Paul Shillcock posted something honest a few weeks ago, which is rarer than it sounds on LinkedIn. He admitted that he spends half his time explaining the terms appointing party and appointed party from ISO 19650, that almost nobody uses them (not the way they were designed to be used, at least), and that the terms grate, not because they’re bad, but because they were forced onto people who never needed them. We should probably start a support club, brecause I feel Paul’s pain very deeply.
Attached to the post, David Shepherd had made a mock script with the help of AI: Sir Humphrey Appleby explaining ISO 19650 terminology to a baffled Bernard Woolley, in the register of the historic tv show Yes, Prime Minister. It shows the reality: appointments that aren’t quite contracts, appointed parties appointed by appointed parties, an entire vocabulary built to describe exactly what everyone was already doing, just with different nouns attached to it.
It’s a good joke, maybe not the joke we deserved but definitely the one we needed. Still, while we laugh at the terminology, I think it would be a shame to stop there, not without asking ourselves what the terminology was actually trying to solve. Sir Humphrey’s genius, in the original series, was never inventing nonsense: it was taking something real and burying it under enough procedure that nobody could tell whether the substance survived. The comedy works on ISO 19650 for the same reason it worked on Whitehall: because there is something underneath the clunkiness that is worth taking seriously, and the joke gives you permission to tackle that part.
So this is not going to be a defence of the terminology as elegant prose, because I frankly hate it. Shillcock is right that it grates, and he’s also right about why. But I want to sit with his own closing line for longer than a LinkedIn post allows: get the responsibilities right, and you can call the parties whatever you damn well please. That’s a real principle, and it cuts both ways. If the words don’t matter and only the responsibilities do, then we have to ask, seriously, what responsibility this particular vocabulary was reaching for, and whether AEC, as a culture, has actually absorbed that responsibility, or has just learned to pronounce the new nouns while continuing to think in the old ones.
Because I don’t think we have. And the two places I want to press on — the internal client, and the appointment that never gets made — are exactly the places where the old vocabulary was silent, the new vocabulary is trying to say something, and almost nobody in the industry has noticed either.
That’s the party this article is actually about. Not one Sir Humphrey might be hosting.
1. Employer, Supplier, Contract: a Glossary Nobody Needed
Let’s get the vocabulary out of the way, because it doesn’t deserve more than this.
Under PAS 1192, back in those early days of BIM, the party that wanted the building was the employer. Under ISO 19650, it seems to be the appointing party.
The party doing the designing or building was the supplier. Or, more colloquially, whoever won the tender. Under ISO 19650, if they’re at the top of a supply chain, they’re the lead appointed party; if they’re further down, or simply by themselves, they’re an appointed party.
The document that bound them together used to be called a contract, or occasionally an appointment if you worked in the small corner of the UK industry that already used that word before ISO got there. Now it seems to be the appointment, regardless of what your national legal system calls the thing you signed.
If you’re a simple person living in a simple world, that’s it. That’s the whole glossary. Three roles and one document, renamed so that the same relationship can be described identically whether it sits inside one organisation or across ten, in the UK or in Uruguay, in a public tender or a private one.
Except it isn’t like that.
If you’re the designer (meaning a supplier) and you have to subcontract a structural engineer to double-check your building, you magically shed the cloak of the appointed party and take on the robe of the appointing party, because now you’re appointing on top of being appointed, and that’s why the ISO couldn’t say “supplier” because you’re still a supplier, aren’t you?
If you’re the HVAC engineering department of a multidisciplinary design firm, and the architectural department is holding the reins of the process, there’s no formal contract between you and your architect and still, they’re your appointing party, you’re an appointed party, and there’s an appointment between you two, even if there’s no contract. And that’s why the ISO wouldn’t say “contract,” stating people and parties might operate without any kind of formal agreement (more on that later).
And that’s a more satisfying answer to “why does the terminology exist.” Renaming employer to appointing party doesn’t, by itself, improve a single information exchange, except the aim was to broaden the horizon and make sure the norm would encompass situations where the employer isn’t technically an employer but they’re still acting like one.
Shillcock’s own point stands: if the UK national foreword already told you to map appointing party back to client or asset owner, and appointed party back to supplier, and hardly anyone did, then the terms failed at the one job they were actually given, which was to travel quietly underneath language people already had, not to replace it. And that’s the importance of having national standards that explain and implement the ISO into the local markets, but that’s a story for another time.
