The Report Trap: Why “We’ve Always Done It This Way” is Stalling AEC

In the world of capital delivery, there is a comfortable, centuries-old blanket we like to wrap ourselves in: The Report. We love the weight of a 400-page PDF. We love the glossy covers and the neatly formatted appendices. For decades, the industry has viewed the report as the ultimate proof of progress. But as we move further into the era of international standards like ISO 19650, we are discovering a painful truth: The Report is often where good data goes to die.

The Comfort of the Status Quo

”We’ve always done it this way” is perhaps the most expensive phrase in the AEC industry. It’s the battle cry of the traditionalist who views information management as an administrative “extra” rather than a core project risk.

In this traditional mindset, as long as a drawing exists somewhere in a massive appendix, it is considered “delivered.” But in a modern workflow, if that drawing isn’t a discrete, searchable, and metadata-tagged information container within a Common Data Environment (CDE), it is effectively invisible to the rest of the project team.

Structured Data vs. Unstructured Narratives

The frustration for many Information Managers today is the constant reliance on unstructured narratives. When we bundle 50 drawings into a single PDF report, we break the “Single Source of Truth.”

The Problem: You cannot run an automated clash detection against “Appendix B.” You cannot link a specific room’s requirements to “Page 214 of the Design Report.”
The Reality: By failing to issue information as structured data, we create a “Data Debt” that someone—usually the lead coordinator or the client—has to pay off later when they can’t find the information they need to build or operate the asset.

Moving Toward the Project Information Model (PIM)

The goal of a modern project shouldn’t be to produce the heaviest report; it should be to produce a robust Project Information Model (PIM).

The PIM is the federated suite of all information—models, drawings, schedules, and specifications—that describes the asset. For a PIM to be functional, every piece of it must be accessible. When we hide critical strategies or engineering layouts inside a report, we are essentially taking a piece of the puzzle and locking it in a drawer. We are choosing the appearance of completion over the utility of information.

The Reconciliation Friction

As Information Managers, we often use audit tools—like cross-referencing our delivery plans against live CDE data—to highlight where these gaps exist. This often causes friction.

When a dashboard shows a deliverable as “Late” because it hasn’t been uploaded as a standalone file, it is often seen as a critique of the team’s work ethic. In reality, it is a critique of the delivery method. Highlighting these gaps isn’t about making people look bad; it’s about ensuring that when the project moves to the next stage, the team has the structured data they need to actually succeed.

Breaking the Cycle

Breaking “the way we’ve always done it” requires a shift in how we value information:

Deliver Containers, Not Collections: Every drawing and strategy should be its own manageable container with its own metadata.
Focus on the Audit Trail: A report is a moment in time; structured data is a living history of the project.
Value the Metadata: The “data about the data” (who made it, what is its status, what does it relate to) is just as important as the lines on the drawing.

The transition from a document-led industry to a data-led one is messy and often confrontational. But if we want to build faster, safer, and more efficiently, we have to stop hiding our best work in the back of a PDF.

Coulter BIM Information Management