BIM adoption assessment and associated BIM roadmap guidance

The construction industry is characterized by the presence of dramatic amount of information among several fragmented project stakeholders. The disability to properly share and process this information made the industry face many challenges and problems. Building information modeling (BIM) became a necessity in the construction industry to overcome these problems and pave the way for the coming digital transformation. Despite the huge research efforts conducted in the BIM area, yet research gaps still exist in the literature. Among these gaps are the variations in the effectiveness of BIM strategic actions (like mandates, policies, roadmaps, etc.), which caused a deficient enhancement of BIM practices. This was due to the lack of comprehensive understanding of the actual construction markets’ BIM adoption status. Furthermore, with the increased international collaboration and current digital transformation, gaps between countries concerning BIM practices greatly evolved. These gaps were unable to be efficiently resolved due to the same reason of the lack to comprehensively understand the actual construction markets’ BIM adoption status. Moreover, there exists a lack of guidance for countries & organizations seeking to enhance their BIM practices. This was due to the absence of a standardized guidance for BIM roadmaps’ design. That is why this research is concerned with enhancing BIM practices worldwide through the construction of BIM roadmap guidance templates & associated construction markets’ BIM adoption status tool. The research will provide construction markets’ decision makers with a bird-eye view, enabling the broader vision of their markets’ BIM status. As well as providing a guidance template that can lead to an efficient design of BIM roadmaps on different scales. Several research was conducted in the field of determining BIM adoption status of different construction markets. However, this was mostly achieved through the conduction of markets’ surveys, that sometimes failed to comprehensively detect the construction markets’ actual adoption status. Within this research, a tool was developed to assist BIM surveys’ designers to broadly and inclusively design a BIM survey which can assess markets’ BIM adoption status, through the incorporation of the required factors and dimensions. Furthermore, it was found in the literature the near absence of a guidance template that would direct decision makers towards designing their own markets’ BIM adoption and implementation roadmaps based on their current markets’ BIM adoption status. Therefore, this research provided decision makers with different BIM roadmap templates to be applied on different scales: market, organizational, project and individuals’ scale. While this research was conducted several research methods and techniques were explored as well as various data collection and analysis techniques. As a result, different charts were created by the author to simplify the understanding of data sampling and analysis for researchers with a non-statistical background. Additionally, quantitative tests were summarized in a chart to enable choosing the appropriate statistical test that should be conducted based on the type of the collected data. This research started with studying the state of the art of how BIM adoption status of construction markets is assessed. Afterwards, using the systematic literature review method and the meta-ethnography synthesis analysis method, a tool was developed to enable the general assessment of construction markets’ BIM adoption status: CMBAS Tool. This tool enclosed 5 dimensions and 19 indicators. The CMBAS Tool was verified and validated through experts’ reviews and was applied to assess the BIM status of the Egyptian construction market. After the verification process the number of indicators were increased to 20 instead of 19. Moreover, to apply the CMBAS Tool to the Egyptian construction market, firstly the nature of the Egyptian construction market was studied, as well as the different data collection and analysis techniques. The purposive judgmental sampling, self-selection sampling, and snowball sampling techniques were used. The collected data was further analyzed descriptively and inferentially using the excel and SPSS software programs. The Mann-Whitney test, paired Mann-Whitney test, Kruskal Wallis test, Chi squared test, Phi and Cramer’s V tests, and internal consistency test (Cronbach’s alpha value) were conducted. The analyzed data was used in the benchmarking study to compare BIM adoption status of different construction markets worldwide. It was concluded that benchmarking BIM status among countries would be beneficial in highlighting the BIM adoption gaps present between different markets, which would hinder the evolving international collaboration in the coming era of the digital transformation. Among the benchmarking process outcomes were the need of a unified BIM survey, a standardized BIM roadmap template, a global BIM platform, and governments’ intervention. Finally, BIM roadmap guidance templates were proposed by the researcher. BIM roadmaps present worldwide, different capability maturity models and noteworthy BIM publications were studied. The systematic literature review method and the meta-ethnography synthesis analysis method were used to develop four different BIM roadmap guidance templates to cover 4 scales: the market, organizational, project and the individuals’ scale. The templates were validated using the focus group method, where experts’ reviews were collected through the conduction of semi-structured interviews. To effectively customize these templates to suit different markets’ needs and requirements, firstly the CMBAS Tool should be used to collect data about the markets’ BIM adoption status. These BIM roadmap guidance templates will encourage and enable different decision makers to design realistic BIM roadmaps easily and effectively for their market, which would enhance countries’, firms’, projects’, and even individuals’ BIM knowledge, implementation, and status. The contribution of this research to industry was: 1. the ability of easily assessing construction market’s BIM adoption status using the proposed CMBAS Tool, 2. the ability to adjust the designed BIM questionnaire to suit different markets and produce a unified BIM survey, 3. the assessment of the Egyptian construction market’s BIM adoption status, 4. the study of benchmarking BIM status worldwide would decrease the gaps between markets concerning BIM maturity, and so leading to an increased collaboration on an international basis, 5. the ability to simply design a comprehensive BIM roadmap customized to suit different market’s needs, requirements, and nature, which will increase BIM implementation in the construction market, 6. the ability to simply design a comprehensive BIM roadmap suitable for different organizations, leading to enhanced BIM practices in organizations and thus in their markets, 7. the ability to simply design a comprehensive BIM roadmap suitable for different projects located in different markets, and 8. the ability to simply design a comprehensive BIM roadmap suitable for different individuals, having different BIM knowledge. This roadmap will increase individuals’ BIM competencies and hence improve BIM practices in projects, organizations, and markets. The contribution of this research to Knowledge was: 1. the development of the CMBAS tool to comprehensively assess construction markets’ BIM adoption status, 2. demonstrating the need of a standardized BIM questionnaire that will lead to an accurate benchmarking study to compare BIM practices among countries, besides developing a methodology for creating it, 3. developing a methodology for creating BIM roadmaps on different scales, which could be continuously enhanced to meet industry changes, 4. creating collective charts to summarize the data analysis process and sampling techniques, 5. the benchmarking study conducted to assess BIM adoption status worldwide will enable researchers from highlighting the gaps between different construction markets, and so work on proposing solutions to close these gaps, 6. demonstrating the need of a unified global BIM platform that will facilitate BIM adoption and implementation and enhance BIM practices on an international basis, and 7. the outcomes of the research work provided evidence of the great influence governmental bodies would have on improving BIM practices and spreading BIM knowledge and adoption.