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Centre for Digital Built Britain completed its five-year mission and closed its doors at the end of September 2022

This website remains as a legacy of the achievements of our five-year foundational journey towards a digital built Britain
 

Standards create an avenue of consistency and opportunity for skills to be recognised and developed. In this blog Kirsten Lamb reviews the work done to date on skills in relation to the standards landscape and points to future work needed to support progress towards an information management framework and a National Digital Twin.

One of the key enablers of change toward a digital built Britain will be skills; specifically, having people with the right skills in the right roles throughout the various built environment sectors, and at all stages of the asset lifecycle. But how can business leaders align the roles in their organisations with their own digital strategies and with needs nationwide? Standards may prove a useful resource for role-specific digital requirements, and CDBB-funded research by Urban Innovation Labs (UIL) in 2018 points to an opportunity to create a role-focused guide to digital built environment standards. 

In a report prepared for CDBB, Meta standard and Standard Landscape, UIL describes their mapping of standards related to BIM and a smart built environment. The resulting heat map shows where standards are most and least prevalent in the information management and built environment lifecycles. This produced several insights, including: 

  • “The operational phase of the asset lifecycle is consistently the coolest part of the landscape across all topics”; 
  • “Data and information exchange is the warmest part of the landscape across all topics”; 
  • “The coolest topics for data and information relate to searching for data and data analysis”; 
  • “Related to the above, the coldest part of the landscape relates to data analysis in the operational phase of the asset lifecycle with only three (0.03%) of the total standards”. 

A section of the heat map for the “Internet of Things” subset of standards. Source: UIL 2018. 

While the UIL work provided an excellent overview of the standards landscape at the time it was produced, the UK BIM Framework (including the ISO 19650 series) has changed the landscape significantly by addressing some of the gaps identified by UIL, especially around joining up information management standards across construction, handover and operations. Future work should replicate this original study to see how the standards landscape has shifted due to the UK BIM Framework and where gaps still remain. 

The second part of UIL’s report introduces the idea of meta standards that are created around roles in the information management and built environment. Meta standards enable analysis and querying of a large body of standards on a given topic, meaning that replicating this method could be the basis for tools that link digital skills and the supporting standards to real roles within the built environment sectors. Meta standards for multi-site asset operators, digital twin information managers and construction procurement specialists, for example, could highlight the necessary digital skills for those roles so that organisations can embed them explicitly in role descriptions, and recruit and train staff accordingly. They could also enable people in those roles to easily find the standards that are most relevant to them.  

To move the consistency of delivery and therefore, required profiles in the built environment sectors forward, however, it isn’t enough to simply list these standards by role. There’s a need for guidance on how to translate these role-based meta standards into digital strategies and digital skills profiles specific to the context of the organisations that will use them. The work UIL did in 2018 is a great basis to guide future standards development and digital skills profiles for roles in these sectors. 

As the National Digital Twin programme progresses and the Information Management Framework starts to develop, the need for a more consistent approach and growth in skills will be paramount to the success of uptake in the industry. Standards create an avenue of consistency and opportunity for skills to be recognised and developed. It is therefore imperative that future work investigates the gap in standards and helps to identify when these would be needed and how they are all linked to the programme. CDBB remains committed to working with BSI as a key stakeholder and partner for the National Digital Twin programme.