Dive summary:

• The idea of building information modeling is easy enough to grasp and very appealing, but buildings do not go up instantly, and a working group of BIM users has issued a set of standards intended to help users in all design and construction disciplines know what they should expect from BIM when.
• The voluntary standards from the BIMForum are known as Level of Development Specifications (LOD), and they lay out ahead of time how much information about a building the model builder and the model users need and what they should expect to know – or not yet know – at various points.
• The BIMForum's 16 architects, engineers and contractors began working on LOD in 2011.

From the article:

“We want everyone to have the same understanding about how much information should go into each element of a building model, and for what uses those models are suitable,” said Dmitri Alferieff, the director of the BIMForum. ...