Developing Smart Standards : proof-of-concept project

A new proof-of-concept project, enabled by the Construction Innovation Hub, has investigated whether actionable tasks could be used to guide organisations in their implementation of the ISO 19650 series of standards.

Information management compliant with ISO 19650 can provide a trustworthy digital record of information about our buildings and infrastructure. To support this, we need to adopt and embed appropriate behaviours and practices which are robust and effective and can work across organisational and asset lifecycle boundaries improving how we design, build, operate and maintain buildings and other infrastructure.

Smart Standards: An approach to implementing ISO 19650-2 using tasks in a digital process explored how tasks deployed on a software platform could be used to guide small to medium enterprises (SMEs) and other organisations to better apply the standards.

The proof-of-concept (PoC) was tested with four client organisations, who in the terminology of ISO 19650-2 act as appointing parties. These organisations tested the PoC approach to setting up the information management process for a new project (‘assessment and need’, and ‘invitation to tender’ activities of ISO 19650-2 clauses 5.1 and 5.2) where project appointments are to be made by the client.

The trial did not just track completion of activities, which can be offered by project management software, it also generated information deliverables, increasing auditability and reducing scope for error as well as providing explanations of the purpose of the tasks and cross-references to UK BIM Framework Guidance and to ISO 19650-2. This is designed to improve user understanding of the tasks and their purpose.

A platform can be used to audit completion of tasks with user actions automatically recorded and time-stamped. The auditing process could be used to demonstrate implementation of the UK BIM Framework, a core policy of the Construction Playbook.

A report has been published to guide organisations through the process and the tasks created have also been published to enable organisations considering a similar approach to learn from them. We have provided the task breakdown structure and the response structures developed for this PoC. Details of this can be found in the Smart Standards: An approach to implementing ISO 19650-2 using tasks in a digital process report.

Further Information 

• The task files have been made available in Word, Excel and JSON on request here.
• You can also access the tasks deployed on the Morta platform here.
• The tasks created in this proof of concept draw upon the methodology of BS EN ISO 19650-2:2018. All clause references relate to BS EN ISO 19650-2 (also referred to as ISO 19650-2).
• Permission to reproduce extracts from BS EN ISO 19650 2:2018 is granted by BSI. British Standards can be obtained in PDF or hard copy formats from the BSI online shop: www.bsigroup.com/Shop or by contacting BSI Customer Services for hardcopies only: Tel: +44 (0)20 8996 9001, Email: cservices@bsigroup.com.