A short essay on the third anniversary of the first official public BIMStorm - or on line brainstorm using Building Information Modeling software.

1. Three Years Ago Today
by Michael Bordenaro
February 1, 2011
Chicago
54 million square feet of space
Hundreds of buildings
Using 800 million kWh of energy annually
Created by 133 people
Observed by 700 people
In 24 hours
With 2.8 million pages of paper not printed
The LA BIMStorm AIA BIM Awards submittal was turned in three years ago today. The
submittal was generated from content created the day before before during a 24-hour global
online charrette – a web-based brainstorm using Building Information Models.
LA BIMStorm won the 2008 AIA BIM Awards Jury's Choice Award. “BIMStorm is beyond BIM,
it moves the industry forward,” said juror Vladamir Bazjanac, PhD, with the Lawrence
Berkeley National Laboratory, University of California.
Today being Groundhog Day, it is interesting to note the
similarity between BIMStorm and the movie of the same
name. In the movie, Bill Murray's character keeps
repeating the same day over and over.
BIMStorms keep happening over and over.
Since the first official public BIMStorm three years ago,
ONUMA, Inc. has conducted more than 24 BIMStorms of
various scale all over the world. More than 4,000 people
have participated in these demonstrations of web-based
business process that are slowly becoming the norm in an
ever evolving global economy.
In January 2011 alone, there were three BIMStorms -
Hong Kong, San Diego and Chicago.
Hong Kong San Diego Chicago

2. What has changed since buildings were first
landed around Dodgers Stadium in Los
Angeles in 2008 and when buildings rained
down on Grant Park in Chicago in 2011?
First of all, things are a lot easier. Technology
has advanced and people have become more
aware of doing business on the web. Four
fields of information – building name, building
type, number of stories and total square feet
can now be “landed” any where on Google
Earth in less than a minute using an iPhone.
That was not possible three years ago. Not that it matters. Whether a person conducts a
building census using a piece of paper and pencil or an iPhone, the information gets put into
the same data base and can help influence.
Getting information on the web is still the way to show value as
the building industry moves forward.
BIMStorm demonstrations allow people to try their hand at web-
based business processes on a practice project.
For the first BIMStorm, six weeks of lessons were conducted to
prepare 133 people for participation. This year, three short
BIMStorms allowed more than 300 people to see the value of
web-based business practices in three weeks.
The experience is repeating at a higher rate than 3 years ago. The “Groundhog Day Effect” is
accelerating. More people are engaging in real BIMStorm style business processes. The
Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, the General Services
Administration, the California Community College system and other are using web-based
processes to achieve dramatic improvements in productivity and profitability.
As part of the BIMStorm Chicago, Deke Smith, FAIA, included a case study of a project that
saved more than $5 million using the open standards that make BIMStorms possible. As
executive director of the buildingSMART alliance, Smith promotes all software vendors to
make data available so all software can work together to solving the increasingly complex
problems of our society's need for efficient buildings.
In the week that President Barack Obama called for first
responders being able to look up a floor plan on the way
to a fire, BIMStorm Chicago demonstrated how that is
possible today with no cost and low cost software.
In the same State of the Union speech, President Obama
said we need to take on the mission of renewable energy
for all the same way leaders in the 1960s took on the
mission of landing a man on the moon.

3. In the same week, Deke Smith said it would take less effort to save $400 billion in a year in
the building industry than it took to put a man on the moon.
BIMStorm Chicago might have landed
hundreds of millions of dollars worth of
buildings on Grant Park in Google Earth
where they will never be built. But it was
clear that more is possible today than most
people realize.
If a moon landing effort were placed on
saving significant savings of time and
money for federal, state and local
government building departments, a
cumulative cost reduction could have a
positive impact on public funds. Energy
savings could be realized on a meaningful
scale. Reduction of greenhouse gas can be
clearly measured and positive impacts
tracked.
This was visible 3 years ago through BIMStorm LA. It is more clear today.
As BIMStorms are repeated over and over, cost saving, web-based business processes will
become so prevalent in the building industry that the “Ground Hog's Day” clock will stop going
off and we will wake up to find our moon mission accomplished.