There are a lot of books on BIM out there, but I've got a new one and it's great!

The book was graciously given to me as a New Year's present by our BIM department at CAS.

The book is entitled, "BIM for Building Owners and Developers: Making a Business Case for Using BIM on Projects," and it is written by K. Pramod Reddy and published by John Wiley & Sons (2012). 

As I read it now, it explains the key issue that many BIM-ologists sometimes ignore: it's really about "process" and "data."

In process, standards are ultimately needed (which are surely coming from the National Institute of Building Sciences) to "open and define" the process, and the data requirements, especially in terms of accuracy and timeliness being paramount.
Part of the deliverables for subcontracting firms will be electronic files representing their planned and actual work both visually and "informationally" speaking. This is what this book highlights: as owners become more savvy with their requirements for data transfer-post construction, BIM will be fully imbedded in our industry.

It's like Mr. Reddy says in his book on pg. 6, "BIM is a  transformative technology, very similar to the Internet. Much like Internet adoption, it is initially being used to automate known "workflows and legacy information."  As this technology becomes better understood, it will soon be used to change and improve constuction processes".  

I couldn't agree more, and like I said, it was worth the read. You can find it at Amazon.com at http://tinyurl.com/85n9dpy .

The question for us out there, are we ready for the challenge? Do we have dependable "known workflows" that we can rely on to begin the process or really, where do we start?

"Legacy information" is everywhere; reliable "historical" information is not really a factor...yet, stay tuned!!