Risk evaluation, much like insurance, usually depends on the value of the asset being protected. It is therefore remarkable that, despite construction being one of the most expensive undertakings anyone can pursue, it still rarely involves a proportionate evaluation of the risks surrounding it.

It is important to note, however, that we are not referring to environmental risk assessments, such as flooding or avalanches. Those are, of course, essential. Rather, we are concerned with the security and management of the information encoded within BIM models.

Information management is, in its current form, a relatively new discipline for architects. Yet it is ultimately nothing more than an extension of activities the profession has always undertaken.

Architects—or, more broadly, design professionals—have always managed information. What has changed is not the existence of that information, but rather how it is structured, segmented, and treated throughout the design and construction process.

The difference is simply that, instead of filing cabinets and physical archives, we are now dealing with files, servers, information systems, and digital platforms that are not always designed to work seamlessly with one another. This is, of course, a consequence of the growing complexity of the construction industry, but it should not be seen as something fundamentally separate from drawings, specifications, and the other reference documents architects have always managed.

When Nicholas Negroponte began conceptualizing what would eventually become the foundations of modern CAD and parametric modeling around 1964, he was not inventing new methods of graphical representation. He was digitalizing the tools we already had, moving them into a new medium.

It has taken the construction industry more than fifty years to begin fully implementing many of those ideas. I would even argue that our design methodology has yet to catch up. We continue to practice architecture using largely analogue ways of thinking, despite relying on increasingly digital tools.

This disconnect has been evident since the first release of Grasshopper. Even today, its potential remains only partially understood by much of the profession.

Critics within academia have pointed to several reasons for this. To begin with, construction methods remain largely manual despite the increasing digitalization of design processes—a disconnect that many hope will eventually be addressed through advances in digital fabrication, additive manufacturing, and 3D printing.

This challenge is compounded by a shortage of adequately prepared professionals who are now expected to master two disciplines that have traditionally evolved independently: information technology and architecture.

In terms of information management, however, there is much we can inherit from IT. After all, few disciplines are more closely associated with data than information technology and its methods for organizing, categorizing, and managing it.

Incidentally, this also brings architecture closer to what we traditionally understand as project management. From that perspective, what began simply as construction increasingly draws 

upon disciplines such as manufacturing, data management, and the programming of civil infrastructure.

Whatever form the architect of the future takes, it may simply reflect a gradual specialization of responsibilities that have always existed within the construction process. Just as we rely today on specialists in building regulations or construction permitting, it is not difficult to imagine future consultants specializing in material deployment, computational design, digital fabrication, or information management.

That said, given my own background in cybersecurity, I would argue that we should begin by focusing on the mapping, classification, and protection of building information. Previous technological revolutions have often forced architecture to react to change, but perhaps this time we can anticipate it and benefit from it.

There is a reason architects have developed such a natural affinity for BIM, and why many of its concepts feel surprisingly intuitive to us:

We have been here before.

---

📕 The Pocket AI Governance Guide is out now for readers looking for a practical way to understand governance in AI.

📙 Amazon US: https://a.co/d/05z7Y2gf
📗 Europe (Amazon Germany): https://amzn.eu/d/0g8ON3Cf
(Also available through other Amazon stores.)

Explore the free articles and resources available on this website.