BIM and smartphones

BIM and smartphones 

Another frequent question (and complaint) about BIM is about learning it: when can one find the right training programme? I often hear of expensive courses for employees of design, engineering and construction firms, as well as for students (universities don't often care for the development of some practical skills). Which one of these courses is the best?

My usual answer is that one should take a BIM course with the same people who gave them their smartphone training because they appear to have made an excellent job of it: practically everyone uses a smartphone nowadays, most to the best of their ability and, perhaps equally significantly, most seem happy with what they can do with it. People think I'm joking but I'm not.

What makes self-education and training so effective with some technologies? Does it apply to all things? Leaving aside a ubiquitous companion like the smartphone, which one inevitably learns to use as well as their pens and pencils (i.e. with variable yet generally adequate results), everybody seems able to work with text processing software like Word but quite often I realise that some of the key facilities may escape them. For example, even young people, seem unaware of page breaks and use instead long sequences of hard returns to move to the next page. Why haven't they learned or discovered it?

In general, becoming a good user of something complex like a smartphone or a computer program is a combination of understanding their fundamental principles and having extensive experience with their operation (and one many need more experience than another). We can teach the former and initiate the latter but one has also to keep coming back to the principles as experience grows to extend understanding of principles into a transparent framework that guides and explains operation. This is something that even university education fails to offer; what are the chances in a work environment?

In conclusion, anyone can learn BIM by spending time with it, trying things out and communicating to other users and experts. I'm not sure how far one can go without support in the form of theory and feedback from theory. What I do know is that smartphones have become so easy to learn not only because we use them all the time but also because they have developed interfaces and apps that are very limited and therefore easy to comprehend without much understanding. By contrast, BIM or text processing software are behemoths with interfaces that try to do too much and may consequently obscure many critical facilities or even intimidate users. Dissolving such software into a myriad of small apps may not be the solution but learning from the success of smartphone can only help.

Skilled BIM workers

Skilled BIM workers 

In discussions about BIM I often hear complaints that to use it properly we need extensive cultural change, especially concerning the habits and capacities of people who should work with it. People are accused of being negative and incompetent concerning innovation. It seems that it's quite hard to find people willing and capable of fully utilizing new technologies. Where does one get the skilled BIM users?

My reaction is that they should employ postal workers. When this is met with puzzlement, I explain that postal workers are fantastically good with new technologies: when I receive a package, they not only ask for confirmation of reception by offering me a mobile digital device to sign on, they also manager to process the confirmation in real time, on the cloud and in real time: within second, my confirmation appears on an online, shared information system that connects the postal services of different continents and notify every stakeholder of the action and of the new state of the project. Could one wish for more?

I hope they get it: the answer to most of our problems with new technologies and their utilization lies not in imposing new obligations and additional processes on people but in creating new, natural working environments, where on does their usual stuff with more ease and without confusion. The postal workers just deliver the package and get my signature. What happens with the delivery confirmation may be beyond their comprehension but by using the right tools, they ensure that the right thing happens. And it happens because the overall system, including the parts about human interaction, are adequately designed and implemented in an effective, efficient and generally reliable manner.

Had the postal worker been obliged to print paper forms according to some standard from the beginnings of the previous century, get signatures, dates and other processing or delivery data on them, then transcribe the data from the forms back to a computer system, we wouldn't have real-time postal tracking systems on the Internet. Many more mistakes would have been made, the personal capacities and habits of each postal worker would bear on the operation of the systems and there would have been widespread complaints from every stakeholder about the technology and its deployment.

So, how about freeing ourselves from outdated conventions and focusing on doing our jobs beyond such confines? Surely these conventions had been established to ensure that these jobs were properly done with the technologies available back then. Shouldn't we now examine what these jobs entail and how they relate to the new technologies and the societies that are already accustomed to them?