This post explores one of BuildUSA’s most important long-term goals: connecting the digital twin of a building’s project and operational life to the live marketplace of products and services that serve it over its lifetime.
The Industry Is Asking the Right Questions — But Missing the Starting Point
There is a serious and important discussion underway within the building industry. Who is responsible for collecting data? Where should it reside? Who owns it? Who can access it, and how can it be used going forward? These are all the right questions. But without a clear vision for how, why, when and for what purpose, data is created in the first place, the answers remain elusive.
That starting point is the central mission of BuildUSA. Standards, Templates & Workflows (STWs) must be in place and accepted across the Building industry ensuring that as data is developed, it resides within a technological ecosystem that all parties can access and utilize, without constantly having to re-create or reformat it just to make it useful.
The Digital Twin Connected to the Live Market
One of BUSA’s most important long-term goals is ensuring that as BIM models are developed, their data structure can organically evolve into a digital twin that is connected to the current, live marketplace of products and services.
Consider a simple example: a pump, modeled in BIM and installed in a real building. If properly coded and connected, that digital model could be linked to the current marketplace of vendors who provide products and services to repair, maintain, and replace that pump, seamlessly connecting a building owner or operator to the right resources 10, 15, or 20 years after installation. And because the data is properly coded, classified, and complete, all parties have the information they need to make professional, informed decisions.
This should hold true not only for large institutional buildings with dedicated operations staff, but also for our homes. Residential databases, properly structured, should be able to track, maintain, repair, and replace the important assets over a home’s typical lifetime. Appliances, furnaces, A/C systems, hot water heaters, roofs, doors, plumbing fixtures, and more. The digital twin of a home should provide the same seamless connection to the market. And with fully developed and implemented BUSA STWs fully in place, contractors and vendors doing maintenance, replacement and repair work would not only access the data for their work, but then update the asset data over the course of years, keeping the record current and complete.
Perhaps the Most Valuable Service a Digital Twin Can Provide
Over a building’s lifecycle, the potential efficiencies and improved comfort levels delivered by this single capability may represent some of the greatest returns available to building owners, operators, and the broader building ecosystem. Properly set up and maintained, it will not only connect buildings and operators to the market, it will inform the market of needs coming into view months or even years in advance.
Take that same pump. If its data includes installation date and projected service life, both the market and the building owner can start receiving notifications that the pump is approaching the end of its useful life, 6 months out, 2 months out. What happens next differs by owner: some are proactive and will get a replacement ordered well in advance; others will try to eke out as much remaining life as possible; still others will do nothing until there is an emergency. The business proposition works for all of them. The value is in the connection, informing real business opportunities between building owners/operators and the vendor market, sustained across an entire building lifecycle.
STWs Are Always at the Center
STWs are always at the forefront of these discussions, and for good reason. Properly structured, they enable all of these capabilities at little to no additional cost once established and widely adopted (an important caveat). They simply require data to be well-structured, fully coded and classified, and secured with appropriate access for all impacted parties.
As BuildUSA’s ecosystem evolves, data ownership will become an increasingly important and contentious issue. Different parties will be rewarded asymmetrically based on what they contribute to the system versus what they receive from it. That tension needs to be addressed head on. A very simple example of how this plays out is the A/E/C construction industry is responsible for creating the data during the design and construction process. Assume they do a good job, and the data is properly structured. This enables downstream benefits accruing to the Owner and the repair, maintenance, and replacement vendors for the building’s lifetime. Incentives and tools need to be available to ensure that the creators of the foundational data provide properly structured, high-quality data.
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