A poll of building owners by a software firm has shown that the ability to effectively manage building information remains an obstacle to compliance with the Building Safety Act (BSA).
Seven out of 10 building owners have found challenges with managing building information across disparate systems and formats, making it difficult to achieve the unified “golden thread” that the new legislation demands.
The Building Safety Act 2022 mandates the effective digitisation of building information. Only 27% of building owners said that their asset information was properly digitised and managed to ensure compliance with the BSA.
The survey of 35 building owners in the UK, by software supplier Zutec, confirms the challenges faced in regulatory compliance and managing digital building information.
While progress varies, most respondents (87%) report being some way into their digital journey. For 37%, the roll-out is under way (37%), 17% are in the early planning stages and 30% are described as being just at the start of their digital journey. Just 17% are already implementing systems to establish a single source of data.
Managing building information across fragmented systems and formats remains a significant barrier for 70%, as organisations often rely on tools like SharePoint or Dropbox, which are not optimised for unified data management or compliance needs.
This issue is further compounded by the high volume of legacy data in various formats, such as paper, Excel and PDF, which are not meta-tagged to support searchability. As a result, 55% of respondents struggle to locate information, 27% find it difficult to update, and another 27% report challenges in accessing and sharing it. The survey showed that digitising existing building information – including paper-based documentation (30%) and managing more comprehensive regulatory requirements such as the creation of safety cases (30%) – presented organisations with some of their biggest challenges.
When asked whether asset information was properly digitised and managed within their organisations to comply with the Building Safety Act, only 27% said ‘yes’. Those who said ‘somewhat’ or ‘no’ indicated that having a centralised platform with a single dashboard for managing building information would improve their capabilities.
