In the first of a two-part series, Justin Kirby of the Start With Smart Group and the Digital Operations Working Group tackles the single most structural challenge facing the built environment, which is the project-operations gap
While this phrase is intuitively understood, it oversimplifies a multi-sided ecosystem crisis driven by completely conflicting mindsets, funding mechanisms, and daily workflows. Using systems design and design thinking, the aim is to show how the industry needs to think differently.
The piece explores how structured engagement across the chasm brings together diverse stakeholders, including those who ultimately hold the purse strings, is the actual design process required to plug this gap.
1. The illusion of connection: Beyond the “project-operations gap” slogan
This two-part series is the culmination of my four-year engagement programme and deep dive, analysing the interface where smart buildings connect upstream into digital construction and downstream into digital operations. The single most structural challenge to emerge is the project-operations gap. While this phrase is intuitively understood, it oversimplifies a multi-sided ecosystem crisis into a binary problem.
In reality, this is a wicked problem that cannot be resolved through the linear, convergent thinking default in traditional engineering and project delivery. Because what works for one stakeholder group can fail others, the chasm remains unbridged. Addressing this challenge requires design and systems thinking to facilitate a solution differently, reflecting the principle that we cannot solve problems with the same thinking that created them.
The split between the project side and the operations side is driven by completely conflicting timelines, commercial metrics, mindsets, methodologies, and daily workflows. A typical construction project lasts three to five years, whereas the resulting buildings operate for over 60 years. This exposes a harsh reality where 80-90% or more of total lifecycle costs occur during operations, making it unquestionably where the true value of the asset is delivered. Yet, the two domains operate in deep silos separated by opposing funding mechanisms. The linear, milestone-driven nature of project execution stands in direct opposition to the continuous, iterative workflows required for long-term facility operations.
This operational circularity happens continuously in existing estates and new builds alike, independent of an asset’s construction handover date. Because these worlds are culturally and financially isolated, what can far too often seem like a closed-loop echo chamber on the project side currently seems incapable of providing a sustainable answer that will actually resonate with the operations side.
Plugging this gap is an absolute necessity to unlock massive operational value, yet the current Information Management community operates under a mistaken assumption that the full-lifecycle ambitions of the Information Management Initiative and the ISO 19650 standard can be achieved simply by forcing project-side frameworks and thinking further down the timeline.
This happens because project teams rarely have frontline experience in facility operations, leading them to overlook these profound differences. On the other hand, lies the elephant in the room, where rapid BIM adoption occurred on the project side largely as a commercial compliance shield for Tier 1 contractors to mitigate delivery risks and get paid. As such, it does not represent an operational business driver for asset owners and operators.
This misalignment stems from a structural vacuum in which the authoring and review of ISO 19650 lack significant operations-side representation. Consequently, Information Management is treated as an unquestionable virtue, the industry equivalent of motherhood and apple pie, meaning the commercial business case has never been clearly articulated for owners beyond safety compliance or generic ESG goals, which are often pushed by platform vendors with proprietary commercial agendas.
2. Frameworks over standards: Engaging the operational base
Plugging the project-operations gap requires design thinking, which means putting ourselves in the shoes of the stakeholders we need to engage. Operational teams are pragmatic people dealing with daily challenges, and however well-meaning, imposing rigid standards or theoretical BIM frameworks is not currently gaining traction. To facilitate a broad market conversation, it seems more logical to start with the functional tools they actively use and work backwards.
This is why the work of the ADS Alliance provides a self-evident foundation for the Digital Operations Working Group (DOWG) playbook I helped announce at Digital Construction Week. The common denominator is Steven Boyd MBE, who co-leads the ADS Alliance and DOWG, as well as being the former CEO of the Government Property Agency. The reason this initiative is making headway is that it engages the market around trusted, co-created frameworks. The core is a practical crosswalk alignment mapping project classifications like Uniclass and NRM3 directly to established operational tools, specifically SFG20 and CIBSE Guide M. By embedding Uniclass, the initiative connects project asset registers to the reality of how that data will actually inform maintenance strategies and long-term renewal decisions.
