BIM adoption by public facility agencies: impacts on occupant value

Many governments have begun to demand that large public facility agencies adopt and implement building information modelling (BIM) in their business processes. Some have published BIM guides. Most of these are technical specifications that are useful at the project level, but they provide no support for the organization-level adoption effort. On the basis of a literature review, action research and case studies of five large UK government facility agencies, a BIM adoption impact map (BIM AIM) is proposed. It describes a set of possible relationships between the actions taken by public facility agencies, the intermediate outcomes of their actions and the eventual achievement of value for the occupants of the facilities they build. BIM AIM can be used by public facility agencies with a wide variety of construction project types to analyse and visualize the strengths, weaknesses and opportunities in their BIM adoption efforts, potentially enabling them to focus on social impacts and outcomes rather than on the technological or management actions that intermediate stakeholders promote.