The UK Government as part of its building information modeling (BIM) initiative has said repeatedly that it expects the big payoff of a digital model will be during operations and maintenance, which typically represents 80% of the cost of a facility.  But to date there has been limited uptake of a full lifecycle approach focusing on cost reduction during operations and maintenance. Since 2018 there has been begun to be quantitative evidence of the benefits of a full lifecycle integrated BIM+geospatial approach to construction.

The UK BIM Alliance has just released its State of the Nation Survey 2021 to measure the adoption of information management using BIM across the UK built environment. The survey involved 1,170 total respondents with broad cross sector coverage of 25 organizational roles and functions in construction.

Architecture (165 respondents), general contracting(143) and clients/asset owners (115) were the top three best represented organizational roles of respondents.  Of particular note is that nearly 10% of the respondents were clients/asset owners, which have been typically underrepresented in previous BIM surveys.

Main conclusion

The main conclusion about the adoption of BIM in the UK, which has been mandated for public projects since 2016, is that 65% of respondents report that that they have used BIM on projects. Of these organizations most of them have used BIM on at least half their projects. 60% state that they used BIM on over half of their projects.  This equates to 740+ companies that have adopted BIM for at least half of their projects.  It is not clear from the survey whether firms that are working primarily in the private sector are adopting BIM to the same extent as firms working primarily in the public sector where BIM is mandatory.

Awareness and adoption of BIM among disciplines reveals a considerable range. Not unexpectedly the disciplines/functions with the highest BIM adoption rates are architecture (75%), general contracting(76%), and various engineering disciplines (77-89%).

Facilities/asset management is still lagging in BIM adoption

Facilities/asset management (23 respondents) is less well represented in the survey and the BIM awareness and adoption rate for facilities/asset management (43 %) was among the lowest which suggests that the adoption of BIM by the facilities/asset management industry is still very low.  A survey a few years ago of the Facilities Management (FM) industry found that while 92% had heard about BIM and 84% agreed that BIM has the potential to deliver value add to FM, over two thirds said that the FM is not prepared for BIM. The survey suggests that facilities/asset management is still lagging the rest of the industry in adopting BIM and this is inhibiting the broader adoption of a full lifecycle approach to construction.