The annual Construction Management and BIMplus survey highlights confusion about the Building Safety Act, but reveals some good news about data. Justin Stanton reports.
Do you feel like you’ve got a full understanding of the requirements of the Building Safety Act? What about your supply chain?
Those were two of the key questions in this year’s Construction Management and BIMplus digital construction survey.
Less than a fifth of respondents said that both their business and their supply chain understand the Building Safety Act. The most compelling responses highlight very real worries at the coalface. “Another piece of legislation that has not been practically thought out or trialled,” said one respondent.
“It’s still grey in too many areas and there is too much other legislation and PAS requirements that confuse the situation,” said another.
One respondent dived into the golden thread: “[There are] unclear definition and requirements about data and BIM – where to host it for compatibility, no client buy-in to supply a common data environment for an ultimate golden thread of non-siloed workflow.”
Golden thread and interoperability
One of the key tenets of the golden thread – as that respondent alludes to – is that information and documents should be able to be transferred electronically to other persons without the data contained therein being lost or corrupted. This, plus a desire to remove inefficiencies, is why interoperability of software is deemed a necessity by so many in the industry.
With this in mind, we asked if interoperability is still a concern, and more than half of the respondents told us it is.
This led us to ask about technology stack reviews. A significant minority of respondents (47.2%) reported that their business has not undertaken such a review in the past two years, but a similarly large minority (41.6%) said reviews have taken place.
One respondent told us: “It was reviewed and found woefully lacking. [We’re] in the process of modernising.”
Another said: “Yes – it proved what we knew already. Mostly disconnected and dumb data!”
On top of your data?
With so much digital construction technology available with the ability to drown an operation in data and information, having a data strategy in place is vital. It’s pleasing to
report that nearly two-thirds of the survey respondents said that their business either has or is developing a data strategy.
If you have or are developing a data strategy, data literacy will be on your radar. Nearly two-thirds of respondents said they are concerned about data literacy in their business.
So, how are data and data literacy being addressed?
“Inconsistently – I don’t think everyone realises what is relevant to them,” said one respondent. Another simply answered: “In an ad hoc way.”
One respondent sounded like they were pushing water uphill in their business: “It isn’t. Management do not understand or wish to comprehend the intricacies and importance of good project data and the need for integrating data into a model.”
But some businesses are taking the right steps. One respondent said their business is concentrating on recruiting the right senior staff while investing in data literacy apprenticeships for existing staff.
What about AI?
We also took the opportunity to tackle the hot potato of the last 18 months: AI. We asked: “Do you have a strategy for the use of AI?” Just a fifth answered affirmatively. This is, perhaps, unsurprising and highlights the lack of engagement with AI-powered tools. Nearly three-quarters said they have no strategy for AI.
However, AI should be ramping up corporate agendas now: the AI law is in place in the EU, and the recent King’s Speech contained a brief mention of the expected AI law for the UK.
We’ll return to this topic in next year’s survey, by which time CIOB’s AI Playbook should have garnered further traffic and industry engagement since its launch in June this year. If you haven’t read the AI Playbook yet, you should do so at www.ciob.org.
