Construction to Operations Exchange: Challenges of Implementing COBie and BIM in a Large Owner Organization

Despite the transition from paper to digital media, hand-off of data and documents from construction to operations and facilities management is still cumbersome and often requires manual entry and duplication of effort. This paper presents initial findings from an ongoing pilot project that began in spring 2011 on a digital information exchange standard called COBie (Construction Operations Building Information Exchange). Through interviews with key participants, we analyze existing practices as well as proposed changes to be made to these practices. Across a large organization, digital information is not trusted—nor is information neutral. Information is connected to particular jurisdictions who currently control the creation and management of their own datasets. We found that despite availability of digital information, people generally prefer to obtain information from colleagues with direct knowledge of the project or from paper documents. Digital information was considered to be either too difficult to access or not viewed as trustworthy since digital data was not consistently maintained. As more digital information is amassed, including information from COBie and building information models, organizational cultures and practices need to be developed around these new datasets.