Last fall, the National Institute of Building Sciences developed an implementation and launch plan for the U.S. National BIM Program (NBP).

The 60-page Foundation for Digital Transformation of Capital Facilities and Infrastructure plan details a strategy toward achieving critical digital transformation of the construction industry.

“[NBP] will be successful through collaboration between the public and private sectors, across industry sectors (e.g., buildings and infrastructure), and across the diversity of project stakeholders (owners, designers, constructors, suppliers, vendors, and other involved parties),” the implementation plan says.

The plan also discusses the strategy to rapidly expand standardization efforts, including expanded roles in partnerships with organizations worldwide.

“The focus is on developing practice-oriented standards that can be adopted into contracts to support information management processes,” the plan says. “There needs to be a focus on providing information to owners to enable significantly improved operations and maintenance of built assets.”

Among the first steps in the process: Identifying the leads, who will manage one of six workstreams within the U.S. National BIM Program.

Three leads recently have been named. They include:

• John Messner, Professor with Penn State University, and Chair of the National BIM Standard – US. Messner will oversee the Standards and Guidance workstream.
• Grace Wang, Senior Technical Program Manager with Google. Wang will oversee the Owner Leadership workstream.
• Alex Belkofer, CM-BIM, VDC Director, Virtual Design & Construction, McCarthy Building Companies. Belkofer will oversee the Stakeholder Engagement workstream.

A Unified Approach to Digital Transformation

The National BIM Program represents a “unified approach to digital transformation that our A/E/C/O industry has desperately needed since the advent of BIM (building information modeling) and technology advancements influencing more collaborative approaches to design and construction project delivery,” said McCarthy’s Belkofer.

“The NBP is both a cultural and technical shift in people, process, and technology alignment between all industry stakeholders - working together to streamline goals, expectations and outcomes by leveraging industry-developed BIM standards and best practices,” he said. “For our great industry to take its next big leap forward, the National BIM Program is a fantastic rally point and foundation for collaboration and evolution of ‘digital delivery’ where all industry stakeholders can be on the team and join in the game for a collective win.”

The NBP Workstreams

The U.S. National BIM Program workstreams are:

• Owner Leadership
• Project Team Implementation
• Standards and Guidance
• Stakeholder Engagement
• Education and Training
• Legal and Insurance

Each workstream comes with a specific scope and solutions.

For example, the scope of the legal and insurance workstream is to identify the approaches to adapting legal and insurance methods to support model-based delivery of projects.

Solutions include NBIMS-US contract resources – developing guidance regarding the incorporation of the program standards (ISO 19650, NBIMS-US, and others) content into core contracts for projects – and coordination with key contract development partners. This specifically involves working with the two template contract providers for many projects in the U.S. – American Institute of Architects contract documents and ConsensusDocs template contracts – to support the incorporation of core NBIMS-US standards into the contract language, when appropriate.

Learn more about the U.S. National BIM Program.