BIM Today: Accelerating digital transformation in 2024

nima – formerly the UK BIM Alliance – wants to help UK businesses deliver a strong return on their investments by accelerating digital transformation in 2024.

In the January 2024 issue of BIM Today, nima vice-chair Paul Wilkinson says “The pace of digital transformation across large swathes of UK government and industry has accelerated significantly in recent years.” He says the context has also expanded significantly beyond BIM….

While the architecture, engineering, construction and operation (AECO) sector has historically been among the least digitised sectors, it has made great strides since the turn of the century. … The early 21st century has also seen increasingly wider adoption of Building Information Modelling (BIM). The UK government set out a BIM vision in 2010 and mandated BIM adoption by April 2016 across construction projects procured by central government departments.

The UK BIM Alliance, established in 2016 to help make BIM “business as usual”, also took a key role – with the British Standards Institution and the Centre for Digital Built Britain – in establishing the UK BIM Framework.

Regularly updated, and endorsed by the UK government’s Construction Playbook and the Transforming Infrastructure Performance Roadmap to 2030, this continues to provide
free online guidance and resources to industry.

A growing information management challenge

Today, however, BIM is just part of a growing information management challenge. Terms such as artificial intelligence (including ChatGPT), machine learning, the Internet of Things, interoperability, digital twins, drones, robotics, open data, smart buildings and the golden thread are all now part of our expanding technological lexicon.

And the UK BIM Alliance changed its name to nima in 2022 partly because it wanted to help industry in the practical application of these wider information management (IM) opportunities.

nima will continue to push more data-centric approaches to information management to help the AECO sector become safer, as well as more efficient and productive.

There have been discussions about a new industry information management mandate (superseding that contained in the TIP Roadmap to 2030). nima is aiming to ensure this encourages adoption and convergence to standardised and practical approaches that support wider digital transformation of the sector.

Delivering a strong return on investments in digital working will be key in 2024. Such investments will also have a longer-term impact on planet, people and prosperity, helping fulfil the original 2010 BIM vision of delivering “significant improvements in cost, value and carbon performance through the use of open shareable asset information”.

Read the full BIM Today article here.