How Important is Inter-organizational Collaboration to the Success of Construction Project BIM Implementation

The construction industry is always criticized for lack of collaboration and ineffective communication. Building Information Modelling (BIM) is introduced to the industry as a concept that involves a series of changes on organizational processes, tools, structures and policies, as well as the interaction patterns among individuals and professional groups. Proponents claim that BIM will improve the collaboration performance of project teams. However, the performance of BIM in practice fails to achieve more advantages than traditional projects on efficiency and effectiveness. On the contrary a collaborative working environment could be the antecedent of successful BIM implementation. In this paper, the impacts of BIM implementation on the construction process are underlined and a set of key factors of inter-organizational collaboration are explored. Furthermore, the significance of inter-organizational collaboration across project teams toward successful BIM implementation in the construction industry is also discussed, pointing to future study on collaboration theory from a social-technical perspective to evaluate the BIM performance.