The National Institute of Building Sciences (NIBS) is kicking off development of a new guideline to help building owners and their design teams utilize building information modeling (BIM) during the building design, construction and operations process and to better support owners’ performance requirements.

The National BIM Guideline for Owners, to be developed under the auspices of NIBS, The American Institute of Architects (AIA), Building Owners and Managers Association International (BOMA), International Facility Management Association (IFMA) and ASHRAE, will provide uniformity in the delivery of BIM projects to federal, state and local government building owners, as well as institutional and commercial building owners.

The guideline is intended for adoption by the building owner to provide a documented process and procedure for the owner’s design team to follow in order to produce a standard set of BIM documents during the design and construction of the facility, and for maintenance and operations of the facility upon handoff. The new guideline will be based on the foreign, federal, state and local BIM guides that currently exist, but geared to a generic facility with uniform requirements for use by a variety of government, institutional and commercial building owners. It will reference a range of documents and practices, including those contained within the National BIM Standard-United States® developed by one of NIBS’ own councils, the buildingSMART alliance®.

The recently established development committee consists of about a dozen BIM experts representing important stakeholder groups, including building owners, architects, engineers, constructors and facility managers. The first task of the committee is to review the relevant and applicable BIM guides currently available, and then proceed to developing the guideline itself. An advisory committee composed of federal, state and local government representatives who developed existing BIM guides will review the effort and provide input on an on-going basis. Once the guideline is complete, the development committee will submit the draft guideline to the buildingSMART alliance membership for review and input. The final guideline will then be submitted to the appropriate standards developing organization (SDO) to go through its consensus process for joint publication as an industry standard.

The goal is for federal, state and local governments and other institutional and commercial building owners to adopt the National BIM Guideline for Owners as the standard procedure for their design/BIM teams to follow, helping building owners unlock the value and opportunity to utilize BIM across the life cycle of a building. Establishing criteria, specifications and expectations in the design and construction process will help owners capture the full value of investing in BIM, while providing a uniform approach for institutional and commercial building owners to achieve consistent BIM requirements for their facilities.