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Reimagining AEC is Dr Sepehr Abrishami's independent podcast on how the built environment handles information. Each episode takes one subject from digital construction, from the ISO 19650 series and the common data environment to the golden thread, soft landings and the arrival of artificial intelligence in design and surveying practice, and tells it as a single argument built on the published standards, guidance and evidence. Sepehr is a researcher and former architect who leads the Centre for AI in Construction and teaches building information modelling at master's level. The episodes are written for postgraduate students and practitioners who want the reasoning behind the rules, not a summary of them.
Every piece of project information needs someone who answers for it. I lead the Centre for AI in Construction, where AI stands for artificial intelligence, and my name is Dr Sepehr Abrishami. An AI system is only as dependable as the information it is given, and somebody has to check that information. So the subject of this Reimagining AEC episode is who does that checking, and the rest of information management, under ISO 19650-2, the international standard for managing information on projects using building information modelling, or BIM.
Here is a decision with no comfortable answer. A client has appointed three organisations directly: an architect, a main contractor and a project manager of its own. At each information delivery milestone, somebody has to review the information model that arrives and decide, on the client's behalf, whether to accept it. The client does not have the people to carry out that review. The architect does, and handing the job across looks sensible. The difficulty is that the architect produces a large share of the information it would be judging. If the client delegates, it asks one organisation to assess work it helped to write. If it keeps the job, it takes on a task it has nobody to do.
The question, then, is who does the information management on a project with one client, an architect, a main contractor and a client's project manager, and how the work is shared between them. The four organisations come from the worked example in Guidance Part A of the UK BIM Framework, The information management function and resources, edition 2, published in February 2021. The delegation itself appears in the same guidance on a project it calls project X, but setting it inside this example and giving the client a shortage of people are my additions, made for teaching.
By the end you should be able to explain what ISO 19650-2 means by the information management function, say who leads each group of activities and what each lead appointed party must prepare, turn a clause into tasks for named people, and judge when part of the function can be handed on. We move in four steps: what the function is, how it divides between the parties, how a clause becomes a task for a competent person, and finally delegation and conflicts of interest, where the client's decision gets its answer.
Start with the definition, because everything else rests on it. The guidance defines information management, at its simplest, as the management and execution of tasks relating to the definition of information requirements, and to the production, checking and delivery of information. Two consequences follow. Everyone in the project team takes part to some degree, from the client who sets the requirements to the task team that produces a schedule. The definition also covers all information. The ISO 19650 series calls that whole body of information the information model, and it can hold any combination of geometrical models, alphanumerical information such as properties and attributes, and documentation. On our project, the project manager's programme, the minutes of a project meeting and a contract administration certificate all belong to the information model, alongside the architect's geometrical model. None of this is new. Information management has existed in some form since information was produced by hand. What has changed is the cost of doing it badly.
The case for doing it well rests on one sentence in the guidance. Outcomes are determined by decisions, and decisions are based on information. The six outcomes the guidance attributes to good information management fall into two groups. Some concern the information itself, which becomes better coordinated, better in quality and timely. The rest concern what the project gains, such as less rework and waste and a more accurate audit trail. So the guidance asks industry to treat information as an asset as much as the physical asset, and to give its management the same importance as design, project and asset management. Digital working raises the stakes, because technology depends on consistent, structured information, and poorly managed digital information may carry greater risk than its paper predecessor, through inappropriate access, inappropriate distribution or a security breach. Those risks are the subject of ISO 19650-5 of 2020, the security-minded approach to information management.
The next issue is who does the work, and here the standard made a deliberate change. Some listeners will know Publicly Available Specification 1192-2 of 2013, known as PAS 1192-2, which the ISO 19650 series has superseded, so treat it as history. It attached information management responsibilities to named roles, such as the project information manager. ISO 19650-2 speaks instead of an information management function, which the guidance describes as the collective responsibility and authority for the information management process. Clause five point one point one covers the appointing party, meaning the client, assigning the function across the whole project. Clause five point three point one covers the same step for each lead appointed party, meaning each organisation the client appoints directly, within its own appointment.
Timing matters. The client should assign its function before it engages any lead appointed party, and every party's first step is to understand the context, purpose and scope of its own function. The intention is that the function is embedded in existing roles. The guidance names one risk. People who take on these tasks on top of their usual work may treat them as secondary when busy, and that risk has to be managed. On currency, ISO 19650-2 of 2018 remains the edition in force, although revised drafts of Parts 1 and 2 went to UK public comment in spring 2026. So the first part of the answer is in place. Information management on our project is a function, held collectively, and the client assigns it before anyone else arrives.
The second step asks how that function divides between organisations. Every clause of ISO 19650-2 describes an activity, and every activity has to be assigned to somebody. The guidance maps every activity to a party, and the simplest way to hold that map in mind is to walk the process in order and ask of each stage who leads it and how often it happens.
