27. 4. 2023 od 10:00 – 12:00, online
In one of my first blogs in this role, I set out as a priority the creation of a Strategic Roadmap for buildingSMART International so that we can develop interoperable standards, digital services, and a sustainable future. My goal was to help guide the work of our community over the coming years in a clear and focused way. I want to thank everybody for their input and suggestions from many people across our network. I am delighted that the first part of this Roadmap is now complete and available for everybody. The remainder of this blog explains each element of the Roadmap in more detail.
It is worth noting that this is not the end of the story, as this will remain a living document. Furthermore, over time I hope to supplement this document – which focuses heavily on what we need to achieve and by when – with further details on how our community can evolve our ways of working in delivering against these requirements.
Firstly, the context within which the Roadmap sits is defined by the fundamental role of buildingSMART in solving the key challenges of productivity and sustainability across the global built environment. These challenges can only be overcome through optimised decision-making and increased automation across project lifecycles, which in turn is only possible if project data from all sources can be fused together into information and intelligence and retained throughout the life of the project. The open digital standards and services that buildingSMART provides enable this data fusion and retention, upon which rests our industry’s ability to automate and make the smart decisions that increase productivity and sustainability, as shown in the slide below. Given how the built environment defines so many of our positive achievements as humanity while also accounting for some 39% of global CO2 emissions, our mission is to improve the world.
The Strategic Roadmap covers three distinct time horizons – today, tomorrow, and the longer-term future – and our role within each of these is different. Taking these in turn:
- Today (‘Use’): we already have excellent open standards available to our industry, so our role is to advocate for and support the adoption and use of these standards globally.
- Tomorrow (‘Improve’): for the near term, our focus is on the evolution and improvement of current standards and services, to make them more user-friendly and effective.
- Future (‘Reinvent’): for the longer term, our role is to develop and deploy the next generation of standards and services, which will harness and unlock the impact of future technology trends.
What we aim to achieve in each of these three-time horizons is captured in the following Vision table.
Our community is working concurrently towards all three of these time horizons. However, the output of this work will become available progressively, targeting the dates depicted in the following Summary slide.
The dates denote the earliest point at which a new standard or service should be available for adoption by the community, after which widespread adoption should be expected to take several years. For this reason, earlier standards will still remain valid and valuable even after the release of new standards. This multi-speed adoption pattern is represented in the following chart, showing the expected overlap in the use of different generations of standards and services, albeit with a progressive migration over time towards newer and more capable standards and services.
As a community, buildingSMART must run ahead of these trends, so we must progressively rebalance our efforts toward preparing our future standards and services, as shown in the next slide.
The Roadmap contains a further level of detail as to the content of each step up in capability which we expect to see over the coming years, as set out in the following two slides.
These capability steps can also be depicted in the following Dependencies chart.
Now that this Strategic Roadmap is published, these details will be synchronised with the individual Roadmaps established by each of the buildingSMART Rooms where our work gets done. That synchronisation will lead to adjustments in both directions – to Room plans and the Strategic Roadmap – on an iterative basis, with the goal of optimising strategic relevance and alignment in all that we do.
As I noted at the start of this blog, our work represents a vital contribution to the future of humanity and our planet. Our responsibility is to make that contribution count.
