Information as a product

Abstract

The Architecture, Engineering, Construction and Operations (AECO) industry is in constant need of processes and standards that allow it to deliver projects within budget, time, and quality. A strategy that has helped to get closer to this goal is the implementation of Building Information Modelling (BIM). Adoption of BIM-related technologies is mostly limited to architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) actors, who handover the collection of design and construction data for the client but retrieving data from BIM models for operations and maintenance (O&M) activities is not as common as desired but it offers great potential to perform and support activities such as Assessment and Monitoring, Documentation, Emergency Management, Energy and Space Management, and Maintenance of Service Information. Processes, standards, and formats for integrating information about Operations and Maintenance in the design phase have been conceptually developed with a technical dimension approach toward activities, information, and solutions. Given that BIM is a socio-technical system, solutions must also consider a social perspective. For this reason, Activity Theory is used to analyse maintenance activities, their origin, elements related, and processes involved in their performance and, more specifically, their definition. The established theoretical lens considers information as the main product to deliver instead of a by-product of the models’ deliverables. Thus, it was determined, through a literature review, exploratory interviews, semi-structured interviews and the aforementioned analysis, that the integration of O&M personnel is not only usually late along the information lifecycle of an asset’s life, but that the required attributes that provide the necessary information to asset managers to perform their tasks are not even considered early enough in the project, commonly when it is already handed over. Integration of these actors along the already established processes is encouraged to ensure the information will not only be produced and transferred as required, but it will also be useful for other purposes that are included in the documentation of the project.