Who owns your BIM data—and who controls it?

Who Owns Your Data—and Who Controls It?

Imagine owning a car that you can’t service yourself. Worse, you can’t even choose the garage. Your dealer is the only one allowed to update your car’s software. It’s your car—you paid for it—but control? That lies elsewhere.

Now take your iPhone. Replace the battery yourself or through a third party, and you’re met with ominous warnings: “Unknown part detected.” Your phone works—but not like it should. Again: it’s yours, but someone else is deciding how it behaves.

We accept these compromises with our devices. Maybe reluctantly. But they raise a deeper question, especially when we move beyond consumer tech: what happens when this same loss of control applies to your critical business data—like BIM data?

You Own It. But Can You Control It?

In most jurisdictions, the answer is clear: if you paid for the work, and if no other contractual terms override it, you own your BIM data. Copyright law protects that ownership. But ownership is not the same as control.

If your data is stored in a proprietary file format, you’re often locked into using one specific software tool to access or edit it. In the short term—say, during design coordination or rapid design iterations—this might seem like a reasonable trade-off. Teams are moving fast, tools are integrated, and everyone’s working in sync.

But long-term? That’s where the problems start.

When Lock-In Becomes a Liability

Let’s look at a few real examples where data control went wrong:

1. The Airport That Couldn’t Read Its Own Data

   A major European airport built an extension using a proprietary BIM format. When the building was handed over, the facility management team discovered they couldn’t open the models. Their CAFM system didn’t support the native design software format. They faced a choice: buy and train up on a full suite of design software—or pay the original contractor to deliver the data in a usable form. Both were costly and time-consuming.

2. The Public Hospital with a “Digital Dead End”

   A new hospital was designed and built with full BIM. During construction, the contractor used a closed CDE system. After handover, the public client wanted to integrate BIM data with their maintenance and asset management system. The structured data wasn’t accessible—locked behind an expiring license to a cloud platform they didn’t own. The digital twin was functionally useless within a year.

3. The Renovation That Started From Scratch

   A housing association planned to renovate thousands of units across multiple sites. They expected to use existing BIM data from earlier projects. But the data wasn’t reusable—it was trapped in outdated proprietary formats, dependent on licenses that had long expired. Instead of building on what they had, they had to re-survey and re-model everything.

The Strategic Case for Data Control

These aren’t just technical glitches—they’re strategic failures. When organizations cannot access or use their own data, they lose:

• Operational efficiency: Extra time and cost to re-do work.

• Knowledge continuity: Institutional memory lost between projects or teams.

• Vendor independence: Forced reliance on a specific tool, vendor, or consultant.

• Innovation potential: Limited ability to analyze or connect data over time.

What Can Be Done?

1. Choose open standards: They are designed to be vendor-neutral and interoperable. Forever.

2. Define data deliverables clearly: Contracts should include specifications for open-format data handover.

3. Plan for long-term use cases: Think beyond design and construction. How will this data be used in 5, 10, or 30 years?

4. Audit your dependencies: If your BIM workflows rely entirely on proprietary tools, ask: what would it cost to migrate?

Ownership Without Control Is a Risk

If it’s your data, you should be able to open it, use it, reuse it, and connect it to whatever systems you choose—now and in the future. Just like a car or a phone, your BIM data should work for you, not the other way around.

Because in the end, control is strategy. And if you don’t control your data, you don’t control your business.