Next week I will be attending an AIA sponsored symposium on BIM (building information modeling) in Washington DC. I am pretty excited about it. There are three separate speaker presentations but the one that will likely be most anticipated for me is the presentation titled "Taking BIM to the Next Level" by Malcum Davies of Gehry Technologies.

I just happened to watch the Frank Gehry film, "Sketches of Frank Gehry", last friday with a group of architect friends. The film is by Sydney Pollack, who directed his first documentary on the life and work of his dear friend. Aside from it being an "Official Selection" at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival the movie is notable on at least two other levels. Firstly, there are very few films made about famous architects -- something that architects themselves, no doubt, have conflicted feelings about -- and secondly, this is probably the only film ever made that brushes up against the side of BIM.

Gehry himself never touches a computer. That much is clear in the film. He does spend a lot of time bending shiny paper, sketching and critiquing physical models -- something his office produces at an enormous rate.

BIM in the Real World

The title of Malcum Davies talk, "Taking BIM to the Next Level" struck a chord with me this week because BIM itself hasn't even begun to truly penetrate the real world of architectural practice. "What?", you say.

One of the distinct pleasures I have in my life is that I get to write about things like BIM, CAD and 3D and somehow get to spend a great deal of my time actually using them in real-world architectural practice. While the Boston-area practice where I am an associate may only constitute a small office (under 20 but more than 10) my life in this office gets me around quite a bit. One minute I'm in office "X" one of top three structural engineering firms in Boston and then the next minute I'm in workshop "Y", one of two top custom shops making wood windows and doors.

Interestingly, this recent series of stops brought up BIM in both places. In office "X" I was asked about BIM by its firm owner and after a 3 minute chat a note was jotted down: "make effort to investigate BIM in 2007."

At workshop "Y" a conversation with its owner turned into a tale about an extrodinary new project designed by a Washington DC area architect that everybody knows. I can't mention names of course but I can tell you there are three names in the name. In my many chats about technology at workshop "Y" I can tell you that the least of their problems is drawing information. And BIM is not even on the radar. "What is BIM?", the owner of workshop "Y" asks.

Our digital equivalent of a firm Rolodex is our FileMaker Pro databases. And of the over 1000 contacts we have specific to the AEC world in the northeast region, the amount of players we have encountered who have already begun to jump into BIM the way it is suppose to go is exactly zero. That doesn't mean BIM isn't happening, it just means that BIM is currently almost completely restricted to the class of building projects in the multiple dozens of millions of dollars range. And only a small percentage of them.

The Tipping Point of BIM

Critics of my appraisal above will state that BIM is not only alive but thriving and growing. Yes, its growing. But its "tipping point" is far enough off in the future to state with confidence that we all have at least another year, if not more, before we cross the threshold.

In Malcolm Gladwell's best-selling book, "The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference", the very definition of the "tipping point" phenomenom was stated as "that magical moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire."

Well, since I'm originally from southern California, and happen to know a little bit about wildfires, let's talk about what you need to actually have one. There are three elements required to actually make a classic wildfire: 1.) we need dry conditions, 2.) we need good Santa Ana winds and 3.) we need a dumb kid to through is cigarette bud out the car window.

Well, if the kid is really just proving that combustion can take root, then the BIM industry is currently at that point where the cigarette has hit the ground and ignited. In order for it to spread we need winds and dry conditions. Not sure of how those map in my rough analogy I'll shift gears a moment and talk about Gladwell's Tipping Point.

Gladwell's book is incredibly lucid in its theory and examples. At heart he is discussing the nature of social epidemics (what some might call major trends or fads). The rise of Google, YouTube, podcasting, and the iPod itself are all examples of phenoms that "tipped" and took off through a phenomenal social growth.

But why has BIM not tipped? And yet Google Earth did?

Gladwell defines three rules of epidemics. Epidemics are a function of the people who transmit infectious agents, the infectious agent itself, and the operating environment for the infectious agent. He summarizes this in the context of social and business epidemics as: the Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor, and the Power of Context.

I'm not going to do a full Gladwell style analysis of why BIM has not yet reached its tipping point. That is beyond the scope of this little article. However, the bottom line is that in our wildfire analogy, we don't yet have any Santa Ana winds and and the conditions are perhaps not yet dry enough.

Stickiness: PacMan versus BIM

In Gladwell's Three Rules of Epidemics the Skickiness Factor refers to the infectious agent itself. In software or technology terms things that are incredibly "sticky" are things that people can't get away from or enough of. Cigarettes have huge and powerful stickiness because of the drug nicotine in them. YouTube and iTunes are incredibly "sticky" because they are addictive software experiences. In businesss stickiness is very good.

And it seems to be a key factor in the Tipping Point phenomonon as applied to the information technology industry. The term stickiness first appeared in the early days of the Web, when new site owners were trying to explain ways to keep visitors on their site and coming back for more. Great web sites were sticky!

And so are Blackberrys, iPods, PlayStations, iTunes and even other software or Net experiences like Google Earth and even perhaps SketchUp. When I was a teenager the Atari games were just brand new and boy were they addictive. Their stickiness was off the charts. I dumped every quarter I ever had into games like Asteroids, Galaxa and PacMan.

The problem with BIM is it comes nowhere near the excitement level of any of these other highly sticky technologies. And yet, coming from 2D CAD, you would think it would.

Context: Wet Grass versus Dry Grass

California wildfires never happen after big rains for obvious reasons. In many ways BIM is like a wildfire trying to run away on wet grass. It is taking longer to jump from 2D to BIM than it was to adopt CAD in the first place. Paper processes platued but 2D CAD and other information technology benefits continue to offer financial gains that challenge the financial upside of BIM in a way that is akin to dousing the dry field with plenty of water.

In epidemic terms, the operating environment for the infectious agent of BIM keeps developing resistance to its spread. The markers of this are:

• 2D CAD keeps making small advances
• Productivity continues in non-CAD domains
• Current economic context isn't right in the US

After listening to 2006 Nobel Prize for Economics winner Edmund Phelps describe the difference between American capitalism compared to European capitalism a lot of what has happened with BIM globably makes perfect sense. He says that American capitalism is dynamic at the individual or small business level and that in Europe things happen on a more consentual level, with big companies, government monopolies and large labor unions discussing what they are going to do before doing it.

Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor in the Clinton Administration and a guest on an NPR segment with Edmund Phelps said that "we have a culture of impertinence in America. In Europe you don't do something first, then ask later."

In the US, not only are businesses under enormous pressure to raise real wages and control costs, but we are -- especially in the AEC world -- a nation of individuals not socially inclined to talk a whole lot about anything before we do it. It is only natural therefore, that BIM would grow its seeds better in Europe than in the United States.