Through-life Information Management For Commercial Property Practice: Benefits & Challenges of BIM

For any property process it is important to have reliable and accurate information about the building, its surrounding environment, and market. This paper describes the difficulties facing property professionals when sourcing, organizing and reusing built environment data through-life and the potential benefits of a Building Information Modeling (BIM) approach to help improve information management in the property domain. Based on a review of the literatures and findings from a stakeholder workshop the paper discusses the benefits and challenges to improving through-life information management. The review of the literature reveals the importance of identifying what information needs to be captured through-life, key attributes of BIM, and the role of structured data. Workshop findings reveal a number of important technical and socio-technical challenges facing property professionals, including the need for information standards, data quality and fidelity issues, security and privacy concerns, and the need for new digital skill sets and knowledge competencies