For architects, building information modeling (BIM) has been the Holy Grail. That is, it is intended to be a technical direction with associated industry standards that makes the interchange of drawings and the sharing of related materials, specs and other information easier and less expensive. To a great extent, it has lived up to its promise. On a scale of one to 10, it’s a solid eight for architects. But to get it to approach the highest mark, we have to add the missing ingredient: Enterprise information modeling (EIM).
BIM, as a natural extension of object-oriented techniques, has seen its greatest benefit in purpose-built design automation tools like AutoCAD’s Revit, which have added efficiencies to detailed design and construction documentation. Companies such as Autodesk, the developer of Revit, have done a great job of maturing BIM products and educating the market about the benefits afforded from their use. If you want to draw walls and doors you can draw them much faster. If you want to change the concrete line and have the change appear in plan and section simultaneously, the effect is instant. For design to construction documentation, the return on investment is compelling and adoption of BIM is becoming a competitive need.
BIM has also had success, albeit more limited success, in analyses such as interference checking, energy analysis and cost-estimating. The additional information collected by object models on relationships of walls to rooms, the materials of walls and floor-to-floor information gives the analysis packages access to information that otherwise would be tediously exported with ad hoc tools or re-entered from scratch.
Nevertheless, while BIM has been great in the handling of construction documents and new forms of analyses, it has had more limited benefits for developers, as well as real estate owners and portfolio and facilities managers. The reason is that BIM typically runs on workstations, which become their own islands of automation. BIM also currently relies on file-based extracts for formal communications vs. the transaction-based interchanges of truly collaborative systems. And current BIM models don’t scale easily to encompass portfolio or enterprise data.
The ideal, of course, was to benefit a wide range of users by providing a flow of information through the entire building life cycle – from design through construction to ongoing maintenance and management. The idea was that if the information had a rich and shared format then each participant in the chain – from designer to engineer to procurement agent to contractor to real estate and facility manager – could add to the information pool rather than throw hard-won information away at each step.
The result: All practitioners acting on behalf of the real estate owners could get more accurate data for less effort. The benefits would include less friction in the design-build-manage cycle, better analyses, more predictable schedules, lower total cost of ownership and more accurate space, maintenance, asset and capital planning. The main beneficiary was to be the building or portfolio owner, who would be willing to fund the fairly expensive technical transition due to the expected payback in direct cost savings, business process improvement and decision-support.
Real estate owners, too, can now realize these benefits with the advent of the enterprise information modeling concept.
Enterprise Focus
Now architects can act as digital facilitators by using EIM to bring their customers, the building owners and others to life cycle nirvana. At the same time, owners and portfolio managers can take the BIM results given to them by their architects and insert them into the EIM structure to give BIM models meaning and relevance to their own organizations and finances. But no matter who takes the technology lead, embedding the BIM models within an EIM model has an advantage: The new technology hybrid uses enterprise information technology techniques that are mature and already in use.
By using enterprise interoperability principles to extend BIM, enterprise information modeling creates an integrated information model that can operate on the scale of the enterprise and at the speed of business.
It works because EIM can correlate design data with the finance and master planning data with the rest of the enterprise. It also uses the Web to automate workflow between users so data isn’t locked on workstations. Finally, EIM can embed the BIM model and data within enterprise-scale relational databases to analyze even the largest portfolios.
While BIM focused on technologies and models, EIM focuses on workflow and processes. EIM can thus prioritize information expense on the information most relevant to results. For instance, Archibus, an example of EIM technology, incorporates the user-and-role organization in its top-level design, which is by professional domain, and functional area to be automated – space chargeback, suite brokerage, etc. Within each functional area, the software is broken down by role: Space planner, lease broker, property manager and so forth. The result is enterprise-relevant data that has clear ownership, is up-to-date and is maintained as a by-product of living organizational processes.
That may sound theoretical, but in fact, EIM is a living, breathing, money-making reality at a number of client corporations who are benefiting greatly from it.
A suggested a set of requirements for successful enterprise information modeling include:
• Use an enterprise-scale tool. Traditional BIM tools like Revit are optimized to propagate changes within a single building and do not scale to enterprise-wide data. Revit data models cannot easily aggregate results from different divisions, sites, and countries – as portions of the model must be checked out to work on them. By extending the BIM tool into an EIM system, the model is stored in scalable enterprise databases such as Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server and the results can scale to provide data in a central summary. Because contributions can be added by division, site, floor, country and even record-by-record, the EIM system can aggregate data from the many actors that need to work in parallel to achieve relevant information.
• Connect building and infrastructure information to the enterprise. BIM concentrates on the relation of building elements to each other: Windows-to-walls, walls to concrete lines and so forth. While essential for design automation, the most important links for portfolio management are between the relevant detail and the enterprise processes that they support. EIM systems express these dependencies as actionable information.
• Make use of the Web. Data input and transfer aside, successful EIM implementations make use of Web interfaces to get current conditions from the field, such as day-to-day changes due to moves, adds and changes. They use the Web to verify existing information – such as space allocations – that only remote sites and department managers know. The Web allows organizations to flow the data from the point of activity or to the manager with signature authority on the space, and allows feedback to happen immediately and without significant interruption to the manager’s workday.
Web-use is another distinguishing characteristic between EIM and BIM tools. EIM tools that are Web-enabled can (in object technology) create an object of a specific class, as well as update and display an entire data model in dictionary-driven form on the Web. Most BIM-style tools require specialized readers to be loaded on each workstation and operated by personnel with specialized skills before they can yield any information or input any changes.
While BIM has been a boon, BIM + EIM = the next untapped opportunity for architects, their clients and ultimately real estate and facilities managers to provide 21st century decision support, process improvement and competitive efficiency.
