Barriers and enablers of BIM adoption: Perspective and experiences of Turkish construction public clients

The construction sector is one of the sectors where technological developments show the least impact. However, in the construction sector, there is a change process due to technological developments, especially in the last period. Especially thanks to Building Information Modeling (BIM), it is seen that a new era has begun in the construction industry. Thanks to the developments in BIM, it is observed that productivity has increased, the stakeholders have minimized their total efforts and they aimed to maximize their cooperation. However, there is a long way to go, especially to take full advantage of BIM. There are many barriers in order to successfully implement BIM in projects and to take full advantage of BIM. In addition, companies are trying to use some methods to overcome these barriers. This article describes the factors used to overcome these barriers and enablers in construction projects in Turkey from the perspective of public clients, the role of employers. For this purpose, a large literature review was conducted first. According to the literature review, barriers and the factors used to overcome these barriers are listed. These items are divided into three domains, such as market level, company level and project level. In the next step, the employers determined at the beginning of the project were interviewed for case analysis studies. During the examination of these factors, 31 participants from 10 public clients in the Turkish Construction industry were interviewed. 31 participants are from Turkish public clients. 18 case studies were conducted with these participants to evaluate how effective the barriers encountered while using BIM technologies and the factors used to overcome these barriers determined after the literature review. In the case studies, the participants were expected to evaluate the effects of these factors from 1 to 5 based on their experiences. According to these evaluations, he calculated the average severity for each factor. According to the results of these analyzes, factors that constitute a barrier for the success of the CPM and the factors that can be used to overcome these barriers were determined. In addition to the numerical evaluation, the participants were also expected to explain the different barriers they experienced. After collecting the data, projects which included in this research are divided into two such as BIM-implemented and non-BIM implemented projects. The results of these two groups are compared by using comparative analysis. As a result of the evaluations made by the professionals, it was observed that the unfavorable economic conditions, high costs, and unclear project benefits. On the other hand, according to study, clear advantages of BIM, ease of use, high analysis ability and positive attitude of the company and demand/satisfaction of the clients were considered as the most significant according to professionals. Additionally, according to the results of this research, the importance of barriers and enablers with respect to project types were evaluated too. While sector level barriers are seen to affect refinery projects the most, company level barriers affect hospital constructions at most in a negative manner. In addition to this, ıt has been discussed that the barriers at the project level are the most effective in building projects and negatively affect the use of BIM. Some suggestions were made according to these findings and the evaluation of these findings.