For the seventh year in a row, UK’s National Building Specification (NBS), a subsidiary entity of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), published the results of its latest annual BIM survey. The outcomes of this report are considered by many experts as the most valuable benchmark of the progress of BIM in the UK, but it also contains a large amount of information that can be useful for many European countries to establish their own BIM implementation strategy.
For this survey, 1000 participants were asked about their BIM activities, experiences, and commitment. 51% of the respondents believe that the British Government is on the right track with BIM, but more than the third stated that it’s not clear to them what they have to do to satisfy the requirements of the National BIM Mandate. This statistic clearly highlights the biggest challenge of many governments throughout the EU: in order for BIM to work, there is an urgent need to establish a suitable and efficient communication channel (in collaboration with the different associations of the AEC industry) between the political authorities that are drafting the legislation of BIM and the different parties applying those guidelines.
If 62% of the respondents claimed to be already using BIM (versus 54% last year), this proportion is expected to increase to 90% until the end of 2017, while 95% are planning to be using BIM in a three-year time frame and 96% by 2022. That being said, such a drastic growth in the adoption of BIM is obviously related to the political intervention, in this case with the enforcement of the BIM Mandate. If the UK was the first nation to hit the “BIM wave”, the rest of Europe should also move quickly in this direction (with the exception of France, that already adopted a nationwide BIM approach at the beginning of 2017). As an indicator, Germany also should observe a similar sudden growth phenomenon in the upcoming three years, since federal authorities also introduced their own implementation strategy: the “BIM 2020”.
What first appeared as an audacious gamble from the UK Government to force the adoption of BIM such a restricted amount of time turned into a real success story. However, one must keep in mind that the BIM journey will not end as soon as everybody will have switched to BIM. On the contrary, the rapid development of peak technologies (Drones, 3D printing, IoT, machine learning, etc.) and their integration into BIM processes will bring a new era, that of the fourth industrial revolution. The adventure is only beginning!
Download the full report here: https://www.thenbs.com/knowledge/nbs-national-bim-report-2017