US is behind in embracing national BIM guidelines. Here’s a look at the industry leaders who are trying to effect change and why we should care.

Drones that track construction through RFID-tagged hard hats and materials. Emergency responders with real-time knowledge of which building areas are structurally sound. Architects who can project revenue accurately. This is the nirvana of an architecture, engineering, construction, and operations (AECO) industry that is empowered by building information modeling (BIM).

Although the number of project teams using BIM tools increases each year, the transformative potential of these tools remains checked by barriers that impede the information exchange among participants and across different software platforms. Getting the most out of BIM will require an open exchange of information, which in turn requires defining and implementing common protocols and standards. But who wants this arduous task?

In the United Kingdom, the answer is simple: the government. By 2016, all British government building contracts will require “fully collaborative 3D BIM,” according to the country’s 2011 Government Construction Strategy. The NBS National BIM library—yes, such a thing exists—already contains thousands of both generic and proprietary BIM objects. (These objects are virtual building components containing performance parameters and physical attributes that can be placed in digital building models.) Singapore, Finland, and Norway also have national BIM standards, and China has one in the works.

The situation is less unified in the United States. BIM standards are as varied as railroad track widths were in the early 1800s. Often they are decreed by the particular owner, such as a state or university, and limited to deliverable specifications. “Sadly, many of these BIM standards don’t look any further than the design process, or are not open, requiring a single vendor-specific file format,” says Jeffrey Ouellette, Assoc. AIA, the vice-chair of the project committee for Version 3 of the National BIM Standard–United States (NBIMS-US), and an architect product specialist at Nemetschek Vectorworks.