From Roadmap to Implementation: Lessons for Ireland’s Digital Construction Programme

As part of their Future of Construction initiative in 2018 the World Economic Forum published an action plan to accelerate Building Information Modelling adoption. The WEF report highlighted actions that companies, industry organisations and governments are advised to implement to accelerate BIM adoption and better capitalise on delivering better project outcomes. According the authors of the report BIM is seen as the centrepiece of the construction industry’s digital transformation, however they acknowledged that BIM adoption globally remain slow. Anecdotal experience would suggest that BIM usage in Ireland is also very low and that a similar initiative or an adaptation of the WEF BIM Adoption Circle would be applicable to driving the digital transition programme in the Irish construction industry. This paper highlights the actions that companies, industry organisations and governments are advised to implement in order to contribute to the acceleration of BIM adoption. The authors document the results of a consultative survey of representative stakeholders in Ireland in mid 2019. This survey was designed to investigate the relevance of some twenty seven specific actions identified by the WEF to drive digital transition in the Irish construction industry.