The adoption of building information modelling in facilities management

Buildings have very long lifespans and decisions made before and during construction have long term consequences. Data and information in paper-based documents are no longer suitable for managing facilities manager’s task. With the late delivery of non-digital data, it is challenging for facilities managers to assess the quality of information and whether the information they need is contained in the handover data. Emerging open Building Information Modelling (BIM) standards such as Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) and Construction Operations Building information exchange (COBie) can greatly facilitate the handing over of data and information to the facilities managers in a gradual and structured way. Recent efforts to facilitate the use of COBie have been noted in the British Standards (BS 1192-4: 2014) and Publicly Available Specification (PAS 1192-3: 2014) guide to implement BIM in operation and maintenance stage. However, the adoption open BIM standards and standards guidelines among facilities managers are still low. Therefore, a better understanding on the reluctance of adoption is needed. A literature review led to a developed conceptual framework that can facilitate the adoption of open BIM standards and standards guidelines. This was used to inform the research design, data collection and analysis. The research was carried out using mixed method approach. The data collections were in-depth interviews and structured online-survey. The data was analysed using NVIVO software to facilitate qualitative analysis, descriptive statistics and correlation analysis using SPSS software. The findings were used to revise the conceptual framework. The findings identified five key information requirements for BIM-based FM. Moreover, findings of the data concluded that the behaviour intention in adoption of open BIM standards and standard guidelines among facilities managers are influence by several key factors, such as awareness of BIM, cost, classification of BIM data, interoperability, as-built model and up skilling. This research contributes to literature on the adoption open BIM standards and standards guidelines in FM. The framework is the most important outcome of this research in term of both contribution to knowledge and practice and can be used to support the adoption of open BIM standards and standards guidelines in FM. Furthermore, this study facilitates the understanding and knowledge of open BIM standards i.e. COBie and IFC and standards guidelines in FM.