News

bSa Monthly Report - March 2011

Apr 04 2011

This monthly update brings to you, our members, not only a long list of activities and accomplishments but also a rather troubling report. While the primary focus of the alliance has been delivering the first consensus National BIM Standard — United States, version 2 and building the alliance Board of Direction to now include representatives from over 50 companies, associations, and agencies, we now find ourselves in a very weak financial position.

bSa now has nearly 200 volunteers working to help transform the industry. Like you, they have joined the Institute and the Alliance and are volunteering their time and talent. In addition, we are working with many educational organizations to identify common principles as well as promoting projects in nearly every aspect of the facilities industry. Up to date information on alliance activities is being delivered to the industry via our web sites and a new issue of JBIM is hitting streets in the next couple of days. However, in order to support all the effort underway we need financial support.

We have always assumed that if we provide a valuable product that the facilities industry would help share in the cost so that we could bring open standards to the industry. We are delivering, but cannot continue to do so without additional financial support from the industry.

Please keep an eye out for your renewal notice from the National Institute of Building Sciences and the buildingSMART alliance and renew your membership as soon as possible. If you are able to provide additional funding or are able to sponsor the Alliance then you will be rewarded by being identified as one of those who truly is making a difference by supporting the transformation. Your Board of Direction and Executive Committee is working hard to help correct the problem but we do need your help also.
The minutes from the last BOD meeting as well as from all meetings this year is posted here: http://projects.buildingsmartalliance.org/files/?artifact_id=3893. You can read about the ideas that have been presented. We want to hear from you also. You can send your comments to either me, Tom Gay the chair of the BOD or David Morris the Vice Chair and chair of the NBIMS-US effort.
This month again has focused a lot of our energy on the National BIM Standard — United States™. At this writing we officially have nine ballots submitted, however many more are being worked on. It was found by many that there was more work involved than anticipated in authoring and submitting a ballot. Please do not wait for the last minute to submit. The submission period ends May 2, 2011. We encourage you to take a look at the ballots that have been submitted and posted on the web site and suggest any others that are missing. http://www.buildingsmartalliance.org/nbims/ Please note: This site will be available in the next couple of days.
We have four Work Groups in place now evaluating those ballots and helping mentor others who are preparing ballots for submission. The four working groups are chaired and staffed by some significant talent in the industry. Design is headed by James Vandezande, Procure by Howard Ashcraft, Assemble by Tom Soles and Operate by Finith Jernigan. We appreciate the time everyone on these working groups is providing. A list of all participants can be found on the web at: http://www.buildingsmartalliance.orgnbims/committees/
We have also been busy getting our message out to may facets of the industry. A presentation was made to the Mechanical Contractors Association of America (MCAA) early in the month. Several presentations were delivered at the National Facility Management Technology conference in Baltimore including buildingSMART alliance, National BIM Standard-United States, Construction Operations Building information exchange (COBie) and Specifiers Property information exchange (SPie). Details about these last two projects can be found on the buildingSMART alliance web site at: http://www.buildingsmartalliance.org/projects/activeprojects/. Additionally, there was a presentation at the International Facility Managers Association (IFMA) Fusion Conference in Boston. At this conference, there was also a meeting to begin building a research agenda for IFMA and the International Institute for Sustainable Laboratories (I2SL) for BIM, based on newly signed Memorandums of Agreement between the three organizations.
The buildingSMART International Technical Management Committee (ITM), International Users Group (IUG) and the Implementers Support Group (ISG) met in Abu Dhabi, UAE during the last week of the month. Unfortunately, several who were planning to make the trip were not able to due to the unrest in the area. We will report on the outcome of these meetings in the next update.
The Spring 2011 issue of JBIM was completed and has gone to press. It is accessible to you now using your portal password as a benefit of membership. This issue looks at "what does it cost NOT to do BIM". The article by Dr. Raymond Issa captures the essence of this issue. He went through six projects and identified what it cost the owner by not using BIM, by looking at change orders that likely could have been avoided had they used BIM on the project. He plans to look at more projects over time and this may e our best metrics as to the values of using BIM on a project.