BIM – are we really the trailing edge?

Hello and welcome to my series of BIM posts. BSRIA have kindly invited me as a guest author, and I’d very much like to hear your views.

But first…an introduction. I am Gary Ross and I’m an Associate Director at Capita Symonds, working in their Building Services section. I cover five offices, driving BIM and smart working across them, as well as linking in with my multi-discipline counterparts across our business.  Most recently I worked for Autodesk, the developers of Revit MEP, and it is here that my passion now lies.

Are we really that far behind? Image Courtesy of Capita Symonds

‘Tail end Charlies’

I’ll go into what Revit means to Capita in a later post, but first I’d like to challenge the view that the Building Services industry are seen by many as the trailing edge of the construction industry – the “tail end Charlies” if you will. With any new technology we seem to be the last to pick it up, the least successful and the slowest to respond to change.

Why are building services behind the times?

Perhaps we don’t promote ourselves as an industry very well? A quick search of the new government Building Information Modelling (BIM) Working Party Strategy Paper reveals just one mention of the term ‘building services’.  Or is it that we really are behind the times generally? Is it just that the technology for Building Services actually lags behind the tools that our counterparts can use months or years earlier?

Do you think it’s a fair representation?

Is it just a case of disciplines bashing disciplines or is it a fair cop? If people say we are behind, are they over egging it for some reason or are they normally being reasonable?

How do you think we can go about improving our image?

Is it just a case of shouting louder? Do we have to radically change our ways or are there just a few tweaks needed?