This methodology focuses its impact squarely on RIBA Stage 7 (In Use), where the operational lifecycle is driven by three continuous phases of maintain, optimise, and renew. When strategic planning grounds asset renewal, these phases map perfectly onto a Plan-Do-Check-Act Quality Management cycle. This introduces a continuous loop of testing and refinement missing from traditional information management.
Despite superficial similarities with Total Quality Management, traditional Information Management lacks a true PDCA cycle because its structural focus remains project-delivery-oriented. The ADS Alliance recognises this divergence in methodology, mindset, and funding, as they approach the problem by joining the dots between Asset, Estate, and Facilities Management rather than pure information management, thereby practically facilitating an agreed common market language.
Furthermore, this institutional work operates simultaneously across both ends of the spectrum. From the bottom up, it brings together those who use and write these classifications and frameworks to participate in their crosswalks and alignment work. From the top down, it actively influences public sector by feeding into the government’s mandatory FMS002 standard and shaping NHS England Estates policy. This delivers a pragmatic framework based on tools the industry relies upon, offering a mature starting point rather than forcing rigid project standards onto operational estates.
However, bridging the chasm completely requires looking at where this alignment meets project information delivery. The next logical step is to connect these crosswalks to the digital handshake at handover, which lies in COBie’s evolution toward buildingSMART’s Asset Owner Handover (AOH) framework. This technical alignment forms the exact basis upon which the ADS Alliance should collaborate with nima on the Information Management Initiative (IMI), working backwards from joining those dots to the ISO 19650 standard to ultimately create a framework which actually works on the ground based on best practice. Crucially, this must be built upon by expanding engagement directly into the technical and relevant committees of both the IWFM and IFMA, structurally embedding these co-created frameworks within the global professional bodies representing the operational base. This comprehensive engagement represents precisely what the DOWG playbook aims to help facilitate, but moving beyond this institutional baseline requires addressing several other critical areas to ensure the handshake survives.
3. The Digital Handshake: Static records vs. live performance data
The definitive question is where and why the industry joins the dots between operational framework alignment and the project information side. While the technical handshake has traditionally relied on COBie, the industry is now facing an evolution to the Asset Owner Handover (AOH) framework, recently instigated by buildingSMART. Debating the old format versus this new framework is an unproductive dead end because the commercial market has already formalised the transition, and operators overwhelmingly reject traditional COBie as an unusable data dump. However, even if the industry successfully transitions to the AOH framework to improve data structure, it still currently only addresses static data.
Neither COBie nor current AOH implementations are designed to capture live performance data. Furthermore, because operational teams lack the substantial budgets required to maintain complex BIM files, static handover datasets are inherently fragile. The moment a technician replaces a fan coil unit on Day 45 with a comparable product rather than the exact original model and fails to log it, the static register becomes obsolete. This lack of an operational data loop is why facility teams view handed-over BIM files as expensive digital museums representing a snapshot of a building that no longer exists.
Crucially, simply evolving from COBie to AOH does not solve this fundamental problem of data drop-off. To address this, the built environment must adopt Outside-In thinking and examine how mature corporate IT fields treat data as a living asset to prevent degradation. The lesson they offer is not that rigid IT governance standards, such as ISO 8000 for Data Quality or the DAMA-DMBOK, emerging in enterprise environments, should necessarily be blindly adopted. Instead, the focus must be on co-creating a usable, practical approach specifically designed to stop data degradation at handover.
Without a framework that allows data maintenance to be rigorously stress-tested by the market on the ground, any transition to a new static standard remains incomplete. Unless the AOH framework evolves further to explicitly encompass active data maintenance and long-term performance data, a critical operational gap will persist.
Coming up in part 2
In the concluding part of this two-part series, the focus shifts from industry diagnosis toward the non-linear design framework I am proposing to practically bridge the project-operations gap.
This involves examining how a coordinated, multi-pronged engagement approach operates simultaneously from the bottom up and the top down. I will also outline the critical upstream role of the Master Systems Integrator (MSI) in protecting an open, independent data layer through semantic data modelling, explore how to inject actual commercial teeth into handovers using performance-related contracts, and detail a highly pragmatic, self-funding pathway out of the digital all-or-nothing trap.
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