Public discussions about BIM by industry bodies such as the Australian Institute of Architect or Consult Australia have been rather sparse since the 2007 RAIA National Conference in Melbourne. At that event, the RAIA held an entire one day parallel stream about BIM, to complement their ‘usual’ program that was less technology focussed.
Since 2007
a lot has happened in the BIM world and the RAIA (now AIA) joined forces with
Consult Australia and Autodesk to set up a series of BIM forums in four major Australian cities. I was
invited by the organisers to facilitate the Melbourne and Sydney events in October
and November 2010. The forums had the aim to identify the challenges, successes
and failures of using BIM to create integrated principles within the AEC
industry.
A selected
number of 35-40 AEC industry representatives with design, engineering,
construction and client background were invited to review key challenges in the
uptake of BIM. Those challenges included: the cost of implementation, cultural
change, IP Ownership, data manager and security, quality of documentation,
improved collaboration, earlier decision-making, the evaluation of alternatives
for sustainable design and improvements using analysis during the design
process.
Discussions
at all the forums were lively with extensive feedback provided by the floor.
During the individual sessions comments were recorded and they were then
summarised in a 14 page report titled: BIM
in Australia 2010 that can be downloaded here!