Four Reasons Why Business Owners Should Embrace Data as a Discipline™

Data as a Discipline™ is the practice of identifying, leveraging, and auditing data to drive planning, design, construction and operations. Implementing a strategy for data will set building owners up for success in the following ways:

1. Supports Facility Operations

Many owners struggle to collect the building data they need to populate asset management or maintenance work order platforms. They resort to clunky excel spreadsheets or rely on maintenance personnel to survey a building that has just been brought online because the right information is rarely turned over from the design and construction team.

Establishing a data strategy for design and construction allows for the identification, management and auditing of information needed to ensure a smooth transition between construction and operations.

2. Ensures Standards are Incorporated

It’s vitally important for design and construction partners to incorporate the owner’s project requirements. Those standards are typically communicated via documents, meeting minutes, phone calls, and the like. However, these modes of information transfer present the opportunity for crucial details to be missed and do not allow for auditing measures beyond review of the construction documents.

By translating these project requirements to data and inserting them into the building model, algorithms can be created to review the model and confirm compliance. This provides owners to easily verify the percentage of their standards that have been implemented.

3. Coordinates Responsibilities

Between the different departments representing the building owner (real estate, facilities, construction, etc.) and those brought in to design and construct the project (architects, consultants, contractors, etc.), there are many stakeholders involved in creating the built environment. Communicating scope responsibility from team to team can result in errors and fail to pick up changes from new information such as a revised lease or contract.

Databasing responsibilities in one location and providing all stakeholders access to that single source of truth mitigates the mistakes that result from team-to-team communication. It also ensures no one is left out when changes to those responsibilities occur.

4. Provides a Return on Investment

Building owners are investing time and money into promoting the use of building information modeling to their project partners and creating the applicable standards. However, many struggle to realize a return on these investments, and fail to appreciate all of the unique opportunities available to them.

By fully embracing the ‘information’ within building information modeling, building owners are able to finally realize the benefits they originally anticipated in adopted digital workflows. Deducting everything down to data, as the universal common denominator that it is, the unifying promise of technology is unlocked.

Learn more about Data as a Discipline™ here.