The process begins and ends with the client. The appointing party leads assessment and need, clause five point one, once for the whole project, then issues an invitation to tender, clause five point two, once for each lead appointed party. Leadership then passes to each lead appointed party, which leads its tender response, appointment and mobilisation, clauses five point three to five point five, once per appointment. Within each appointment, the appointed parties, which each lead appointed party appoints in turn, lead collaborative production and delivery of the information model, clauses five point six and five point seven. Finally the client closes the project out under clause five point eight, once per project. The guidance's point is that most activities sit at appointment level, so they repeat for every appointment.
A few sub-clauses depart from that pattern. Task teams assess their own capability and capacity under clause five point three point three, and prepare their own task information delivery plans under clause five point four point four. The lead appointed party reviews and authorises the information model under clauses five point six point five and five point seven point two. The appointing party reviews and accepts the information model under clause five point seven point four. Keep that last one in mind, because it is the activity our client is thinking of handing to the architect.
Now apply the map to the running example. A lead appointed party, sometimes called tier one, is any organisation with a direct appointment from the appointing party, and even small projects have several during design. The architect has in-house expertise across architecture, interior design and landscape architecture, so its delivery team is made up of internal task teams. The main contractor is a management contractor that appoints an external supply chain for engineering design and build services. The client's project manager runs the tender process, the strategic programme, progress trackers and stage reports, and is the only organisation in its own delivery team. Picture one client with three lines of appointment running from it. Beneath the architect sits a layer of internal task teams, beneath the contractor a layer of external firms, and the project manager's line ends at the project manager itself. Each of the three holds an information management function at appointment level, on behalf of its own delivery team. For the project manager the function is proportionally simpler, but it does not disappear.
What each must produce divides by timing. With its tender response, under clause five point three, a lead appointed party submits what it proposes and evidence that it can deliver: a pre-appointment BIM execution plan, or BEP, which the guidance calls essentially a method statement for information delivery, a summary of capability and capacity, a mobilisation plan and a risk register. On appointment, under clause five point four, it confirms and details the plan: the confirmed BEP, a detailed responsibility matrix, its own exchange information requirements, or EIR, which set out what it needs from its appointed parties, and a master information delivery plan, or MIDP, which brings together the task information delivery plans of every task team.
The architect and the main contractor prepare everything. The project manager prepares everything except its own exchange information requirements, because it appoints nobody, and its MIDP is in effect a single task information delivery plan, less detailed than the others. Notice that the guidance speaks of resources rather than documents. A resource need not exist as a document. Its content can be referenced through a system or combined with other project content, and what counts is that the content exists. Combining content needs care, so that nothing is wrongly promoted into the contractual appointment documents, or wrongly demoted out of them.
Three lead appointed parties create a problem for the client. It will receive three BEPs and three MIDPs, possibly in different structures and formats, and has to review them all. The guidance starts from one principle, which is that consistency is driven by what the client issues: the project's information standard, its information production methods and procedures, and the EIR each lead appointed party receives. Where parties work very closely, as client-appointed design consultants do, the authors of each BEP should talk during information planning, through the project's common data environment, or CDE. The client could also issue templates as shared resources, but that is a trade-off, because lead appointed parties may have templates already approved in their quality management systems, and where scopes differ as much as an architect's and a project manager's, one template may not fit. An error in a shared resource is copied by everyone who uses it, so shared resources should be tested during mobilisation. That settles the division between organisations. The harder work starts inside each one.
Assigning an activity to an organisation is only half the job. Someone inside it has to carry the activity out, and someone has to answer for it. The tool is a RACI matrix, where RACI stands for responsible, accountable, consulted and informed, and the route from clause to person runs through four steps, each adding detail. First, Annex A of ISO 19650-2, noted in clause five point one point one, gives an information management assignment matrix that summarises the clause activities in RACI form and helps an appointing party form a scope of services. That is not detailed enough, because some activities hold many tasks. Generating information can mean models, drawings, schedules, clash detection, programme simulations and COBie, the Construction Operations Building information exchange. So, second, the UK BIM Framework produced an information management assignment matrix tool that expands each clause into tasks. In that tool, accountability is fixed by the shall clauses of ISO 19650-2, while responsible, consulted and informed can be adapted. Third, any party may build a more detailed matrix for its own team, although ISO 19650 does not require it. The fourth step is the result, a named individual holding one of the four letters for each task. One exception applies. Tasks under clause five point six point two, generate information, are assigned through the responsibility matrices and the information delivery plans instead.
The guidance shows the result for a main contractor, the same kind of party as ours, in an expanded matrix for clause five point four, appointment. The full matrix covers ten of the contractor's roles, among them a bid manager, a planner and a BIM specialist, alongside the client, the client's third party and the supply chain. Four of its tasks show the pattern. Confirming who will undertake the information management function falls to the BIM specialist, accountable and responsible, with the bid, design and project managers and the task teams consulted. Establishing the level of information need belongs to the design manager as accountable and responsible, with the BIM specialist also responsible. Today that task follows ISO 7817-1 of 2024, which replaced BS EN 17412-1 of 2020. Baselining the deliverables and dates in the master information delivery plan belongs to the planner. Telling the client about risks to the delivery milestones belongs to the project manager, with the client informed.
