Fifteen years on both sides
of the same problem.

I started as an architect. Not a BIM specialist: an architect who ran a design-build practice in Mexico for six years. Residential and commercial projects from first sketch through construction administration. Client pressure, site supervision, production deadlines. The full cycle.

The problems I had then are the same ones I see in small AEC firms now. Models that break at deadline. Drawings with errors nobody caught until the client did. Teams spending hours troubleshooting issues that shouldn't exist.

I assumed it was a skill problem, something to practice through, tools to master better.

It wasn't. It was structural.

The template underneath every project was making the same mistakes on repeat. A project browser organised by nobody, for no clear purpose. View templates that drifted after the first override. Naming conventions that meant something to one person and nothing to the next. Phases configured incorrectly in week one, impossible to correct cleanly at deadline.

These aren't random failures. They're predictable ones. And they have a specific cause: the structural configuration decisions that most templates either skip or get wrong.

In 2017, I joined one of Canada's largest design firms as an Architectural Technologist. Over the next eight years I moved from that entry point to BIM Director for West and Central Canada.

The work was the same problem at different scale: building the structural foundation that prevents errors before they happen. ISO 19650-aligned information frameworks. Revit template and family library standards. Autodesk Construction Cloud implementation across multi-discipline teams. Applied across 400+ live projects. Used daily by 70+ architects and designers.

What those eight years produced was a clear, specific answer to a question that most small firms never get to ask properly: what exactly is the structural difference between a model that holds up under delivery pressure and one that doesn't?

Small AEC firms face the same production problems that proper template structure solves. But they don't have the resources to build that structure from scratch, and they can't justify a full-time BIM manager to do it.

Datum AEC exists to close that gap.

Every product here is built to the same standard I apply in my director role, not adapted from it, not simplified from it. The same structural work, at a price point that doesn't require a budget approval process.