Awful acronyms and the Atkins BIM Standard

Time for celebration! The worldwide Atkins BIM and CAD communities now have a unified standard.

In the past we had the Corporate BIM Standard. Then we released our Corporate CAD Standard - yes, that feels like it was done backwards, but there were plenty of reasons at the time.

...and now they are unified and updated based on the latest industry thoughts in the snappily named "Corporate Standard for Managing Information on our CAD and BIM projects". Dale Bartlett in Oman was asking why we deliberately picked such a rubbish name - and again there were plenty of reasons.

• Why Corporate?. Because we want to emphasise that this is pan-Atkins. In the past there have been lots of local standards, so this emphasises this is driven from the top and is the only standard we should be using in the absence of client requirements. In the UK this is a big step on the road towards Level 2 BIM before 2016, but it also allows us to work more effectively when we are collaborating across the Atkins globe.
• Why not just the CAD and BIM Standard? Because then everyone who wasn't a modeller or draughtsman would assume it had nothing to do with them. There are duties for the whole team in this and we want everyone engaged (that collaborative working thing again), so we buried these acronyms at the end. All the Project Managers need to realise there are things in this they need to worry about. It is not just for the usual BIM suspects!
• Why Managing Information? Because as this subject evolves it will grow to include everything we generate. Emails, standards, asset data...... There will be further iterations of this and information rather than models or drawings will be the bit doing the expanding.
• Why not Information Management? Because IM is used by many as an acronym already and people would bring preconceptions with them if we used it. Hence Managing Information written in full.

So I agree that CSfMIooCBP is a pretty rubbish acronym. Everyone will probably just call it "The BIM standard" but perhaps we should try Dale's idea of printing some T-shirts for the team!