nima launches membership scheme to build an information management community

Nima is launching a membership scheme for people from across the built and managed environment working in information and data management. The step is intended to make the current volunteer-led, virtual organisation – previously known as the UK BIM Alliance – more resilient, to help it better support and represent information management practitioners, and to foster wider digital transformation across the sector.

Membership model

By offering individual membership, nima aims to provide a ‘home’ for information management (IM) practitioners. It also aims to represent members’ opinions on relevant topical issues, supported by regular polls and discussion forums. Nima vice chair Fiona Moore says:

“First, we are incredibly grateful to our past and current patrons for their essential financial backing, to other supporters for providing their people’s time, energy and expertise to nima, and to our many volunteers, past and present. However, in addition to this essential support and in response to multiple requests, we want to establish a sustainable ‘home’ for information managers. I think this will also be attractive to other interested parties wishing to engage more efficiently with the IM community.

“Second, we want to become the key membership body concerned with data and information management in the built and managed environment. Our mailing list and social media contacts already cover thousands of individuals. Many of these actively engage with nima as it is directly relevant to their daily activities; we aim to complement other professional and trade associations by focusing on practitioners’ industry-specific needs for IM skills and knowledge.”

“Third, nima aspires to become the ‘voice’ of the sector’s information managers. We will be consulting members on issues relating to IM (for example, developing nima’s positions on government consultations, advancing the UK BIM Framework, and developing other guidance).”

Building on recent work with the Construction Leadership Council, nima is seeking to become the specialist organisation leading on sector digitalisation, taking a coordinated approach to identifying good practice and sharing it for the benefit of the whole industry.

nima background

Nima – formerly the UK BIM Alliance – has become an influential advocate of digitalisation in the built environment sector. Initially, it focused on the adoption and use of building information modelling (BIM) approaches, but it is now helping people to address a wider range of practical information and data management challenges.

In 2010, the UK Government set out a BIM vision and mandated BIM adoption by April 2016 across construction projects procured by central government departments. Building on the work of the UK BIM Task Group advisory group, the UK BIM Alliance was established in 2016 to help make BIM ‘business as usual’. It provided an umbrella for existing specialist networks (BIM4s) and regional groups, and in 2017, it incorporated the UK and Ireland chapter of buildingSMART International.

Alliance experts (many linked on social media as the ‘UKBIMcrew’) collaborated on early guidance, which led to the development of the UK BIM Framework. With the British Standards Institution and the Centre for Digital Built Britain, the Alliance launched the Framework in October 2019. It continues to provide free online guidance and resources to industry, is frequently updated, and is endorsed by the UK Government’s Construction Playbook and the Transforming Infrastructure Performance Roadmap to 2030.

Throughout this time, the Alliance was almost entirely financially dependent upon industry patrons, mostly construction software providers. These funded the organisation’s presence at industry conferences and trade shows, its website and communication activities, its UK BIM Framework inputs, and its continued engagement with individual digital practitioners and with other industry organisations. It changed its name to nima in October 2022, since when it has expanded its activities, holding three successful virtual conferences, and, in November 2024, with the Construction Leadership Council, it co-launched the Information Management Initiative (IMI).

IMI and nima principles

The IMI aspires to become an industry-led and government-supported programme to progressively transform data and IM practices across the built and natural environment sector. At its core – and at the core of nima’s membership approach – are a set of principles crystallising key thinking developed over the past 10 years. These relate to the overall purpose of IM, the importance of people, the need for a common approach or process, and requirements for clear data and information governance:

• Recognise the whole life purpose of information and data: Identify the relevance and purposes of data and information to improve organisational and project outcomes; consider an asset as comprising both the physical structure and the data and information held to manage it.
• Upskill people in information management: Establish basic digital literacy as an organisational minimum requirement, make relevant data and information management skills part of individuals’ continual professional development, and recognise and empower ‘IM leadership’.
• Take a common, consistent and data-centric approach: Converge on a common framework to define, procure, deliver, store and use interoperable data and information, and incorporate a data and information architecture relevant to the organisation and its collaborators
• Establish clear data and information governance principles: Adopt clear approaches on stewardship, ethics, quality, security, interoperability, longevity, openness and integrity of data and information. Enable sharing and easy use of the right data and information at the right time and in the right structure by considering data and information independently from technology.

Information management community: member benefits

The cost of nima’s information management community membership has been pitched at £35 per annum. Standard membership benefits include:

• recognition as a nima supporter, via a unique nima membership badge (shareable in email signatures, LinkedIn profiles, etc) denoting commitment to improving information management
• polling members’ opinions on industry policy issues – opportunities to influence nima policy initiatives via member-only consultation polls
• exclusive events – invitations to two member-only online events a year where members will be consulted on topical issues relating to IM (for example, nima responses to government consultation papers, development of the IMI Framework and related guidance, etc)
• members-only online discussion forums to reflect member opinions (coming soon – late 2025)
• opportunities to influence nima event content and contribute to events
• nima monthly newsletter – new members will be added as subscribers to the existing nima newsletter.

Fiona Moore adds:

“We aspire to develop our membership offering over the coming years with a view to potentially becoming a chartered membership body representing IM practitioners in the built and managed environment. Depending upon members’ needs (and we will be polling members’ opinions), activities may include developing a body of knowledge, a code of conduct, continual professional development (CPD) activities, certification, measurement of IM capabilities, etc..”

The new nima membership scheme will be formally launched at nima’s quarterly online forum, at 2pm BST on 22 May 2025 [see recording here], and will be promoted at the Digital Construction Week trade show at London’s ExCEL on 4-5 June 2025 and future events.