#RTCBCS: Adam Thomas recaps on inaugural Building Content Summit

Post event thoughts following summit held in Washington, July 2015

It’s been just over month now since bimstore.us officially opened for business. Our launch was marked with our sponsorship and attendance at the inaugural RTC Building Content Summit held in Washington in July 2015. Following the hashtag on Twitter, it was pretty clear to see that feedback on the event was overwhelmingly positive from those who attended. Today Adam Thomas, bimstore partner and COO of independent consultancy Read|Thomas , gives us a recap and his own opinion of how the event went down!

Overview

The first annual North American Building Content Summit or BCS kicked off before RTC North America this year in Washington, DC. Okay…well…actually Arlington, but we could see DC - so close enough!

Holding the event on the west side of the Potomac didn't stop the 100 attendees from kicking the event off. The breakdown of the attendees were roughly:

70% Architects20% Content Creators10% Manufacturers

I believe this was a great turnout for a first year event! The day was divided into morning and afternoon sessions. Headlining the morning portion of the event were broad presentations from Autodesk, Bentley and Graphisoft. After these presentations there were more specific manufacturer and content creator discussions. The afternoon sessions were more specific and interactive; round-table discussions dove into the issues and opportunities surrounding content creation.

Standards vs. Guidelines

Central to the perspectives on the creation, distribution and management of content were the round table discussions concerning industry standards. It turns out that the UK and Australian standards and have raced ahead of North America and we have a lot of catching up to do. But the challenge in North America (and particularly in the US) is trying to manage 50+ state-level regulations and guidelines. It’s likely impossible to create a standard that will satisfy all these conflicting interests.

But all is not lost! We switched gears and discussed guidelines with the central question: “Can we create minimum guidelines that allows each team a better starting place?”I believe there is some meaningful consensus that can be reached and I’m looking forward to discussing some of these guidelines in the future.

Fear and Loathing in BIM Content

It wouldn't be a BIM Content Summit without legality, scope, and competition being an important part of the discussion - and is often a contributing factor as to why creating a standard becomes so difficult. Every discipline has meaningfully different needs for content they use. Does content create a competitive advantage? Some people strongly expressed this to be the case and are averse to letting “their” content out of their control. Meanwhile the majority of people believed that content itself was not the competitive advantage - but rather the ability to leverage the content in the proper way to save the project time and money.

The People

The real highlight of the event was the melding of minds from all over the world! I truly believe that the 100+ attendees are the most dedicated members of the BIM community and are committed to define and solve this challenge together. By combining thoughts, ideas, and problems from every corner we were able to discover things we didn't know.

And knowing what you don’t know is the first step to success.

We are just Starting the Content Journey

When the event wrapped up and we came up for air we discovered that its not about whether or not we solved a problem but were we successful at making progress towards understanding and defining the problems. In many cases, we learned the problems are actually much smaller than what we have all made the issues out to be. If we keep waiting to come up with the perfect solution we’ll never get started. And I think there’s a lot to like about the following sentiment:

“A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.”George S. Patton

So what are you going to do about it? In the end the manufacturers and content providers are simply trying to create near term solutions that solves near term problems based on near term information. We need to keep abreast of directions and trends with regard to BIM and manufacture supplied content. But insisting on a perfect solution before getting starting is a false choice.

Opportunities abound within the BIM community so I’d really encourage you to get involved: #RTCBCS on Twitter or to join the Slack group by emailing me directly (adam@readthomas.com).

More to follow!

- Adam