Employing a document controller and resourcing them with the right tools is an often overlooked element in digital information management. Ignore them at your peril, Sarah Cole declares.
“A lot of documentation seems to be created to be most convenient for the person producing it, which is not the same as it being most useful for the people who actually need to use it.” So says documentation and archive specialist Sarah Cole, who is making a name for herself among clients looking to bring order to unstructured data.
Cole has her own consultancy, Time/Image, and works for several developers and building owners/occupiers, devising filing systems for information that is being generated by construction teams on new projects, or sorting and regimenting information for existing buildings. The systems are all created in ways to make the information easily readable and searchable by non-experts.
She got into the work by chance. “My degree is in classical civilisation from the University of Nottingham, which is actually a degree in looking at a large amount of information and making sense of it.” From there, she went into developing digitised film archives and creating digital archives for several museums and heritage organisations.
“ISO 19650 is largely focused on the processes by which information is exchanged and managed, rather than the standards within those documents, the minutiae of how they’re organised, or the longer-term usability of the information produced.”
This included a stint at the British Library where she created an app called Poetic Places. The app, funded by the Creativeworks London knowledge exchange hub and made in collaboration with the Library, “would run in the background on your phone and ping up poetry about London locations as you happened to visit them”. Although a lack of funding means it’s no longer available, it was replicated by a group in Canada.
Digital archiving
Her move into the built environment came when she was approached by a software company that wanted an archive specialist. “I was brought onto a project where they had 50,000 documents going back to 1988. They wanted to create a searchable digital archive that could be used for legacy documents as well as a large upcoming refurbishment project.
“Even though I didn’t have a technical background in the industry, I was familiar with the terminology because my dad’s a building services consultant, and as a child I’d help him assemble all these papers scattered over the lounge floor into lever arch file O&Ms. That was in the 90s and early 2000s,” she explains.
Cole says she was surprised that the standard format for digital O&Ms was essentially the paper one. “It struck me that it wasn’t a very efficient way of managing data in a digital environment.”
She says that, unlike the heritage sector, she was also surprised to find there is no standard for naming and classifying documents in construction. “I know there’s the ISO for BIM, but I wasn’t seeing a standard for documentation formats – not one that’s adhered to by everybody, certainly.”
She gives an example: “On a big construction project, there may be a contractor who does the floor finishes, another one does the stone and ceramics, and another contractor for the WC fitout.
“Often the information is structured by trade and subsections. So, if somebody breaks a tile on the floor in the toilet, where do you go to look for the replacement information out of those three O&M sections? That means you must have the technical knowledge to know where to search for information. If you’re a facilities person, you don’t necessarily have that background.”
ISO 19650 to the rescue?
Sarah Cole’s top tips for document management
Take documentation seriously. It’s often overlooked, but it can cost money as many projects can’t get signed off until it’s all in place.
Choose short file names. Develop or borrow somebody else’s, but set yourself a standard file name structure that is as short as possible while still conveying critical information.
Introduce document registers. I’m a big fan of document registers. For the uninitiated that entails compiling a list of all the documents in a particular section of your CDE and what they are, a bit like a large contents page but usually in a spreadsheet-style format. Ideally you want to include metadata, such as the date the document was created, the contractor that produced it, the system(s) it relates to, the levels/sites it refers to, the project it was part of etc, for true searchability.
Employ a document controller and give them proper resources. That’s very important, because if you don’t have someone who’s in charge of managing and controlling data properly, it simply doesn’t happen. Give the document controller some useful resources too. I’ve seen some people who have had to manage documents in their inbox and it’s a nightmare. It’s essential to invest in some specialised document control software. If you don’t, it just costs time and money later.
Bring document controllers into projects early. That allows them the opportunity to provide guidance on what is required. But don’t confuse their role with that of engineering consultants, or the technical writers producing the O&M content. Those are different things.
I can read most of the drawings that I look at, but you shouldn’t expect document controllers to be able to understand all the documents they handle, and they shouldn’t be expected to act as quality control for them.
Back up your data. Never ever let the only copy of your documentation be housed on a third-party cloud platform, because if they go out of business or simply close your account, it’ll be lost. Arrange to have regular downloads onto local (ideally physical) drives stored somewhere, preferably in another location in case of emergency.
But with the ISO 19650, aren’t some of those issues sorted out? The answer from Cole is an unequivocal ‘no’.
“ISO 19650 is largely focused on the processes by which information is exchanged and managed, rather than the standards within those documents, the minutiae of how they’re organised, or the longer-term usability of the information produced.
“COBie provides a very comprehensive and digitally-smart specification, but it’s very much associated with BIM and that’s not necessarily the best approach for an organisation that isn’t actually modelling their buildings,” she says.
“One of my clients is based in an older building, and hasn’t comprehensively modelled it; the specification I’ve developed for them could be described as very COBie-like in its structure, but it’s tailored to the context of their CDE and isn’t cluttered with information they simply don’t need day-to-day.
“Both ISO 19650 and COBie can certainly be used to produce very good documentation, but both require comprehensive resourcing, specifically trained individuals to oversee their implementation, and commitment to stick with them throughout a project life cycle and beyond."
Legacy documentation
Cole adds: “My focus is often on transforming ‘legacy’ documentation into usable databases for clients. I do work with current projects and find I’m just not seeing these data standards fully implemented.
“I’ve seen very strong attempts to follow ISO 19650 (even in largely model-less situations) and its recommendations for file naming [or ‘Information Container Identification’], and they have been effective for capturing most of the important elements. But I’ve still ended up with patches of missing items and mediocre content, especially toward the end of projects.
“On smaller projects – like replacing a pump set, or internal projects – you’re less likely to see these standards adhered to at all due to lack of resources, or the fact that ISO 19650 may not totally align with internal workflows.”
Invest in document management
Cole believes the problems often boil down to organisations not investing enough in their documentation managers and controllers – if they have them at all. Or not giving them the authority or oversight they need to reach a usefully high standard of documentation.
“No standard is effective if nobody is invested in maintaining it,” she says. “Organisations often don’t see the true value in their building documentation until its absence or unreliability becomes a problem. That might be during an onsite emergency, or when they suddenly discover they don’t have a fire strategy after all, or when they come to undertake critical works and find they need to have the whole building surveyed because they’ve lost the relevant drawings.”
The need for organisations like housing associations and fire authorities to be able to put their hands quickly on information in the wake of post-Grenfell regulation only serves to underscore this sentiment.
Cole devises her own filing protocol that can be used by those with no previous knowledge of the project. This might involve, for example, putting all drawings in one folder and attaching meta data to them, and then introducing an easy-to-use tagging system. “Uniclass is fine – except most human beings can’t read it,” she says.
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