...major cultural shift getting so many of these industry veterans to not fight change.”

David Morris, director of virtual construction at Norwalk, Conn.-based­ EMCOR Group and chair of the BIM Forum’s Subcontractors Subforum, says BIM’s cost of entry remains a barrier.

“A smaller guy that pays list price could rack up $40,000 in hardware and software costs,” he says. “Add in [other factors and] you’re in over $100,000 quickly. For a five- to six-man shop that does $5 million to $10 million in revenue per year, it’s tough to bite that off.”

The report also called on the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which commissioned the NRC study, to gather industry stakeholders to develop a collaborative strategy for implementing the highlighted approaches.

“As long as we’re all pulling in the same direction, the more people, the better,” says Deke Smith, executive director of the buildingSMART alliance that was formed to address these issues.

“ [Production] has continued to falter and ultimately no one does anything substantive about it.”

— PAT GALLOWAY, CEO, PEG ASUS-GLOBAL HOLDINGS

The report also suggests that NIST work with federal bureaus to develop a “technology readiness index” for innovations with high risk, cost and impact.

Huw Roberts, global marketing director at Exton, Pa.-based technology provider Bentley Systems, believes that NIST is well positioned to create such standards, but he warns that a rating index could be difficult to develop.

The “definition of readiness,” Roberts says, could be very fluid depending on the objectives that are being sought.