Dive Brief:

• Building information modeling is still a coming thing, but it has not achieved wide use yet among medium and small contractors.
• What 2013 will be known as is the year that data mobility became widespread as more and smarter devices and cloud storage of information allowed sharing of information all around job sites and between sites and offices.
• BIM requires software and perhaps hardware investments, and it is still proving its worth, while "data mobility" appears to have proven its case to almost everyone's satisfaction.

Dive Insight:

One place where BIM and its ability to show conflicts have proven valuable is complex projects on which multiple contractors  are working. One example offered at a recent conference held by AutoDesk, which makes BIM software, is World Trade Center Tower 2 in New York City. Tyler Goss, who was a BIM manager for Turner Construction on the project, told the group that the tower is essentially the physical plant for the rest of the development, and conflict avoidance or resolution was critical.