For more than a year, I’ve been immersed in a deep dive into one of the built environment’s most persistent and frustrating challenges: the project-operations gap. This journey began in my previous role as the executive director of the Digital Buildings Council, where I facilitated conversations and curated panel sessions and articles to help bridge this divide. The chasm between the data created during a project’s design and construction and the information required for smart building operations is a key manifestation of this larger problem.
My recent article for Digital Construction Plus, inspired by a conversation with Alex Plenty of Skanska, helped to reframe this discussion. As Alex explained, the core issue isn’t a technical conflict between competing technologies but a deeper, more stubborn problem of communication and misaligned financial incentives. A LinkedIn post I wrote based on feedback about this from his former colleague, Jack Sharp (now at Acutro), became an unexpected catalyst. It launched a WhatsApp discussion group with over 30 participants, all eager to tackle this issue.
The group is a unique cross-section of the industry, with representatives from:
- Contractors: Kier, Skanska, Wates/SES, Sir Robert McAlpine, Laing O’Rourke and Multiplex
- Design & PM: Turner & Townsend, NDY, and Mott MacDonald
- Operations & FM: JLL, BNP Paribas
- Big BMS Players: Honeywell, JCI, and Siemens
- Platform Providers: Glider, Demand Logic, Trigrr, Acutro, and Xempla
What’s happening in our conversations is a live illustration of the project-operations gap. It is a tale of two mindsets, driven by a fundamental financial divide.
A Tale of Two Mindsets: CapEx Idealists vs. OpEx Pragmatists
The discussions in the group reveal two distinct philosophical camps. On one side are the idealists, primarily from the design, engineering, and BIM communities. Their work is funded by CapEx—large project budgets that prioritize the completeness and elegance of a design. Their approach is to create a perfect data model, including a comprehensive set of metadata and information management protocols, and push it downstream. They are motivated by the challenge of building a brilliant, comprehensive system. The problem is, this brilliant system often fails to deliver value once the project is handed over, and the data is left to die.
On the other side are the pragmatists. Their world is the operational life of the building, where every penny spent must be justified by immediate return on investment. Their work is funded by OpEx—a tight budget that demands efficiency and immediate solutions. They don’t care about a perfect data model; they care about what information they need to fix a boiler or reduce energy use right now. Their approach is to pull only the data that provides tangible, day-to-day value.
The pragmatists’ frustration with receiving useless data is just as valid as the idealists’ frustration with their brilliant models being ignored. The fact that the pragmatists are participating so actively in a discussion about BIM data—a topic they have historically viewed as generally irrelevant to their operations—is a strong signal that there is indeed an appetite to bridge this divide.
Building a Bridge: The Path to Collaboration
The real opportunity here for our group is to stop arguing about who is right and start building a bridge that respects both of these realities. The most important lesson I’ve learned is that the BIM community needs to stop asking, “Why aren’t you using our brilliant data models and information management systems?” and start asking, “What are your biggest headaches, and what information do you actually need to make your day easier?”
The conversations have already moved toward a tangible conclusion: a shared need for a collaborative Digital Soft Landings Framework that includes a Minimum Viable Handover (MVH) requirement.
This approach would bring the two mindsets together in a single, focused project. The framework would outline a step-by-step process for a successful digital handover, and the MVH guide would define the absolute minimum data an operational team actually needs to do their jobs. It would be a practical, financially viable solution that provides a clear return on investment.
This collaboration is an opportunity to move the entire industry forward by focusing on what truly matters: making buildings smarter, more efficient, and more valuable for everyone who designs, builds, and operates them. The journey from my previous role to this new venture has reinforced my belief that these deep, meaningful conversations are the only way to get there.
I’ll be curating and moderating a panel on this very topic at London Build Expo in November.
If you work in this space and are passionate about solving these problems, I’d love to have your perspective in the group. Just DM via LinkedIn.
