Despite years of digital progress, a stubborn disconnect remains between design data and building operations. In this thought-provoking piece, David Savage, Head of Smart Buildings at LMG and active member of buildingSMART UK & Ireland, challenges the industry’s current approach to BIM and calls for a fundamental shift toward smarter, more operationally-driven digital delivery.
We’re building ‘Data Museums,’ and it’s time to stop
I walked away from a panel at Digital Construction Week this year with one thought ringing in my ears: we’re still getting it wrong. For all our talk of digital transformation, we’re still working in expensive, inefficient silos.
My day job is running the Smart Buildings team at LMG, and I’m involved with buildingSMART UK & Ireland. This puts me in a unique spot, right at the collision point between the data from Building Information Models (BIM) and the real-world systems that make a building tick. I see the same costly gap appear, project after project.
The solution isn’t to build more complex models. The solution is to flip our entire process on its head. It’s time for a “Smart-to-BIM” approach.
That time a client called our BIM a “Museum”
On our panel, we kept coming back to the same frustrating problem: billions are spent on BIM, but the data often dies the day a project is handed over. The facility managers (FMs)—the people who actually run the buildings—are left with something they can’t use.
I’ll never forget a flagship government project I was on back in 2015. We modelled everything to perfection. On handover day, the FM took one look and called it a “museum of data.” It was beautiful, he said, but totally disconnected from his live systems. It was useless to him.
And he was right. The problem isn’t the FM; it’s our industry’s ego. For over a decade, the design and construction world has been asking, “Why don’t they use our brilliant models?” It’s the wrong question.
What if we started by asking the operations team, “What are your biggest headaches? What information do you actually need to make your day easier?” Once we know that, we can give them the exact data they need, in a format that plugs right into the tools they already use. It’s a simple, human-centered idea.
Flipping the process on its head
You know what the fix was for that “data museum”? It wasn’t rocket science. We just had to build a simple link between the BIM asset IDs and the building’s maintenance system. Suddenly, the museum came to life. It became a living, working tool.
This proves the technology isn’t the hard part. The hard part is changing the way we think.
This is where clients need to step up and lead. We have to completely reverse the flow of information. Instead of a design team pushing a BIM model “downstream” at the end, we need to start with the end in mind. This is the “Smart-to-BIM” flip. The client defines what they need the building to do and how they need to operate it for the next 30 years. That list of needs becomes the shopping list for what data the BIM model must contain.
It turns the whole process from a data push into a data pull. Think of standards like ISO 19650 as the grammar for our data. But this “start with the end” thinking? That’s the actual story we need to tell. It’s what makes the standard useful in the real world.
Why the MSI is your translator
This is exactly why the Master Systems Integrator (MSI) is so crucial. We’re the natural bridge because we live in both worlds—the clean, structured data of design and the messy, dynamic reality of a building in use.
An MSI is the on-the-ground translator. Our job is to untangle the mess of different systems and proprietary tech that gets in the way of a truly smart building. We take the client’s operational shopping list and translate it into a clear set of data requirements for the designers. This simple act of translation makes sure the model is useful from day one and prevents the madness of having to re-tag and rebuild data after handover, which costs a fortune.
So, where do we go from here?
The message from the trenches is clear: we all have a part to play. It’s great to see groups like the Digital Building Council finally putting a name to the “Project-Operations Gap,” because you can’t solve a problem until you agree on what it is.
And things are about to get even more interesting. AI is going to give this entire workflow a massive boost. Once we have clean, operationally-focused data, AI can get to work predicting failures, optimising energy, and giving FMs insights they can actually use, not just more alerts to ignore.
The bottom line is this: we have to stop admiring the problem. It’s time to learn the lessons from BIM’s rocky journey. If we champion a “Smart-to-BIM” approach, led by smart clients and implemented by MSIs, we can finally get what we were promised.
Let’s stop building beautiful, useless museums and start creating living, breathing digital assets that work. That’s how we get the intelligent, efficient, and sustainable buildings we’re all waiting for.