Built Intelligence

Practice area 01

Information Governance & Digital Delivery

Standards describe what good information looks like. Governance determines whether anyone is obligated to produce it. Most projects have the first and not the second.

Organizational what the business needs to know Asset what operations needs to run it Project what the project must produce Exchange what each party must deliver BIM execution how the team will comply Common data where it lives, how it moves DERIVED FROM OPERATIONS executed during delivery Each layer answers a question the previous one poses. Skipping one does not remove the question — it defers it to handover.
The requirement chain of ISO 19650. Each layer answers a question posed by the one before it.

The problem

The National Institute of Standards and Technology estimated the annual cost of inadequate interoperability in the U.S. capital facilities industry at approximately $15.8 billion, with roughly two-thirds of that burden falling on owners and operators after handover rather than during construction. The cost of information failure is paid mostly by whoever inherits the building.

This failure persists on projects that did everything the technology literature recommends. Peer-reviewed research has documented a $113 million research facility that had a formal BIM Execution Plan, applied COBie formatting, and operated under an IPD philosophy — and whose automated exchange into the maintenance management system still failed at handover. The cause was not a missing standard. It was that no one held defined authority over what had to exist, in what state, verified by whom, before information could move.

What governs this area

The decisions it comes down to

  1. What asset information will operations require — as data, not as documents?
  2. Which party is accountable for each information container?
  3. What level of information need applies to each element, at each stage?
  4. What states exist in the common data environment, and who authorizes each transition?
  5. Who may read, edit and issue within each state?
  6. What check must a container pass before issue, and who performs it?
  7. What happens to superseded information?

Basis

Academic. BC 6050 — Building Information Modeling for Multi-disciplinary Integration, Georgia Institute of Technology.

Applied basis

The three enforcement mechanisms described here — role-based permission, record-level visibility, and immutability of closed states — are in production in a multi-entity commercial real estate operation the author administers: eighty leased units across twelve buildings, held by several distinct owners including units in undivided co-ownership.

Writing in this area

Information Governance for Collaborative Delivery

Version 1.0 · August 2026