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Government to launch new October 2016 stretch BIM target to validate data quality

BIM level 2 April 2016 compliance mandate deadline to be supplemented by new target to verity and drive up data quality by October 2016.

Government is to introduce a new October BIM target to challenge industry to raise the quality of data gathered and shared in digital models.

Details of the new October target are being revealed today at the annual ICE BIM conference in London, giving the industry a year to prepare and providing a new focus for improvement beyond the existing April 2016 level 2 compliance mandate.

“It is all very well pushing data at each other but if that data is rubbish then what is the point,” Mark Bew

However, speaking at the Infrastructure Intelligence Straight Talk event ahead of the formal announcement of the new target, government BIM Task Group chair Mark Bew said that the new October stretch target was being introduced to help boost the quality of data now being gathered by the industry.

“Because we have met the April date we now want to start to drive the quality of data up,” he told delegates highlighting that all the “in-scope” public sector clients were currently on target to meet the BIM level 2 mandate.

“It is all very well pushing data at each other but if that data is rubbish then what is the point,” he added highlighting the new data validation strategy at the Bentley Systems supported event. “The stretch target will be some kind of requirement around electronic validation capability a year from now."

Details of the target, he said,  would follow in the formal announcement. However, Bew said that the new October target was designed to be a stretch and to challenge the industry to boost its quality performance.

“No one else has gone for that yet,” he told delegates at the Infrastructure Intelligence event. “It is the future and linked to an research project where we started to understand how we can check data electronically. These tools are now available so we need to develop the techniques and pass them down into the supply chain. If we don’t start to validate then we don’t get trust into our data.”

“If you sat us back down in July 2011 and set out where we would be by now then you would never have thought the whole industry would be talking about data in the way it it,” Mark Bew

Bew said that across the public and private sectors, the BIM level 2 April 2016 target had been embraced, enabling the UK industry to take a leap forward globally in the development of digital construction and data enabled infrastructure management.

“If you sat us back down in July 2011 and set out where we would be by now then you would never have thought the whole industry would be talking about data in the way it it,” he said. “So we set our sights out in a big way - we didn’t expect to get this far.”

Future details and video from the Infrastructure Intelligence Straight Talk event will follow.

If you would like to contact Antony Oliver about this, or any other story, please email antony.oliver@infrastructure-intelligence.com.