So, to keep going, there are a couple of responsibilities in the grey zones that we need to clarify before we get them right (and before calling the parties whatever we like, as Paul is daring us to do). We can’t assume people know what the responsibility is. The honest answer, in most of the offices I’ve sat in, is our industry doesn’t know it: not fully, not consistently.
The next two sections are about the two places where that gap actually costs something.
2. The Client who sits next to you
Here’s a sentence that shouldn’t be controversial and somehow still is, in most design offices I’ve worked with: the structural engineer three desks away from you is your client, in exactly the sense that matters for BIM, even though nobody signed anything and the guy who’s paying you is three times removed in another office.
AEC has a blind spot on this, one that’s almost cultural at this point: we understand client perfectly well when it means the entity paying the invoice. We understand it a little less well, but well enough, when it means the entity up the supply chain we’ve been subcontracted into. What we’re bad at — genuinely, structurally bad at — is understanding that a colleague in another department, another discipline, another floor of the same building, asking you for a federated model or a set of coordinates or a fire-rating schedule, is also a client. They have requirements. Those requirements have a deadline. If you don’t meet them, something downstream breaks, exactly the way it would if you missed a deadline. The only difference is that nobody’s going to sue you for it, so everyone behaves as if the obligation isn’t real. I’ve watched this exact dynamic delay a BIM Execution Plan milestone by three weeks, internally, on a project where the external deadlines were being tracked to the day.
BIM’s entire operating premise is that information has to flow reliably between roles regardless of what boundary those roles sit either side of, whether organisational or disciplinary or whatever. A Level of Information Need doesn’t know or care whether the party asking for it works for the same company as the party providing it. An exchange requirement is an exchange requirement. If your information management culture only takes requests seriously when they arrive with a purchase order attached, you don’t have an information management culture: you have an invoicing culture that occasionally produces useful documents as a side effect.
Here’s the part that I think gets missed entirely when people mock appointing party and appointed party as bureaucratic bloat: those terms are purposefully not organisation-bound. An employer is external to you by definition: you don’t technically employ your own architectural department. A client is external to you by definition. But an appointing party can, without straining the word even slightly, be the department down the corridor that really needs your deliverable by Thursday.
The vocabulary that everyone finds clunky is one of the only vocabularies our industry has ever had that’s actually shaped correctly for the internal case.
We just never use it that way, because we default to reading appointing party as employer with a funny hat, instead of reading it as what it’s built to be: a relationship that holds regardless of where the organisational chart draws its boxes.
So when Shillcock says the terms grate because they were forced onto people who already had working words for the external relationships, he’s right, and that’s exactly the population that never needed the new vocabulary in the first place. The population that did need it, that never had a working word at all, is the one still asking the architect for wall thicknesses and getting told that we have other priorities.
3. The Appointment that isn’t one
So far, I’ve been arguing that ISO 19650’s vocabulary is better than it looks, because it happens to work for a relationship the industry refuses to name. Now for the bad part.
Go back to the internal client scenario, I said there’s no contract between them, and still, per the standard’s own logic, there’s an appointment. Sit with that for a second, because it’s a strange thing to claim. A contract is a specific, bounded, legally recognisable object. Either it exists, signed and dated, or it doesn’t. An appointment, in ISO 19650’s usage, apparently exists whenever one party is meaningfully directing the information-producing work of another: no signature required, no consideration exchanged, no legal instrument anywhere in sight. The standard needs the word to stretch that far, but that wasn’t just to cover the internal client scenario, I’m afraid. When the ISO came out, we had been fighint for years that BIM needed to be contractually binding, with a BIM execution plan being attached to the contract in some way. Then the ISO arrived. And it stretched terms, alright. It stretched it on one side, using the exact same word for a two-dollars gig and for the multi-million-euro contractual relationship between an asset owner and a main contractor with penalty clauses and insurance requirements attached.
