Reflections from the Amodal webinar, with Tilbury Douglas, Laing O'Rourke, Skanska and McLaren Construction
Amodal brought together senior information management leaders from four UK tier-one contractors for a live panel discussion on the pressures reshaping document control, quality assurance and regulatory compliance across the industry. The session was chaired by Stuart Bell, CEO of Amodal.
- Kate Beard (Tilbury Douglas)
- Lorna Kimber (Laing O’Rourke)
- Liza Langford (Skanska)
- Thomas Flannery (McLaren Construction)
What follows is a summary of the key talking points and the wider evidence base behind them, together with Amodal’s view on where the industry goes next. Scroll down for the full webinar recording.
More documents. Less time. Greater risk.
The panel was set a subtitle to react to, and the consensus was that it undersells the problem rather than overstates it. Submission volumes are rising, review windows are compressing, and, as one panellist put it, the day-to-day turnaround inside document control is rarely the bottleneck. The real pressure sits upstream, in design and client review, colliding with a site programme that wants to build now.
Nobody programmes QA into the contract. Everyone has their five or ten days, but the expectation in practice is two. – Prep-call consensus across the panel
That contractual gap when assurance time exists on paper but not in the programme, was identified as the structural root of the problem: information either gets released before it has been properly checked, or checking becomes the thing that gets compressed when the programme is under pressure.
The cost of poor review
The panel used a simple escalation model to make the commercial case for catching problems early rather than downstream:
- 1 Caught at the first draft
- 10 Reaches the design manager
- 100 Built on site
The point is not the precision of the multiples rather it is that the industry consistently fixates on the visible, downstream failure (rework, programme delay, reputational damage) while undervaluing the far cheaper option of stopping the error at the first gate. That is the commercial case for moving from a 10% sample sweep to a 100% sweep of submitted information.
The wider evidence base supports the scale of the opportunity. Research commissioned from KPMG and Atkins, and cited by nima and the Information Management Initiative, estimates roughly £5–£6 of productivity gain and £7 of cost savings for every £1 invested in information management.
Building safety has raised the stakes
The panel was clear that the cost of poor information is no longer purely commercial. The Building Safety Act and golden thread requirements have added a compliance and accountability dimension that most teams are still adjusting to.
One panellist described a clear evolution in her own role: from administering a single system to overseeing several, with information managers now personally accountable for maintaining the golden thread across all of them, a change she attributes directly to the Act.
The sharper debate was over who is actually driving that change. Level 2 BIM was contractor-led; it forced contractors to evolve their own practice. The Building Safety Act, by contrast, is meant to be client-led. However the panel questioned whether that is really happening in practice, or whether contractors are still filling the gap left by clients who have not defined what compliant construction evidence they actually want.
“An HRB with no EIR and no written client information requirements at handover is not a hypothetical. So what is the contractor meant to deliver? You interpret it, deliver it, and document it yourself.”
The panel was equally clear that this is not solely a higher-risk-building issue. Building safety expectations are dragging information management best practice forward across the whole industry, including projects, such as schools and non-HRB commercial buildings, that sit outside the Act’s direct scope. The underlying shift is the same one Amodal has been tracking for some time: from proving that information exists, to proving that it can be relied upon.
The skills challenge behind the numbers
Every theme on the panel eventually returned to capacity. There is significant demand for experienced information managers and document controllers, and the panel was candid about why it is hard to recruit and retain them: the skill set has changed fundamentally, from a manual, paper-based discipline to a digitally-led one, and the industry is still mid-transition.
The panel estimated that 60–70% of an information manager’s or document controller’s day is genuinely value-adding, with the rest lost to repetitive checking and administration. Telling a talented graduate their job is mostly checking is exactly why the profession struggles with churn. There was also broad agreement that there is little formal training or qualification route out of document control, and that roles reporting into design management often lack a visible progression path.
This matches the wider industry data.
- CIOB’s 2025 skills research (2,556 responses) found combined skills gaps of 83% for modern technology, 73% for quality and 73% for safety, alongside continuing reliance on printed or 2D drawings and uneven digital maturity across the supply chain.
- NBS’s 2025 Digital Construction Report found more than two in five respondents were already using AI tools for tasks such as searching technical information, drafting and reviewing text, and analysing project data. This evidence demonstrates that the appetite for support is real, even where formal assurance processes have not yet caught up.
From controlling information to managing it
The panel’s closing statement framed the whole conversation: the profession is moving from controlling information to managing it. Controlling is manual checking and administration. Managing is assurance, governance and stakeholder engagement. That shift isn’t simply a rebrand of the job title, it’s the real evolution.
Less time on:
- Manual checking
- Administration
- Chasing information
More time on:
- Assurance
- Governance
- Stakeholder engagement, building safety, information strategy and data quality
Where this leaves the industry — and where Amodal fits
The picture the panel described matches what Amodal sees consistently across tier-one contractors, asset owners and developers: CDEs have solved storage, distribution and workflow, but they were never designed to confirm that submitted information is complete, coordinated or technically correct. That gap between ‘the workflow was followed’ and ‘the information can be relied upon’ is where risk, rework and reputational cost accumulate.
It is also why Amodal has been developing Verity, part of the endev-o platform, as an AI-assisted assurance layer that sits alongside, not in place of, the CDE. Verity checks submitted information against a project’s rule base (naming convention, title block, revision control, metadata status and suitability logic) and returns its findings directly into the CDE workflow, giving teams a prioritised, evidenced starting point rather than a blank inbox on a Monday morning.
“Verity can’t replace humans, because humans understand context and process. But if we break the assurance process into its component checks, there is a rule base we can apply consistently, and a great deal of heavy lifting a machine can do first.” – Stuart Bell, CEO, Amodal
The intent is deliberately narrow: not full automated compliance, and not a replacement for professional judgement, but a way to give document controllers, information managers and CDE administrators a prioritised, evidenced starting point. With an in-built query capability (Ask Verity), teams can interrogate project and originator performance in plain language as the evidence builds.
Amodal sees two routes organisations are already taking.
- Teams with the skills and capacity to run this themselves, plugging assurance directly into their own CDE workflow
- And organisations such as asset owners with a growing supply chain and limited in-house capacity, who need it delivered as a managed service at the contract boundary, so that information is assured before it is relied upon.
Whichever route fits, the direction of travel is the same one this panel described: clearer requirements, defined accountability, continuous assurance through the project lifecycle, and technology that supports rather than replaces the people who remain responsible for the final decision.
Watch the full webinar on demand below, or please contact us for more details about how we can help you.
Struggling with Document Assurance?
Contact us to talk to Amodal about assurance, CDE strategy or Verity Document Assurance:
Contact us here
Contact us today
Discover how Amodal can help you deliver safer, smarter, and more compliant projects and assets.