Top criteria for BIM

[Laszlo Nagy]

I just got email about a very good article on AECBytes about Top criteria for BIM. It is a good reading:

http://www.aecbytes.com/feature/2007/BIMSurveyReport.html

[Anonymous]

I'm one of those "Revit Series" users... Autocad came bundled with Revit for a few hundred bucks more. But it's Autocad sitting on the shelf, not Revit, I use it mainly for cleaning up my dwg files from the surveyor. Anyone that uses Autocad for architecture design these days is just plain nuts!

And the article didn't look like a Revit ad to me either, I thought they went out of their way to make Bentley look like the best answer. Ugh!

Michael Vaughn

[Anonymous]

I was also slightly put off by the article. I responded on her blog page that:

- Revit is often shelfware -- it's great software but users haven't made the effort to learn it. How many of the respondents actually use Revit BIM as their primary documentation platform?
- ArchiCAD was not discussed at all
- Bentley was touted as a solution, and it's more like a nightmare!

Bentley probably wanted to see what the damage was against their archenemy Autodesk, and yes it's bad. Bentley is like a group of bleating sheep about how great their product is, when it's tough for all but the most advanced users to learn and use. Its future is not looking bright.

I don't think AC users should feel slighted by the survey -- instead you got to see that you have more than half the architectural users of Revit (the share posted is for all 3 flavours of the BIM platform, so the architectural share is certainly less than the total), and twice the userbase of BA.

[Karl Ottenstein]

Good to hear that you're actually using Revit, Michael, and not one of those who just have it on the shelf.

I have a lot of problems with the survey, though. First, the sampling method, and second, the questions (as perceived from the article - I did not take the survey).

The sample being a self-selected (those willing to respond) subset of AECBytes subscribers is such that I can not accept many of the results as statistically valid - merely socially interesting and suggestive for further study.

I have to wonder how the question was asked as to what BIM software a firm was using. If the question was merely that, the response is different than if one asked "What software do you use to substantially model your entire project in 3D?" etc. As some of us know, there are ArchiCAD users out there who would say that they use BIM software (ArchiCAD), but in fact they are only using the 2D tools - plus perhaps the wall tool with doors/windows to quickly create 2D plans. (Shockingly stupid, but true.) No doubt, some Bentley and Revit users do not really use their products as they are meant to be used.

Even Dr. Khemlani's response here:
http://aecbytes.com/blog/2007/10/10/top-criteria-for-bim-solutions-aecbytes-survey-results/#comments
that Revit is the current 'market leader' is a vague, unsubstatiated fact AFAIK. If by market leader, she means the most delivered copies, perhaps that is so. To me, the 'market leader' would have the most square feet of buildings designed and/or built with the software as actual 3D models (true BIM). Or, the most number of people actually using it in production. I have not seen any study that hints at those numbers and would like to see some real scientific/statistical work on this entire area to not only guide manufacturers (the Bentley-sponsored purpose of her informal survey) - but to give a true state-of-the-industry to guide the profession and university curricula.

Cheers,
Karl

[Anonymous]

Karl wrote:
The sample being a self-selected (those willing to respond) subset of AECBytes subscribers is such that I can not accept many of the results as statistically valid - merely socially interesting and suggestive for further study.

This fact in itself makes the statistics functionally useless. Similarly, we don't have any idea on the Revit forums whether the member demographic correlates at all with the real user base: are large, medium and small firms represented equally on the forum? We just completed a wish cycle -- do those votes represent the wishes of the entire Revit user base, or just those who happened to stumble onto AUGI?

A real survey of a large number of firms large and small would be more telling.