Industry perception of BIM adoption in design sector

Abstract

<p>Building Iriformation Modeling (BIM) is an IT enabled approach that is expected to enable improved inter-disciplinary colfaboration across distributed teams, intelligent documentation and information retrieval, greater consistency in building data, better conflict detection and enhanced facilities management. While the potential benefits of the BIM approach in design data management and project co-ordination and colfaboration are near to obvious, the adoption rate has been very slow. This paper discusses the findings from an ongoing research funded by Australian Cooperative Research Center for Construction Innovation (CRC-CI), which aims to identify these gaps and develop specifications and guidelines to enable greater adoption of the BIM approach in practice. This paper reports on the findings from a detailed analysis of Focus Group Interviews (FGls) with industry focus groups for their inputs and feedbacks on changing work practice, role of technology, current perception ofBIM and industry expectations. FGI discussions were recorded on tapes and analyzed firstly using an open-ended approach to identify the main themes. Based on these main themes a coding scheme is developedfor in-depth analysis. The key issues that emerge include version management, data organization and structuring, data exchange, data ownership and control, activity co-ordination and protocols for 3D model validation. While many issues discussed echo our findings from the literature review, the FGls give greater insight into the causes for the inhibitions to BIM adoption. This paper presents the observations ji'om the FGI data in detail. Plausible future research on BIM and it's relevance to existing technologies and tools are discussed.</p>