The BIM Mandate Nobody Owns
More public owners now require BIM on their projects, and the mandate has become one of the easiest things in the industry to write. A paragraph in the procurement documents, a reference to a standard, a line in the contract about deliverables. It takes an afternoon. What it asks of the owner afterward is the part that rarely gets written down.
I have seen the same pattern across enough projects to describe it plainly. The mandate goes out, the project team complies, and a model is delivered that satisfies every line of the requirement. Two years later the owner's facilities team cannot use it. Nobody broke the contract. The contract simply never said what the model was for.
A mandate is a requirement, not a plan
A mandate tells the project team what to produce. It does not tell anyone what happens to it next. Those are different questions, and only one of them is usually answered in writing.
The owner who asks for a model at handover has made a reasonable request. The owner who asks what decisions that model needs to support, who will use it, and what it has to be accurate enough to do has made a much harder one. The second owner gets a different model. Not because the project team is more skilled, but because the target was finally visible.
Procurement decides more than the specification does
Most of what a model turns out to be is settled before anyone opens a modeling program. It is settled when the scope is written, when the bids are compared, and when someone decides what the lowest acceptable standard looks like.
A bid evaluated mainly on price will be answered with the cheapest version of the requirement. That is not bad faith; it is what the evaluation asked for. If the requirement describes a file format and the evaluation rewards the lowest number, the result will be a file in the correct format. Whether anyone can rely on what is inside is a separate matter that the process never tested.
The missing person
The most consistent gap I see is not technical. On the owner's side, nobody holds the outcome.
The project manager is accountable for the project, and the project ends. The facilities team is accountable for the building, and they were not in the room when the requirement was written. The model sits between them, delivered by one group for another group that never agreed to what it contained.
Someone on the owner's side has to be able to say what the data is for, accept it against that purpose, and still be there when the building changes. Without that person the mandate has no end point. It has a delivery date, which is a different thing.
What an owner can do differently
None of this requires new technology.
- Write the use before the format. State the decisions the data must support, such as space planning, maintenance, renovation scoping or capital planning, and let the format follow from that.
- Name an owner for the outcome. One person, on the owner's side, who accepts the deliverable and who will still care about it in five years.
- Evaluate bids on what they will deliver, not only what they will cost. Ask how the team will confirm the data is right, and what happens when it is not.
- Plan for the first change. Buildings are altered within months of handover. A mandate that does not say who updates the model, and how, describes a document with a short life.
The standard to aim for
A good mandate is judged by what happens after it is met. If the facilities team opens the model eighteen months later and trusts it, the mandate worked. If they open it and go back to the drawings from 1987, it did not, whatever the closeout checklist says.
Owners are right to ask for BIM. The work is in deciding what they are asking for it to do, and then putting someone in charge of seeing that it does.
Nishan Kohli is Co-Founder and CEO of BIMstream, a digital delivery and reality capture firm serving public infrastructure owners across the United States.