NBS and Structured Data

I've been on the road out and about on NBS duties over the last two or three weeks. My time seems to be spent split between discussing how to enhance our products and services to meet the need of manufacturers and the how to meet the needs of construction professionals. Both seem to boil down to the same thing though - (a) structure the data correctly and (b) present this in an intuitive way. This topic is explored further in the two examples below...

1. Interview with Pauley Creative
- http://www.pauleycreative.co.uk/2013/02/what-building-product-manufacturers-need-to-know-about-bim/
Pauley Creative are expert advisers to construction manufacturers when it comes to digital marketing. I was interviewed by Pritesh from Pauley Creative on the topic of what manufacturers need to know about BIM.

PC – If there was one message to manufacturers with respect to their BIM strategy what would it be?
SJH – The simple single message is to focus on the quality of your content – the rest will follow.

Fig 1. What building product manufacturers need to know about BIM

2. Article on theNBS.com
- http://www.thenbs.com/topics/DesignSpecification/articles/benefitsOfStructuredApproachData.asp
I've been meeting with a number of large contractors over recent months and discussing how a structured approach to data can definitely enhance information flow and collaboration on large projects. This also has the secondary benefit of looking over past projects and using this data to learn for future jobs.

Assurances are needed for the following:
- The data must be consistent and to a standard structure
- The data must be robust and to a high quality
- The data must originate from a trusted library that is maintained.

Fig 2. The benefits of using a structured approach to data

The other job this week has been trying to find the time to help our Market Research team pull together the National BIM Report 2013. Keep an eye out for this in the next few weeks! It'll be a free download again from the BIM area of our website:
- http://www.thenbs.com/topics/BIM/reports/index.asp