As Digital Director at BIM Academy, Bola is passionate about delivering a digital first approach. Bola is an industry thought leader with specialist knowledge in Digital Construction, Smart Legal Contracts, Blockchain, Built Asset Assurance, BIM, Technical Compliance and Asset Lifecycle Management. He is a Chartered Construction Manager, Chartered Quantity Surveyor and Fellow of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS), and in 2019 Bola was awarded an OBE for Services to Diversity and to Young People in the Construction Industry.
When did you first start working with digital twins?
Having completed a 32month sabbatical at UK’s Centre for Digital Built Britain ‘CDBB’ with Cambridge University in 2022, my work here rose from my appointment on the Gemini Council and spoke to the next phase of information management into the sphere of digital twins; of which BIM is a key component. But it all really began back in 1994 when I articulated my first ‘process level’ digital twin, founded in BIM enabled workflows, premised upon the ontology of data. In 1998, I began to champion the project delivery benefits of BIM in the Surveying profession, which culminated in several sector wide discussions and an insight paper produced in 2015. I successfully demonstrated the benefits of 5D BIM implementation amidst the client facing challenge of wider adoption, which continues apace, albeit slowly.
What have you worked on in relation to The Golden Thread?
The Golden Thread is of great importance, having risen from the Building a Safer Future Report; an output from the Grenfell Tower tragedy which precipitated the evolution of the Building Safety Act 2022. I have extensive client facing experience in leading large multi-million pound programmes of work that demand stringent KPI’s and adhere to regulatory third party audit, purely from a cost and data management perspective. At BIM Academy we are working to educate clients in the need for better building safety management and the legal requirement to implement the Golden Thread through every project phase [aka the 3 Gateways] from (1) planning / design and (2) construction through to (3) operation / occupation.
What inspires you?
Life is short, I encourage everyone to be humble and to live everyday as though it were their last, remembering at all times that we are all on a journey of finding ‘ourselves’ and ‘our purpose’. And, when you find your purpose, know that this is in fact your calling to commit to helping others find theirs. That way, the world will always move in the same direction, with a common purpose – an awareness and mutual respect for each other’s differences.
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