Barriers in BIM Adoption and the Legal Considerations in Vietnam

Building Information Modelling (BIM), an emerging trend in the construction industry worldwide, has been officially introduced to Vietnam recently in some piloted projects. However, in Vietnam, the BIM market is still immature due to that the players in the construction industry have perceived many barriers in adopting this new solution. In a country with a civil law system like Vietnam, the legal environment is considered as the most important enabler for the construction industry to adopt innovative technologies, including BIM. This paper, using a hybrid research approach of surveys and expert judgment, discusses the most popular barriers in BIM adoption in the construction industry in Vietnam, which include five internal and five external barriers. The country’s BIM roadmap, policies and relevant legal documents that are currently in effective are then collected and analyzed in line with the discovered barriers in order to explore their effectiveness in creating an enabling environment for BIM adoption and implementation in the local conditions. After that, legal considerations on the clarity and feasibility roadmap for BIM adoption, the reasonableness of the strategy/plan to grow the industry’s BIM capacity, the system of relevant laws and regulations to govern the BIM-enabled construction projects, the need for a new set of standards and codes for BIM-related processes, and an incentive system for the pioneers in BIM adoption in public sector are discussed. Recommendations on the legal document system, governmental policies, incentives and supports from the Government to encourage the construction industry to apply BIM are then presented. Further research can be developed beyond this research to validate the research results in a broader coverage