That’s not a nuance the standard is holding: that’s a nuance the standard is refusing to hold, on purpose, because holding it would mean admitting there are different kinds of things here and only one word for them. The ISO doesn’t sketch scenarios and, in doing so, skirts away from the responsibility of stating that yes, there needs to be a formal appointment of some sort. You can’t do BIM on a handshake, and a pre-contract BIM execution plan becomes just that, a handshake, if it doesn’t eventually end up attached to the contract itself. Not stating that is the single biggest hole in the appointing-party/appointed-party framework, and it’s exactly the kind of hole that comedy skits about “translucently transparent” terminology never get near, because the joke needs the vocabulary to be uniformly absurd, not selectively incomplete.
At the cost of stating the obvious, here’s what actually differs between a formal appointment and an informal one, and why the difference matters enormously in practice rather than just in semantics.
A formal appointment comes with a named, dated, referenceable document you can point to when something goes wrong: this is what was asked for, this is what was promised, this is who’s accountable for the gap between them.
An informal one — the department down the corridor, the internal request, the client asking if you could just send them the model in a different format because the stars aren’t aligned tonight — comes with none of that. When the deliverable is late, there’s no document to consult, so the conversation about whose fault it was has to be reconstructed from e-mails and memory, which means it usually isn’t reconstructed at all. It just gets absorbed as generalised organisational friction, the kind everyone shrugs about, instead of being traced to the specific missing appointment that should have made someone accountable for it.
This is where the ISO car runs you off the road. You can only get the responsibilities right if the vocabulary lets you distinguish between a responsibility that’s been formally assigned, one that should have been but wasn’t (for reasons that are worth investigating) and one that’s been informally assumed, because those things fail differently, get remedied differently, and get prevented differently. ISO 19650 gives you exactly one noun, appointment, for both, and then trusts you to supply the missing gradient yourself, project by project, with no help from the standard at all.
Which is, I’d guess, exactly why hardly anyone bothers. If the standard won’t tell you the difference matters, most people will quietly decide it doesn’t, right up until the day it very much does, on site, when nobody can say who was supposed to answer whom.
And this is something we need to fix with the upcoming ISO revision, I think.
4. Get the Party Started
So, where does this leave us, other than three desks away from an unanswered request for information?Not at a verdict against the terminology, not from me at least.
Paul’s post and the sketch that followed it are both doing something useful, which is letting an entire industry laugh at a vocabulary that has, for years, been imposed without our explanations being able to penetrate the callouses of our industry. That laughter is deserved. But I said back in the first section that the joke shouldn’t give you permission to stop looking, and I meant it. If you stop at “appointing party is a silly word for client,” you miss the one thing the silly word actually got right — that the relationship it’s trying to describe doesn’t care about your org chart — and you miss the one thing it got badly wrong: that it never told you when the relationship needs a signature and when it doesn’t.
Get the responsibilities right, Paul said, and call the parties whatever you like. I agree with half of that, which I suspect is what he meant all along. The words might not matter. But the responsibilities were never fully specified in the first place, and that’s not a naming problem you can solve by mapping appointing party back to client in a national foreword. It’s a substance problem. It’s the difference between a standard that tells you a relationship exists and a standard that tells you what kind of relationship it needs to become before someone gets hurt by its absence.
I’ve spent a career watching this industry solve the wrong half of its problems with enormous energy. It’s exhausting. We’ll debate terminology for months, produce glossaries, run webinars on what to call the guy down the corridor, and never once ask a client to sign something technical, because it’s awkward and slow and requires admitting that the handshake wasn’t enough. That’s not a translation failure. That’s a preference for form over substance dressed up as translation. I’ve said elsewhere that terminology fetish is the death of the profession — the worship of the correct-sounding term over the thing it was supposed to protect — and this is the same disease wearing ISO’s clothes instead of a licensing board’s.
The upcoming revision is a real chance to fix this, and not by adding a fourth noun to the glossary. Fix it by admitting the gradient exists: say, somewhere in the standard’s own language, that an appointment which is never formalised is a deficiency to be tracked, not a variant to be tolerated. Give the internal client an appointment that doesn’t need a purchase order, maybe lighten up the whole mobilisation stage, and give the informal one a flag that says this should have had a signature by now and didn’t. Then, the standard would finally be doing the one job vocabulary is actually for: telling you, reliably, what you’re accountable for and to whom.
Until then, people will keep doing what we’ve always done: laughing at the funny hat, answering the corridor’s emails last, and hoping nobody asks who was supposed to sign what. I think we’re ready to do better. Let’s get this party started.
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