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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.
Auditors test a building's record against the building itself. My name is Dr Sepehr Abrishami, and digital twins, which aim to keep a record matching its building, are one subject of my research, alongside building information modelling, or BIM. My subject on Reimagining AEC is information about buildings once they are in use, the period the standards call the operational phase.
Consider an audit at a company that owns three office buildings. On the day each building was handed over, its asset information model described it accurately. That model, the AIM, is the owner's set of structured and unstructured information about an asset in use. Since handover, a contractor has carried out the annual inspection of each roof. Lightning has struck one of those roofs, and a specialist has repaired the damage. The company has also bought a fourth building from another owner. Now an auditor asks to see the record for the damaged roof, and to be shown that it matches the roof itself. Every one of those events changed a building. If nothing changed the AIM along with it, the auditor is reading the description of a roof that has gone. The company is a teaching device of mine. Its roof inspection, lightning strike and purchase follow examples in the UK guidance, and the audit is my own addition.
The question I want to answer is how the owner of an asset in use makes sure that, whenever something happens to the asset, the information about it is captured, checked and kept up to date. The answer comes from ISO 19650-3, the international standard for information management in the operational phase. It also comes from Guidance Part 3 of the UK BIM Framework, written by David Churcher and published in September 2020. In May 2025, nima, formerly the UK BIM Alliance, announced that the UK BIM Framework had been renamed the IMI Framework, after the Information Management Initiative.
Working through the answer should leave you able to place ISO 19650-3 in the life of an asset, link it to asset management and read it against ISO 19650-2. It should also equip you to explain trigger events and the routes they open, and to describe how requirements are arranged and how the AIM is kept current. I will take the answer in four parts: where the standard sits, what it shares with ISO 19650-2, how events drive the process, and how requirements lead back to the AIM.
The first part places the standard in time. The operational phase had a UK specification before it had an international one. PAS 1192-3, a Publicly Available Specification from the British Standards Institution, or BSI, appeared in 2014, and many asset owners and operators built their practice around it. BSI withdrew it in August 2020, so I treat it here as history only. ISO 19650-3 was published in July 2020, and the guidance assures owners that all the key principles of the PAS were brought forward into it. Guidance Part 3 followed two months later, and it says plainly that its detail is limited, because the standard had only just been published.
The standard is now under revision. nima announced UK consultations on revised drafts in 2026, first for Parts 1 and 2 in March, then for Part 3 in May, with comments on Part 3 due in July. ISO's own catalogue now lists the draft second edition of Part 2 as the future replacement for both ISO 19650-2 of 2018 and ISO 19650-3 of 2020. The draft of Part 3 carries a new title, Implementation of the information management process. Neither draft is published. ISO 19650-3 of 2020 is the edition in force, and it is the one I work from.
The scope of ISO 19650-3 is the operational phase, the period when an asset is in use. It also applies when an asset must still be managed while nobody uses it, a mothballed building for example. Its primary users are asset managers and facilities managers, with the teams and contractors who work for them. Capital project teams gain from it too, because it explains why they are asked to produce operational information. In June 2025, nima reported that the IMI Framework was being extended to cover operation, starting with facilities managers.
The standard is written as a specification, so each requirement uses the word shall, and it says very little about how to meet those requirements. That gap is what the guidance fills. It is also voluntary, and by itself it obliges nobody. For the company with the office buildings, the obligation would have to be created. It could cite ISO 19650-3 in its contracts with external contractors, or adopt it as policy for the internal departments that act as owner and as works teams. Either way, the guidance expects the process to be applied in proportion to the owner, the assets and the work in hand.
ISO 19650-3 also describes where information management sits, as layers nested one inside the next. The outermost layer is the management of the whole organisation, and the standard's example there is quality management. Inside it sits asset and project management, with the ISO 55000 family as the standard's example for assets and ISO 21500 for projects. Inside that sits information management, where the ISO 19650 series applies. At the centre are two information models, the project information model, or PIM, in the delivery phase, and the AIM in operation. The ISO 55000 family has since been revised. ISO 55000 of 2024 sets out the vocabulary, overview and principles, and ISO 55001 of 2024 states the requirements for an asset management system. ISO 21500 now stands in its 2021 edition.
