End of year message for 2018

2018 has been another ‘high growth’ year for buildingSMART reflecting our ‘start-up’ status. The two Standards Summit in Paris and in Tokyo were both highly professional and of ever-increasing stature – and reflected in the growing attendance and breadth of topics addressed. The work effort in our Rail, Ports and Waterways and Bridge projects was of an unimagined scale and will bring forward real benefits for the digitisation of Infrastructure. The Professional Certification Scheme has, after two years of hard development work, launched and attracted its first candidates in Germany this December.

This work would not be possible without the strong support from our Strategic Members. I especially thank those sustaining members from earlier years and welcome Siemens and CRBIM to our community. I have also been delighted to see the growing strength of our staff teams in our Chapters (especially Norway and Germany) and, of course, have been delighted that Aidan Mercer has joined from Bentley to help us drive forward our Marketing activity.

It is a privilege and very exciting to lead the buildingSMART community. The growing recognition of our role and the importance of what we are doing is something I am truly pleased about. Our core leaders around the world are all managing to work in many directions ‘spinning many plates’ and contribute out of the personal passion I know. I fear that as we grow the strains of ‘many plates’ will get worse before it gets better. Thank you all for leaning in and supporting our collective effort once again.

A special focus for 2019 will be improving our alignment with work in other institutions notably ISO, CEN and the EU BIM Task Group which will I hope lead to greater efficiency.

Have a great holiday – we have much to do in 2019

Richard Petrie