The BIM specialist is accountable for only one of those four tasks. The others sit with a design manager, a planner and a project manager, people whose jobs exist anyway. That is the embedded function in practice. The guidance accepts that scheduling tasks this way takes effort, but argues that it pays off, because people understand their own input, dependence on the BIM or digital specialist falls, and capability grows inside existing roles.
A task assignment works only if the person can carry it out, so the guidance asks that competencies be considered across the task team and the most appropriate individual selected for each activity. Technical competence rests on experience of comparable projects and knowledge of the relevant standards. Non-technical competence concerns behaviour. Resilience comes first, because the work involves encouraging people to change how they work, and the guidance calls good communication and teamwork vital. If the planner or the design manager at our main contractor lacks a competency, the guidance prefers upskilling, for self-delivery and continuous improvement. When upskilling is not enough, a party can hand part of its function to someone else.
That brings us back to the client's decision. Under clause five point one point one, the appointing party can delegate responsibility for all or part of its information management function to a prospective lead appointed party or a third party. Under clause five point three point one, a prospective lead appointed party has the same option with a prospective appointed party or a third party. The usual reason is a lack of capability or capacity for specific tasks, which is our client's position exactly. The rule in every case is that responsibility can move while accountability stays where the standard puts it. The accountable organisation is ultimately answerable for the activity, with yes or no authority and a power of veto, and only one organisation can be accountable for an activity. The responsible organisation completes the activity or task delegated to it.
Reviewing and accepting the information model, you will recall, is the client's own activity under clause five point seven point four. If the client asks the architect to carry it out, the architect becomes responsible for the review, and the client remains accountable for the acceptance, with the final yes or no still its own. Delegation solves the shortage of people. It does nothing about the conflict that made the decision awkward, and for that the guidance offers a safeguard it calls probity.
The guidance takes its definition of probity from a dictionary, as strong moral principles, honesty and decency, and in practical terms it means identifying and managing potential conflicts of interest. ISO 19650-2 names probity arrangements under clause five point three point one, for the lead appointed party, but not under clause five point one point one, for the appointing party, and the guidance points out that they may apply to either. Its project X is the arrangement our client is weighing. The architect reviews and accepts the information model for the appointing party while also producing information, so it would be reporting on its own compliance. To avoid the conflict, different individuals within the architect's organisation may need to carry out the two functions, keeping honesty and decency between them. So the client can delegate the review to the architect, provided it keeps the accountability and the architect separates the people who produce the information from the people who review it.
The client's other route is to engage a third party. As with any delegation, whoever appoints the third party keeps the accountability. The guidance treats the third party as effectively a lead appointed party, yet it does not submit the tender resources described earlier, because it acts on behalf of another party rather than as a provider of information. A tender can ask it to show how it will handle conflicts of interest, through membership of a professional body, or a statement, organisation structure or plan. Whoever makes the appointment then has two duties. The first is to tell the third party enough about the project and the team to price a complete proposal, such as the procurement route and the other parties' capabilities. A lead appointed party making such an appointment must also pass on the appointing party's exchange information requirements and the project's information standard. The second duty is the one most easily missed. Map what every party will do before writing the third party's scope, so the function has no gaps, and then ask for fees against tasks.
Let me draw this together. On a project with one client, an architect, a main contractor and a client's project manager, the ISO 19650-2 answer is that every party does information management, through a function embedded in existing roles rather than a single job title. The client assigns it across the project under clause five point one point one before appointing anyone, and each lead appointed party nominates its people under clause five point three point one. Each prepares its own BIM execution plan and master information delivery plan, the project manager's the lightest of the three. Inside each organisation, a RACI matrix turns clauses into tasks for planners, design managers, project managers and BIM specialists with the right competencies. Where the architect reviews information for the client, the client stays accountable and probity keeps the two roles apart.
Three points are worth carrying into your work. Settle who is accountable for each activity before deciding who will do it. Judge a delivery team's resources by their content, since a BEP or an MIDP need not be a stand-alone document to do its job. Whenever responsibility is delegated, record who keeps the accountability and how any conflict of interest will be managed.
For reading, start with Guidance Part A of the UK BIM Framework, which nima, formerly the UK BIM Alliance, now maintains with the British Standards Institution, and read it alongside ISO 19650-2 and its Annex A. The episode on the information management assignment matrix takes the RACI tool further, and the episode on information delivery planning picks up the MIDP and the task information delivery plans.
Ask me, Dr Sepehr Abrishami, where to begin in an organisation you work for or study, and I would point to any activity with no name beside it, which is the gap this episode of Reimagining AEC has been about.