Buildings 2.0 Library
Conversations on the future of the built environment
81 episodes of the Buildings 2.0 podcast, each bound as a short book: the ideas, the numbers and the lines worth keeping.
Season 2, Episode 9 /Sep 5, 2025
Why VDC isn't about BIM, it's about data strategy
Joseph Good, Gilbane
Sep 5, 2025 /Data, BIM & Interoperability
Why VDC isn't about BIM, it's about data strategy
Joseph Good is a senior VDC manager at Gilbane, one of the largest construction managers in the United States. Virtual design and construction, VDC, is the discipline of using models and data to plan and run a project. Joe argues it was never about the model at all, and that the industry is already moving toward building directly from models with no paper trail.
Joseph Good, Senior VDC Manager, Gilbane
In this conversation
Gilbane's rule for avoiding shiny objects: if you cannot sell the Fiat on your project, why would you go for the Ferrari?
Joe's skill of regulating between atmospheres, speaking in concepts to executives and in acronyms to modelers without losing either.
Why design-bid-build contracts limit how much a construction manager can shape what the designer delivers.
His pet peeve: 'BIM model' is like 'ATM machine,' and the sloppiness of the term reflects sloppiness about what BIM is for.
There's going to be a point in time where models become the instrument of service.
Joseph Good
Chapters
How Gilbane thinks about VDC
How a large construction manager organizes its digital practice.
The good and the bad
What works and what still frustrates him about the industry's adoption of data.
By the numbers
Construction professionals who say more than half of their project data is unusable
Joe frames VDC as a data strategy rather than a modeling department. This is the share of the industry starting from bad data.
Source: Autodesk and FMI, Harnessing the Data Advantage in Construction (2021) ↗The toolkit today
The software and hardware a VDC team actually uses today.
Hybrid roles
The hybrid roles emerging between modeling, management and the field.
Advice for a young VDC manager
What Joe would tell someone starting in VDC now.
If I can't sell the Fiat for my project, why would I go for the Ferrari?
Joseph Good
Takeaways
VDC is a data strategy, not a modeling department. The objections never change: too expensive, too complicated, I've succeeded other ways, I won't share my data.
Models will become the instrument of service. You will build straight from the model, changes will flow to the field, and there will be no drawings to argue over.
Start with the field's micro-decisions. When superintendents, field engineers and project managers use the tools on every project, staffing and software spend justify themselves.
It's a pet peeve when people say BIM model, because to me it's like ATM machine.
Joseph Good