Abstract/Summary

Despite the attention paid to measuring the perceived benefits of BIM increasing its adoption throughout the construction industry, important links between implementation, support and benefits have received little focus. This paper explores how the conditions of implementation define the benefits of BIM adoption. The findings from two case studies implementing and using BIM are presented and compared. The first is a large urban regeneration project and the second is a healthcare project. A well-recognised model of system success was mobilised from the field of information systems to reveal that irrespective of project size and type, without sufficient support that addresses business process reengineering implementation is focussed on technology and technical process. This confines the benefits to productivity and efficiency gains associated with technical changes, and any potential improvements to the effective exchange of information for collaboration are difficult to achieve because they are inextricably linked to process changes at an organisational level. In effect, limited focus on the organisational aspects of BIM adoption inhibits the scalability of the benefits the technology provides. Focus is on the disconnections between organisational level BIM implementation and project level BIM implementation. An incendiary issue for both cases was BIM awareness amongst project participants and stakeholders, however, the effect of this on implementation success varies within each case study. In using the Delone & McLean Model to systematically examine the system at a point of reconfiguration, benefits are captured relative to the implementation approach. This study highlights the significance of these interdependencies and argues for a more comprehensive approach to BIM benefits capture that recognises this to usefully inform implementation strategy development.