A $2.4 billion stadium project put it in writing before anyone poured concrete. Most Arizona contracts never mention it at all.
It was 7:00 on a Tuesday morning, and I had a cup of coffee and about an hour before my first meeting. I pulled up an Autodesk webinar recorded the week before, about the new Cleveland Browns stadium going up in Brook Park, Ohio. I expected mostly a highlight reel. Aerial drone shots, a translucent roof rendering and somebody using the word “transformative” a few too many times. I have watched enough of these to skim through the first ten minutes.
Then the host, Autodesk’s Jennifer Suerth, asked Phil Dangerfield, the Browns’ SVP of Operations, a question that had nothing to do with steel tonnage or the construction schedule.
Who ultimately owns all this data and source of truth?
Dangerfield did not pause. It is us, the owner, he said. Then he added the part that made me start to really pay attention. That answer had been decided before anyone broke ground, because on a $2.4 billion project, the digital model itself is the contract document. Not a deliverable attached to the contract. Not something referenced in an appendix somewhere. The contract.
I have sat through a lot of Arizona kickoff meetings over the years, between Dimensions and my affiliation with the Arizona Builders Alliance. I cannot recall a single one where somebody asked that question out loud, let alone put the answer in writing.
“Almost nobody in Arizona construction has ever been asked, in writing, who owns what the tech produces.”
The Question That Never Comes Up at an OAC Meeting
If you have been in construction in Arizona for more than about fifteen minutes, you already know how this usually goes. The OAC meeting covers schedule, budget, submittals, maybe a rough patch with a sub. Nobody puts “who owns the model” on the agenda, because everybody assumes the answer is obvious.
It is not obvious. It just feels obvious, right up until somebody asks it out loud.
Who owns the drone footage your super had flown every Friday? Who owns the punch list history sitting in a platform your GC pays for? If your GC’s subscription lapses, or the sub who ran your reality capture goes out of business, or the platform you built three years of RFI history in gets bought by a bigger vendor, whose data is that, and can you actually get it back in a form anybody can use?
Most Arizona firms have never had to answer that question, because nothing has forced the issue yet. That is exactly why the Browns project is worth paying attention to. Somebody with $2.4 billion on the line was not willing to leave it to assumption. They wrote it down before the first stake went in the ground.
What a $2.4 Billion Team Put in Writing
Patrick Wipperman, a VP with AECOM Hunt, the joint venture partner running construction alongside Turner, described how they got there. They built an entire digital delivery document, separate from the drawings, that spelled out exactly whose responsibility each piece of the model was, and at what level of detail, at every phase of design and construction. That document became its own contract, one they hold each other accountable to the same way they hold each other accountable to the drawings.
It did not happen without a fight. Wipperman said the lawyers argued over it for a while, because there was no real precedent for treating a model as a contract document on a project this size. There is now. That argument produced language other projects can point to.
This is what I mean when I say governance before capability. AECOM Hunt and Turner did not buy a bigger AI tool to solve this. They wrote down who is responsible for what, before they turned on any of the flashy features. The governance came first. The capability just rode along behind it.
To make it work day to day, the joint venture put six people on staff whose entire job is the model. Not six people who also do the model on the side. Six people, each with a specialty, whose job is keeping that data structured, current, and usable by everyone else on the job.
Nine times out of ten, the Arizona equivalent of that six-person team is one project engineer who also runs submittals, takes meeting minutes, and gets pulled into whatever IT problem shows up that week. That is not a criticism. Most Arizona firms are not building stadiums. But the underlying discipline scales down whether you have six dedicated people or half of one person’s Tuesday.
One detail from the panel stuck with me more than the rest. Wipperman mentioned having to bring in training for something he never expected: a 3D mouse. People who had spent thirty years navigating a model with a keyboard and a standard mouse needed real instruction to use a device built for it. Nobody on that project was resistant or careless. They just had not been shown yet. That is worth remembering the next time somebody on your team looks lost in front of new software and you assume they are the problem.
The Field Can't Use What Nobody Owns
The same panel included a detail that will sound familiar to anyone who has handed a superintendent an iPad on a job site. As the design team resolved clash after clash in the model, they left the history of every one of those old issues sitting inside the file. Clean to a coordination team. Useless to a thirty-year superintendent trying to figure out what to build next.
The fix took two moves. First, get the designers to hand over a cleaner, field-facing version of the model instead of the full working file. Second, upgrade the jobsite’s own internet so lighter, faster field-viewing tools could actually run out there without freezing every time somebody tried to load it.
I have written before about the $79 router quietly costing an Arizona GC roughly $57,000 a year in lost time. This is the same story wearing a hard hat that costs considerably more. Whether the model is worth two billion dollars or two hundred thousand, the field cannot use data that nobody has taken responsibility for cleaning, structuring, and delivering in a form the person on site can actually open.
I say often that the field-to-office disconnect is where the money hides on most Arizona jobs. This is exactly what that looks like at stadium scale, and it looks the same at tenant-improvement scale. The gap is rarely a lack of tools. It is nobody deciding, ahead of time, who is responsible for making sure the data crossing that gap is actually usable on the other side. That is data ownership too. It just shows up as a frozen screen instead of a legal question.
What the Rest of the Industry Looks Like
The Browns project is the exception that proves how far behind standard practice really is. Autodesk and FMI surveyed nearly 3,900 construction industry leaders worldwide, across owners, architects, general contractors, and specialty trade contractors, and the results are worth sitting with.
Only 55 percent of firms reported having any formal data strategy at all. Not an ownership clause. Not a governance plan. Just a written strategy for what to collect and how to manage it once you have it.
Only 12 percent said they always incorporate their own project data into decision-making. More than half do it only sometimes or not at all. And the same research put a number on what that costs: bad project data, meaning data that is inaccurate, incomplete, or simply inaccessible when somebody needs it, was estimated to cost the global construction industry roughly $1.84 trillion in a single year.
None of those firms set out to be careless with their data. They just never got asked the question early enough for it to become a habit instead of an afterthought.
THE BEFORE YOUR NEXT OAC KICKOFF
Who owns the native model files if this contract or vendor relationship ends?
Who owns the drone footage, photos, and reality capture collected on this project?
What does the sub keep versus hand over at closeout, and does anyone have that in writing?
If the platform we are using gets acquired next year, who do we call, and what happens to three years of history?
Is any of this written into the OAC agreement or the subcontracts, or is everyone just assuming somebody else has it covered?
The Play
You do not need a six-person digital delivery team or a standalone contract document the size of the one AECOM Hunt and Turner built for a $2.4 billion stadium. You need one paragraph.
Before your next project kicks off, add a single line item to the OAC agenda: data ownership and retention. Not a debate. Not a legal review. Just a plain paragraph that says who owns the model, who owns the photos, and what happens to both when the project closes out. Put it in the agreement while everyone is still getting along, not after somebody has already left the job or the platform has already changed hands.
As I finished my coffee, what stuck with me was not the roof or the render or the seat count. It was how fast Dangerfield answered a question most Arizona contracts have never actually asked.
Nobody in that story was trying to hide anything or dodge a hard conversation. They just decided, on purpose, before the first shovel of dirt moved, who owned what. That is the whole story in a single sentence.
Most of us are still waiting for a dispute to force that conversation. You do not have to.
For over 20 years, Dimensions has been the trusted IT partner for Arizona’s architecture, engineering, and construction industry. We help AEC firms communicate better, collaborate smarter, and actually use the technology they’ve invested in. Because in construction, the tools only work if your team does.
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