"Place your hand on a hot surface and you recoil immediately to avoid severe burns. Make this mistake a few times and our brain is wired to avoid hot surfaces. The communication network in our body transmits the signal in an instant to our brain. We register it in our brain, learn and evolve. If it took even a minute for this message to travel from our fingers to our brain, we would be covered with a lot more burns.

"The building industry on the other hand moves in slow motion," he continues. "We typically take much longer than minutes, hours or days to get a message back to the brain and change course. The limitation has been a combination of technology and embedded processes. As messages are delayed, we cannot truly predict the future impact of decisions we make today. As an industry we are not only burning our own hand, we are burning the planet."

In many respects, experts say, the construction industry has been resistant to automation. The majority of the work is performed manually rather than by computers. In addition, because of the historical lack of standardization between computer applications, the data is likely to end up in a file cabinet instead of a database even when computers are used.

BIM or three-dimensional modeling software may be the technology that drives a change. Experts describe it as a single-source repository for information about a building. The newest BIM software applications integrate every aspect of a building. They encourage construction superintendents, schedulers, modelers and subcontractors develop unified strategies that can accelerate development and enable early detection of problems or mistakes. Ultimately, BIM can reduce project delivery times as well as risk, costs and lawsuits resulting from errors or construction delays.

Andy Fuhrman, the San Francisco-based CEO of the Washington, DC-based Open Standards Consortium for Real Estate, says BIM allows stakeholders to take a virtual walk-through before, during and after construction, as well as provide 360-degree rotating views. "They're more advanced, and can represent building system components, such as light fixtures, fire-rated wall systems, and other real-world building components, including mechanical, electrical, and plumbing routing," he adds.

Fuhrman, a technology consultant and certified building inspector, has been working with Onuma to incorporate Oscre standards including space classifications and real property unique identifiers into the BIMStorm process. The long-term objective is to standardize BIM so it works hand-in-hand with existing facility management technology and retain its usefulness for the full life cycle of a building's life, from design to demolition.

Oscre is a global, non-profit organization established in 2003 to develop data standards to eliminate inefficiencies in the real estate industry. The organization is credited with enabling a significant level of standardization, coordination and collaboration among key stakeholders in the profession.

Fuhrman thinks BIM has great potential. "The world is changing," he says. "People don't necessarily have to be face to face to do many processes anymore, including building. Through standardization of the data, it becomes easier for people to exchange information, even between various software applications. So we may be able to compress a design phase that typically takes a year into two or three months, saving time, money and resources."