ISO 19650-3 then follows the two models through time, at four moments. When a project starts, relevant information passes from the AIM into the PIM, so the design team does not begin from nothing. At handover, operation starts and the flow reverses, with relevant information passing from the PIM into the AIM. After handover comes a post-occupancy evaluation or performance review, which tests whether the asset works as intended. Then the operational phase continues through trigger events, each one a reason for new or updated information. A note in the standard adds that information can also pass between the two models during delivery, not only when a project starts and at handover.
Each of the company's buildings has an AIM, and any refurbishment project would draw from it and return to it. Handover itself, and the code of practice that supports it, BS 8536 of 2022, belong to the episode on Government Soft Landings. So the first part resolves on one point. Information management under ISO 19650-3 serves the owner's asset management, with the AIM at its core.
The second part asks how much of this you already know. If you have studied ISO 19650-2, the standard for the delivery phase, much of Part 3 will feel familiar, because it inherits all the terms and definitions of Parts 1 and 2. The appointing party is still the organisation that receives information and makes the appointments, here the asset owner or operator. The lead appointed party still leads a delivery team, and each appointed party within it still provides information. The BIM execution plan, or BEP, explains how a delivery team will manage information. The master information delivery plan, or MIDP, brings together the task information delivery plans, or TIDPs, in which each task team schedules its information and its delivery dates.
The process keeps its eight steps, all in clause five. Step 1 is high-level preparation by the owner. Steps 2 and 3 select a lead appointed party. Steps 4 and 5 formalise the appointment and mobilise the team. Steps 6 and 7 produce and accept information, and step 8 closes one pass. Steps 1 and 8 happen once for each asset, although step 1 is revisited as the owner's strategy changes. Steps 2 to 7 repeat for every appointment.
The guidance then measures the overlap. Of the 46 requirements clauses in ISO 19650-3, 35 have the same intent as clauses in ISO 19650-2, and 29 of those are also worded very similarly. That is about three quarters of the text. The other eleven clauses have no equivalent in Part 2, and they describe the work of an owner rather than of a project. Three principles lie behind them.
The first is that the owner prepares before any appointment. In step 1 it sets its organisational and asset information requirements, and decides which assets and which foreseeable trigger events it will manage. It establishes the AIM and the processes to maintain it, and links the AIM to its enterprise systems, the wider systems the organisation runs its business on. The second principle is a decision at the opening of step 2, where the owner settles how the information for an event will be provided. That decision is where the routes through the process begin. The third is new behaviour at the close. A delivery team may have to stay ready for an event that has not yet happened, and every pass ends by adding to the AIM rather than by archiving a project.
Beyond those eleven clauses, the guidance names four differences that carry the operational logic: trigger events, several pathways through the process, loops that reflect a long-term interest in the asset, and exchange information requirements issued for each appointment. The third part takes the first three of them, and the fourth part takes the last.
The third part is where the operational phase differs most from delivery. The first difference is the trigger event, and the guidance defines it in one sentence. Trigger events are the occurrences during the life of an asset that cause new or updated information to be required. The guidance adds that they provide the overall tempo for the information management process in the same way that plan of work stages do during a project. So, where the Royal Institute of British Architects, or RIBA, Plan of Work 2020 paces a project, trigger events pace operation. The idea came across from PAS 1192-3. Some trigger events are foreseeable, such as regular maintenance or inspections, and can be scheduled. Others are so random or rare that planning for them is impractical, and the guidance's example is a lightning strike. Even so, the plans an owner makes for foreseeable events can help when the unexpected arrives. For the company, the annual roof inspection is foreseeable. The lightning strike was not.
The second difference is that the process has more than one route. At a decision point the standard labels H, the owner settles how the information for an event will be provided. The answer selects one of three pathways, labelled B, C and D. Think of them as three parallel routes that leave decision H and meet again at step 8.
Pathway B is for foreseeable events. The appointment is made in advance, so steps 2 to 5, from the invitation to tender through to mobilisation, run before the event happens. The delivery team then waits, mobilised and ready, until the event starts production at steps 6 and 7. That waiting is a requirement of its own, clause five point five point four, which asks for resources to be kept in readiness for a trigger event. The company's roofing contractor, appointed for the annual inspection, follows pathway B. Pathway C is for events that are simply responded to when they happen, and it also carries delivery phase work under ISO 19650-2. Here the appointment follows the event. After the lightning strike, the company appoints a specialist and runs steps 2 to 7 in full. Pathway D is acquisition. When the company buys its fourth building, that building's information arrives from the previous owner and goes straight to acceptance at step 7.
