There is no clear holistic approach or methodology to assess the adoption of building information modeling (BIM) technology at corporate level. This paper proposes an approach for developing critical success factors (CSFs) that can be further developed for assessment of BIM adoption at organizational level in the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry. This first part of the paper presents an overview and literature review of important factors related to decision-making, technology implementation, or both aspects for an organization to adopt BIM technology. Then, discussions are given on the empirical approach proposed for developing CSFs through a questionnaire survey and a sequence of data analysis, a conceptual framework on BIM technology adoption developed to facilitate the questionnaire survey and BIM adoption assessment, and a questionnaire designed with 123 influencing factors (IFs) identified from the literature and domain experts. For the purpose of demonstration and validation of the proposed approach, this study conducted a survey in Taiwan's AEC industry, and the data collected were examined by reliability and ranking analysis, including inferential statistical tests. Ranking analysis was employed to obtain 80 key factors (KFs) out of the 123 IFs. Among these KFs, three factors were found to be the most important: 'support from top management' and the 'functionality' and 'design validation' of BIM tools; two factors were found to be very important: 'the definition of project goals before forming teams' and 'coordination and integration among the professions.' Other findings are that owners perceive the 'initial investment cost' of BIM tools as more expensive than do the owners-cum-managers who manage projects themselves. Architects seem to find 'LOD 300' and 'LOD 400' more important than contractors. Further data analysis on the 80 KFs for developing CSFs for BIM adoption assessment will be presented in the second part of the paper, and finally, 58 CSFs are derived. Based on this study, the proposed approach is not only generally applicable for CSFs development in regions other than Taiwan, but also capable of handling the small number of questionnaire respondents commonly encountered in a society still at an early stage of BIM technology adoption.

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