BIMBO - the right thinking

Right Thinking – it takes me back to my history and classics teacher who once wrote on the blackboard (a big black tablet where tutors wrote with a chalk stick) the following and we all aimlessly script it into our books with crisp blue Quink flowing and precisely dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s.

“Most ancient civilizations - Egyptians, Greeks, Phonecians, Aztecs, Chinese, Sumerians, Babylonians etc. did not slowly rise from the dust, or blossomed suddenly, as if they'd been gifted a legacy of civilization, and technology from some mysterious point in pre-history.  In time, as wars, strife, time, disasters had their effects, these civilizations declined, as they never entirely had the entire support structure to maintain advances they had only inherited, but not developed.”

The history lesson continues, Ford said, “the Russians are coming – let’s get organised”, asking, what was the “thinking” behind Ford’s commentary.

As an adolescent, thinking at the time – what the hell does this mean? – am I ever going to refer to this again? and continued being a happy juvenile.

Here we are, several decades later and the history lesson comes to the forefront.  I was having a discussion just this week to see how to engage the SMEs into BIM.

Does our thinking need to change in order to do BIM well? focuses the response. What resonated for me from the history lesson was “never entirely had the entire support structure to maintain advances”.

Of course, thinking has to change in deploying BIM for the SMEs.  It is most certainly a change and where things are done differently.  With BIM we are building virtual buildings first, solving the problems as we go and then building the real stuff.  We now have reasonable tools to do this.  We are continuing to evolve these tools to better refine the way we build, document, retain information and this update information.

In the context of BIM, the key to all of this is that we also need to build a “support infrastructure” around this method of working.  This requires the right type of mentality and thinking.  There are groups of people working in silos all over the world and developing tools and processes.  Only when these get unified eventually will and the evolution of BIM be complete.  As an analogy of “valve to transistor to VLSI” now allow us to seamless communicate with this technology taken as granted.  But when it started, it was equally fragmented and it was the relentless engineers who changed their generations thinking to get away from valves to VSLI chips and more.

The “support infrastructure” is the planning, communication, management, technology, resource, education that are all seamlessly integrated together.  The right thinking is the thinking around these aspects.

How drôle! When Ford said, “the Russians are coming” – let’s get organised” another flash back from the history lesson and it is well represented in this argument, where the entire nations gets organised and it always starts at the local level, where the momentum begins, eventually culminating into a national force.

For SMEs and BIM “the Russians are coming” is the same as the Darwinian threat.  If you don’t change and adapt effectively and efficiently with the changing surroundings, there are only two true outcomes - either evolve as a superior BIM species or drop down the food chain and eventually get swallowed or become extinct.