WET News

"The pace now is scary, exciting, encouraging and it's opening up dialogue" 8 WET NEWS DECEMBER 2016 INTERVIEW " It's come of age," says Anne Kemp on why Building Information Modelling (BIM) has captured the imagination of the engineering world. "Over the last five years it's got easier, partly because we're now very familiar with our iPhones and social media," she says. "We're kind of living in a digital world now anyway, so why wouldn't we do it in our workplace? Why wouldn't we involve it in how we're designing and constructing and then operating and maintaining…?" But Kemp is quick to emphasise that while industry needs digital data, this must be controlled safely, securely and without challenging existing workloads. "That's really important." Kemp is chair of the new UK BIM Alliance, which launched in October, and she also chairs the ICE BIM Action Group, BIM4Infrastructure UK and BuildingSmart UKI. When she's not chairing BIM groups, Kemp is a fellow at Atkins for BIM, geospatial and digital. She recently took time out of her packed schedule to tell WET News why "the captains of industry" are embracing BIM; why BIM4Water's work in getting the water companies to have open conversations about BIM is a good collaborative example; and why BIM lvl 2 will morph into BIM lvl 3. For Kemp, BIM is about better information management. "It is consciously managing information through the whole life cycle of a project both for buildings and infrastructure, thinking about what are the outcomes." Strategy It is worth remembering that BIM is not new. It has been around for years but its implementation gathered pace in recent years mainly because of the government's Construction Strategy, which required all central government departments, including the Environment Agency (EA), to adopt minimum, collaborative Level 2 BIM from April 2016. This mandate does not apply to the water sector, although it will for Scottish Water when the public sector in Scotland implements BIM from April 2017. The government set up a task group, which comprises the BIM4 groups and BIM regions, to develop BIM lvl 2 as a concept and then as standards. However, BIM lvl 3 is on the distant horizon. "The task group has been moving onto BIM level 3 and digital built Britain," explains Kemp. "However, back in March it identified there was a need for industry to step up and take leadership of implementing BIM Level 2. Societal benefits "The BIM4s and regions were approached by government to organise something and, aœer quite a lot of soul-searching, we decided to set up the alliance to represent the industry as a whole." While BIM lvl 2 is very much about the control of developing information within the existing contracts environment, BIM lvl 3 is about how "we introduce uncontrolled data into information we use, things from the internet of things, social media etc. It's the big data and you have much more of the geospatial side of things as well, and societal benefits from BIM looking forward". Kemp says: The concern was that while the government was starting to look at what BIM lvl 3 could become – it's very much a research and development activity – we needed to hold firm with BIM Level 2 because we're only on the start of that journey and we really need to consolidate on it." That's where the UK BIM Alliance comes in. Its mission is to bring the UK built environment Anne Kemp, chair, UK BIM Alliance

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