An early, well-documented attempt to use building models to run a famous building that was designed long before BIM: what the research project tried, and what it shows about information for operations.
The Sydney Opera House was designed in the 1950s and 1960s and opened in 1973, long before building models existed. From 2004, its owner took part in an Australian research project, the FM Exemplar Project, to test how a model-based approach could support facility management of a building whose information was spread across drawings, databases and people's heads. The work is one of the earliest public case studies of BIM for operations, and the owner's work on it has continued since.
The case is often cited for a lesson that still holds: for operations, the model's value is in the information it gives access to, not the geometry. A building already in use has its asset data in many places; bringing it together, structured and owned, is most of the work. It also shows that BIM for operations is a long programme rather than a single project.
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