Where to Focus for Successful Adoption of Building Information Modeling within Organization

Abstract

Suggestions abound for successful adoption of building information modeling (BIM); however, a company with limited resources cannot adopt them all. The factors that have top management priority for successful accomplishment of a task are termed critical success factors (CSFs). This paper aims to derive the CSFs for four questions commonly asked by companies in the first wave of BIM adoption: (1) What are the CSFs for adopting BIM in a company? (2) What are the CSFs for selecting projects to deploy BIM? (3) What are the CSFs for selecting BIM services? (4) What are the CSFs for selecting company-appropriate BIM software applications? A list of consideration factors was collected for each question, based on a literature review, and then refined through face-to-face interviews based on experiences of BIM experts. An international survey was conducted with leading BIM experts. From the 206 distributed surveys, 52 responses from four continents were collected. This study used quantitative data analysis to derive a manageable number (4–10) of CSFs for each category from dozens of anecdotal consideration factors. The derived CSFs are expected to be used as efficient metrics for evaluating and managing the level of BIM adoption and as a basis for developing BIM evaluation models in the future.