Doug is feeling argumentative. Next week he will be taking part in two debates:
1. Monday 9th December at the Cambridge Union Doug will help to argue against the motion “This house believes that BIM is the answer”. This debate is being hosted jointly by The Edge and Cambridge IDBE. Come along and join in if you are in Cambridge.
2. Tuesday 10th December sees the debut Saint Gobain online debate to discuss the motion “There is no useful definition of what a sustainable building is”. Doug will be arguing for the motion and the debate runs until 20th December with the usual to and fro with plenty of opportunity for contributions from the online audience.
Please do join in these important discussions. More details can be found by following the links above.
if BIM really meant Building Information Management as I believe it’s supposed to then I would say there is a role for it. But it doesn’t solve the problem which is fundamentally about dealing with people, operating evolving systems and the lack of planning and continuity that so often fails in FM. By all means use 3D CAD for resolving design problems but allowing for the fact that the CAD systems evolve, doest mean that each new version will read the old one as I discovered when upgrading software on an old Mac only to discover that it couldn’t read an old vectorworks version!
Hi Simon
I’ve not yet constructed all my argument, so thanks for the thoughts. I can sympathise with your problems in maintaining data continuity across generations of CAD software having experienced the same myself. This is the software houses’ cynical way of ensuring that we all keep paying for upgrades every year rather than skipping a few. Interestingly I understand that the British Library looked at all the archival standards for audio data a few years ago and concluded that the only way to protect their collection of recordings against platform obsolescence was to move the whole lot onto live servers.