Workshop on Information Management in FM Organizations

It's been slightly more than a year since I took my position as BIM-specialist at SISAB. It was a year full of excitement, joy, genuine insights and intriguing challenges. Taking part in a dozen of projects and receiving loads of daily inquiries and feedback from people involved in creating and using building models and information handover was a an invaluable experience.

Progressing from the clear-cut policy side of BIM to the more arbitrary field of BIM processes revealed a whole new host of both possibilities and problems associated with BIM-implementation. I was though not totally detached from the policy field, rather had a smooth transit from academia to national BIM-networks such as BIM Alliance Sweden. During the last year, I have been involved in a number of working groups of BIM Alliance namely Facility Management, Building Materials, Project Management and Environment & Energy. Parallel to this, I have been participating in a number of R&D Projects within the national strategic program Smart Built Environment. My involvement in networks and projects as such is intended as a contribution to the overall vision of maintaining a seamless flow of information across the entire lifecycle of buildings and infrastructural facilities. At the same time, I strive to bring the collaboratively-formed knowledge in the field back to SISAB and improve our own information modelling and management practice. The ambition level at SISAB for this endeavor is amply high and we have a number of articulate initiatives in progress to realize this.

In February 2018, a one-day workshop preliminarily titled as Information Management in FM Organizations will be held by SISAB. Nationally-renowned experts in the field will gather and contribute to a concentrated brainstorming event in the form of a mix of short talks and round table discussions. The event will be opened by SISAB's CEO, Claes Magnusson, and moderated by the FM business developer and BIM strategist, Lars Lidén from Meta consultants. Senior consultants from such pioneer construction, FM and IT companies as Tyréns, IBM, Sweco and Vasakronan will join in. People from different managerial and technical positions at SISAB and Stockholm Municipality will also be participating. The initial idea for the workshop was conceived by our project and personal coach and my mentor, Stig-Erik Öström.

The talks and discussions will cover both construction and operation phases and span various relevant topics namely BIM and IoT. Narratives of exemplary projects provide substance for discussions around future systems, work flows and organizational setups for an efficient procurement, management and retrieval of facility information as a treasured asset for supporting and optimizing the core businesses of organizations. A number of students from relevant programs will also be present, document round table discussions and contribute with their fresh and innovative ideas.

SISAB's primary mission is producing and maintaining facilities where school kids learn and nurture. At the same time, we genuinely aspire to create forums and platforms where knowledge is created, shared and exploited for the good of the society as a whole.

Source: https://www.thesun.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/nintchdbpict000337897903.jpg?strip=all&w=960&quality=100

A whole-life approach to building information management; visions and prospects

Framtidens förskola (The pre-school of the future)
Source: http://sisab.se/siteassets/informationsmaterial/framtidens_forskola.pdf

Recently, I have been indulging myself in loads of digital documentations of school facilities of various sizes and complexity. My latest occupation as BIM-specialist at SISAB has provided me an invaluable opportunity for contributing to BIM-development within all the three fields of technology, policy and processes. SISAB is a major client and owner organization and part of Stockholm Municipality. The organization is responsible for planning, design, construction and operation of the majority of school facilities in Stockholm. Its activities span, thereby, the entire lifecycle of facilities. This qualifies SISAB as a leading actor that is eligible for and capable of promoting efficiency in all aspects of construction including information management.

Procuring tens of projects and operating hundreds of facilities annually entails commissioning a host of actors from a wide variety of disciplines ranging from architectural, engineering and project management to maintenance firms. They largely differ in their size, organizational structure and level of expertise; something that has implications for how ambitious SISAB can be with its requirements on the quality of the commissioned work.

A drastic case is setting the requirements on the handover information of facilities. This should be realized through BIM directives and policies that address our requirements on hand-over documents in sufficiently detailed terms. This is though not simply a top-down decision flow. Producing reliable, accurate, non-redundant and complete documentation of building information in forms and formats that enable future use requires a close collaboration among all actors also that everybody is roughly on the same page. Setting the bar too high could deter smaller actors and deprive us of the critical mass of the bidders required for a sufficiently competitive tender process.

A good example of how neglecting this aspect could result in unrealistic expectations is the RIBA Plan of Work. Their initial goal was to implement level-3 BIM (as defined in the Bew-Richards maturity model) in all public sector projects by 2016. Since not all actors possessed the competences required, however, they had to lower their criteria to level-2 BIM after a while.

Our current approach at SISAB for balancing our pace of BIM-implementation against the realities of the market and guaranteeing a soft transition to model-based commissioning is to integrate our BIM ambitions with other flagships initiatives at SISAB namely Framtidens Förskola (The pre-school of the tomorrow). Through this approach, actors who are lagging behind in BIM would be both inspired and informed by the more progressive projects and best practices. BIM-implementation would - in this sense - not be a separate goal by itself rather an indispensable part of the overall vision and mission of the client organization i.e. to provide children with safe and sustainable environment for nurturing and education.