Where the Gaps Lie: Ten Years of Research into Collaboration on BIM-Enabled Construction Projects

Abstract

A BIM-enabled Construction Project (BIMCP) refers to a project involving relevant BIM tools to generate, exchange and manage project data between project participants. Success in delivering BIMCPs largely relies on how effective project members collaborate. As a result, collaboration on BIMCP has become a growing field of research while a review of studies on collaboration on BIMCPs is still missing. To address this gap, this paper presents the findings of a systematic review on studies devoted to collaboration on BIMCPs over the past 10 years (2006-2016). To this end, 208 studies published in 12 ICT-oriented journals in the construction context are thoroughly reviewed. The findings bring to light that studies on collaboration on BIMCPs are sporadic, isolated and focus on narrowed, limited and disjointed areas associated with collaboration. The study contributes to the field through highlighting the gaps of the existing literature on the topic. This provides a stepping stone to direct future inquiries that target collaboration on BIMCPs.

Collaboration in BIM-based construction networks: A bibliometric-qualitative literature review

“…In this study, drawing upon the framework proposed by Poirier et al (2016) and the CCWM model proposed by Patel et al (2012), the collaboration antecedents in BbCNs have been synthesized into a so-called Collaboration Pentagon as illustrated in Effective collaboration in BIM-enabled construction projects requires focusing beyond the technology-oriented debate in collaboration (Oraee et al, 2017). In essence, collaborative working requires the integration of all collaboration antecedents (Patel et al, 2012, Bedwell et al, 2012.…”

Collaboration barriers in BIM-based construction networks: A conceptual model

“…This observation of the dominance of 'process' barriers (shorthand for technical barriers) is in line with previous studies' arguments on collaboration in BbCNs, asserting that technology "push" has remained the prevalent theme of the available studies (cf. Mignone et al, 2016;Oraee et al, 2017a).…”

Collaboration in BIM-based construction networks: a qualitative model of influential factors

“…A review of the literature shows that many scholars have tried developing innovative technologies to facilitate collaboration (Sacks et al , 2018; Elghaish et al , 2019). However, research on collaboration in BbCNs is dominated by the technology discourse (Oraee et al , 2017a), focussing on the software-central view of BIM (Papadonikolaki et al , 2019) and overlooking the crucial role of people management (Liu et al , 2017), despite the observation that people management is the major source of ineffective collaboration in BbCNs (Liao and Teo, 2018; Merschbrock et al , 2018). Scholars such as Mignone et al (2016), Merschbrock et al (2018) and Li et al (2019) emphasise the role of people, exploring collaboration issues in particular projects and discussing the solutions adopted, but their findings lack the ability to be generalized beyond the immediate settings of their studies.…”

“…The failure of industry practitioners in shifting common practices to foster collaboration among members in BbCNs remains and omnipresent and vexing problem (Poirier et al , 2016; Oraee et al , 2017a; Alreshidi et al , 2018). Identifying the barriers that act as the root causes behind this problem is a predicate to provide remedial solutions (Merschbrock et al , 2018).…”