All three pathways reach step 8, aggregation into the AIM, and two further decisions follow. At decision K, the owner asks whether the appointment continues. If it does, a pathway B contractor goes back to waiting for the next trigger event, and a pathway C contractor moves on to its next delivery milestone. At decision L, the owner asks whether it still has responsibility for the asset. If it does, the process returns to step 1, where requirements can be reviewed. The process ends only when the answer is no.
This is the third difference, the long-term perspective. ISO 19650-2 is a single run from beginning to end, and its output is a project information model. ISO 19650-3 keeps cycling for as long as the owner is responsible for the asset. Each contractor that responds to an event starts with an AIM that helps it plan the work. If the roofing contractor's appointment continues, it waits for next year's inspection. So the third part comes down to this. Trigger events set the tempo, the way information will be provided selects pathway B, C or D, and the loops keep the process running for as long as the asset is held.
The fourth part turns to the last difference, information requirements, and it brings us back to the AIM. ISO 19650-1, published in 2018, set out a hierarchy in which asset information requirements, or AIR, would be used in operational appointments, and exchange information requirements, or EIR, in delivery appointments. While Part 3 was being written, its authors realised that EIR could serve operational appointments as well.
The result is three levels. Organisational information requirements, or OIR, are set once for the whole organisation, and they can reach beyond asset management. AIR are set for each asset, which makes them more generic than EIR, and they are still derived from the OIR. EIR are issued to a lead appointed party for each appointment, and they specify the asset information needed in response to trigger events. To keep them distinct from the delivery phase version, the standard names them EIR ISO 19650-3. For the company, one set of OIR would yield AIR for each building, and the roof inspection and the lightning repair would each get their own EIR. Writing these requirements is the subject of the episode on information requirements.
That leaves the AIM itself, the owner's information model for the asset in use, and five clauses keep it accurate. They fall at the two ends of the process. Three belong to step 1. The owner links the AIM to its enterprise systems, establishes the AIM itself, and sets up the processes that will maintain it. The UK BIM Framework's process map of ISO 19650-3, published in 2021, marks step 1 as work to complete before any appointment is even considered. Between the two ends, production and review use the common data environment, or CDE, workflow, which has an episode of its own. Information is produced to an agreed level of information need, a framework now defined in ISO 7817-1 of 2024. The information from each delivery team is then federated, which means brought together, to build the AIM. The remaining two clauses close each pass at step 8. The owner aggregates each accepted information model into the AIM, then reviews the AIM and continues its maintenance, so that it keeps representing the state and condition of the asset.
Now return to the auditor. The inspection, the repair and the purchase were each met by one of the three pathways. If the specialist's repair information was checked at acceptance, aggregated into the AIM at step 8 and followed by a review, the AIM shows the repaired roof as it now stands. Had that pass stopped short of step 8, the gap would sit exactly where the auditor is looking.
That brings me to the close, and back to the opening question of how an owner keeps information about an asset in use captured, checked and up to date. Under ISO 19650-3, every event is met by one of three pathways, set up before it or after it. The owner checks what comes back at acceptance, and every pass ends by aggregating the accepted information into the AIM and reviewing it.
Treat ISO 19650-3 of 2020 as the standard in force, read PAS 1192-3 as history, and watch for the revised parts of ISO 19650 as they are published. Start from what you know of ISO 19650-2, since about three quarters of the text reads across, and spend your effort on the eleven clauses that do not. For each event, or each class of events you can foresee, settle how its information will be provided, ahead of time wherever you can, because that choice decides between pathways B, C and D. And set requirements level by level, with OIR shaping AIR for each asset and EIR for each appointment, so that every pass has something precise to return to the AIM.
For reading, start with Guidance Part 3, now among the IMI Framework's archived documents, and the framework's process map of ISO 19650-3. Both are free to download from its website. The episodes on parties, teams and processes in the delivery phase, on the common data environment and on Government Soft Landings deal with the subjects closest to this one.
Check a building you manage, survey or study against the last event someone recorded in its model, because buildings spend most of their lives in use. It is Dr Sepehr Abrishami speaking, and that check is the one Reimagining AEC would put to every owner.