I am a UK Qualified Architect and became a professional applications developer after 10 years practice within UK construction.

I first got involved with computing in a serious way when I worked with Bob Poulter in Hong Kong in early 1990’s where we produced added value products for building modelling and document management systems throughout the Far East based, in part, on the core applications George Stevenson’s Engineering Technology was developing in the UK.

In 1993 with Engineering Technology working on building modelling applications which led into the creation of UK’s first construction portal the Building Information Warehouse, biw.co.uk in 1995 when Internet technology was in its infancy.

In 1996 I and George started developing the UK’s first web-based project extranet from first principles, evolving into the Information Channel, which became the UK’s most widely used Project Extranet.

I was also the architect for the Information Channel Standards, which reinforced the service as a Client-centric suite of knowledge based information of property assets for construction projects when BIW became a separate company in 2000,

At the start of 2002, I helped establish activeplan to complement the success of the Project Extranet, but take it onto the next dimension and develop solutions that extract data from the project documents and create an interactive Building Model using Web Technologies. A series of web applications were developed using the core Activeplan retail platform. This included Room Briefing, O&M data capture through construction process, Space Utilisation, Site issues, KPIs, Co-ordinated modelled information. We consolidated these applications into a unified suite PLACE, ROOMS, ASSET and RESOURCE marketed to Estates management for space and estate utilisation.

We have been practicing and developing Building information modelling since 1990 which the industry is now embracing as BIM.