An investigation of BIM readiness of owners and facility managers in Singapore: Institutional case study

Over the past five years from 2010 to 2015, Building Information Modeling (BIM) has gained significant popularity in Singapore's building and construction industry with the implementation of the first BIM roadmap by BCA (Building Construction Authority). It is observed that, the project stakeholders adopt BIM in their work flow mainly in the design and construction processes. It is unclear the extent to which successful BIM adoption be extended to post-construction Facility Management (FM) stage. Considering that most of the buildings in Singapore are existing buildings constructed and operated without any BIM experience, it is important to know how the building owners react to BIM adoption in FM. In this research, we selected a large institutional organization in Singapore to investigate the BIM readiness of the building owner and facility managers. Our aim is to evaluate the awareness and willingness of BIM adoption, identify the motivators and challenges of BIM implementation, and explore the strategies and potential issues of BIM adoption in FM. The research provides value to the implementation of the upcoming BCA's second BIM Roadmap with the focus on process transformation, BIM for specialty contractors, BIM for design-for-manufacturing-andassembly, BIM for facilities management, and BIM research and development. We adopted a qualitative method of unstructured interview with open-ended questions to collect rich information and data from the interviewees with greater details and depth of content. The transcripts were coded for qualitative analysis. Interview data revealed that the owner and facility managers have a fairly high degree of awareness of and willingness to BIM adoption in FM, with many external and internal motivators and challenges identified. Some potential issues which may hinder the BIM adoption are discussed in five key components, i.e. people, process, technology, policy, and BIM manager.