On Wednesday 15th June, Ireland’s National BIM Council (NBC) a national body to support the advancement of digital in the construction sector was officially launched.
NBC was formed as a recommendation of the Enterprise Ireland 2014 National BIM Forum and is a key measure in fulfilling the Government’s national ‘Construction 2020’ strategy.
The inaugural meeting was convened by its chair Caroline Spillane, Director General of professional body Engineers Ireland. Welcoming the council, she said: “The formation is a key step forward in realising the potential of digital tools and processes within Ireland’s construction sector. The NBC recognise the role of technology and ‘better information management’ in achieving measured improvements in productivity, international competitiveness and collaboration. Further, the move towards a more highly engineered ‘data rich’ product with less ‘on-site’ physical labour, opens new opportunities for innovation and a far more interesting, exciting and diverse range of career choices within the industry.”
Stephen Hughes, the head of Construction at Enterprise Ireland, said “Ireland’s National BIM Council is a partnership between the public sector and industry to provide vision, leadership and a collective voice for the advancement of digital in the design, construction and operation of built assets. A primary role for the council will be to develop an industry ‘road map’ that will seek to optimise the successful implementation of Building Information Modelling (BIM) in Ireland.”
The council is composed of nine members from the public and private sector and represent clients of construction and the industry supply chain.
- Ms Caroline Spillane (Chair) Engineers Ireland
- Mr Tom Costello IPUT plc
- Mr Damian Duffy National Development Finance Agency (NDFA)
- Mr David O’Brien Office of Government Procurement (OGP)
- Mr Gerard Bourke Office of Public Works (OPW)
- Mr Noel Kennedy Intel Corporation
- Mr Sean Downey Construction Industry Federation (CIF)
- Mr Ralph Montague Arcdox and CitA BIM Group
- Mr John Hunt Enterprise Ireland
- Dr Alan Hore (Secretariat) DIT/CitA
The first national survey (October 2015) to benchmark the level of Building Information Modelling (BIM) adoption across the Architects, Engineers, and Contractors (AEC) in Ireland revealed that 67% of the industry sample possessed confidence in their skills and knowledge to deliver BIM. While only 6% reported no confidence the remaining 27% reported a general knowledge of BIM and a gradual improvement in BIM skills.75% of the sample reported an increase in demand for BIM in Ireland.
The research was conducted by Construction IT Alliance and Enterprise Ireland (copy available upon request).
