As the first British prime minister to call a European referendum said, a week is a long time in politics. How long then is a half-decade in the swift-flowing realm of digital construction? 

It was in February 2013 that the Construction Industry Council (CIC) and the BIM Task Group introduced their first BIM Protocol. A document intended to help project teams fulfil the government’s Level 2 BIM mandate (interestingly, the 2011 Government Construction Strategy referred to “fully collaborative 3D BIM” rather than Level 2 maturity), it set out each member’s roles and responsibilities for the building information model and took priority over terms in the relevant construction contract. Now the CIC returns with a second edition.

The original protocol displaced the underlying contract whenever there was a conflict or inconsistency. That didn’t seem particularly collaborative. Now parties must agree a solution

Looking back, its forerunner could be oddly discombobulated where it came to collaborative working. Project team members retained ownership of copyright in electronic data while others received user licences – yet these might potentially be suspended or revoked for non-payment, which could be disastrous in a BIM project. The common data environment (CDE), regarded as essential for co-operation, was barely alluded to. If the employer compiled the technical information required by the BIM Protocol’s appendices inadequately, the protocol struggled to facilitate BIM at all.

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