Industry must be ready to make information sustainable

Since the UK government's 2010 mandate that public-sector construction projects would have to use building information modelling (BIM), there has been increasing awareness that the procurement of new facilities must also include the procurement of information about them as well. A report for Highways England has suggested that for every £2 of physical asset, they hold £1 of data asset.

Owners and operators want to see their assets in action as soon as is practical, and retain their operational value for as long as possible thereafter.

Along the supply chain, architects, surveyors, engineers and contractors are recognising that they in turn must be sure they receive the information they need to perform their roles, in a trustworthy and useable form.

Just as sustainability is a priority in environmental, social and economic contexts, improved, robust information management must secure sustainable information. Without doing so, our ability to monitor built assets and take action accordingly will be compromised.

First PAS 1192 – and now ISO 19650, which has succeeded it – have provided the sector with robust procedures and technologies to implement the collaborative working practices that enable information to be shared without relying on wishful thinking or benevolence from the parties involved.

These standards are having a positive effect on the way contractual appointments are made and carried out. Parties are negotiating both up and down from these requirements to refine them and their implementation plans as they gain experience.

However, there is another category of required information, which is not bound by contractual obligations but may arise from other stakeholders both now and in the future. These could include users, owners, regulators, emergency responders, asset markets, mappers and retrofitters.

We can be sure that the same, basic information about the asset or project will be essential. But what new qualities will be sought in the future – will stakeholders want plastic-free buildings, for instance? The weight that will be placed on different resources, such as grey water reuse, is also difficult to predict.

This suggests that there are minimum requirements for the quality of information to future-proof its useability. ISO 19650-4 has set out such requirements for built-in quality assurance and subsequent quality control processes.

Other work has started to identify minimum information content that is required. For instance, industry body buildingSMART has proposed a set of regulatory information requirements and sustainability information requirements.

These do not prioritise any particular regulatory or sustainability assessment but lay down the information that is the prerequisite for such assessments., starting with identifying and classifying spaces, products and materials.

Both sets of requirements are voluntary, and it may be some time before we see them included in contractual obligations. However, there may be an ethical obligation for organisations, and a moral obligation for individuals, to support them – which means that learning to use them will be a valuable skill.

The standard does not choose any particular version or scheme for sustainability but instead alerts the users of ISO 19650-4 that information sustainability is now a criterion.

In addition, ISO 19650-4 supplements the other parts of the standard 'by providing the explicit process and criteria for each individual information exchange. The intention is to secure the benefits arising from collaborative and interoperable … BIM by choosing "open" schemas, data formats and conventions'. It seeks to secure asset information for use, independent of any authoring software used to create it.

This represents a shift in information management as fundamental as the transition to triple-bottom line thinking has been for business in general.

The regulatory and the sustainability agendas also requires a shift in attitude towards information. Even in situations where proprietary applications and data are contractually acceptable, there is now a new understanding of interoperability.

In the past interoperability was seen as the ability to access proprietary data through programming, scripting or other means. But now it should more broadly refer to the ability to hold and use information independent of the tools used to create or record it.

This means that, as quantity surveyors and cost consultants, we should share our assessments in an interoperable way by providing structured information and not just as PDFs or emails.

We should develop processes that can use structured asset information to assess any regulatory and sustainability measures, options and alternatives in an efficient and accurate way.

As professionals, we ought also to advocate that all projects meet regulatory and sustainability information requirements as well as asset-specific ones.

Finally, we must support clients and their advisers in avoiding becoming locked in to using specific vendors' software or formats. Faced with the time-honoured excuse that 'We've always done it that way,' there is a clear riposte: 'It's not sustainable.'