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Centre for Digital Built Britain completed its five-year mission and closed its doors at the end of September 2022

This website remains as a legacy of the achievements of our five-year foundational journey towards a digital built Britain
 

Becoming Digital: Enacting Digital Transformation in Construction Projects

Our January Monthly paper is a working paper by Thalya Zomer, Andy Neely, Ajith Parlikad and Veronica Martinez. 

The paper investigates the implementation of building information modelling (BIM) in construction projects and explores the change process involved in how BIM is institutionalised in practice.

Abstract

Digital transformation is often conceptualised as an accomplished event; however, conceptualising it as something that organisations accomplish does not capture the features of the change process. In this study, we analyse digital transformation at the inter-organisational level (i.e. construction projects context) and conceptualise it as a dynamic change process that people enact. More specifically, we investigate the implementation of building information modelling (BIM) in construction projects, adopting a practice-based approach to explore the change process and how BIM is institutionalised in practice. We propose a preliminary conceptual model of the institutionalisation of BIM as a structuration process. Based on ethnographic data, our findings revealed two main characteristics of the process of institutionalising BIM in projects, i.e. path dependency and contingency upon institutional fields. Through our findings, we offer insights into both the literature and practice on how digital transformation in projectbased contexts occurs in practice.

This is a working paper, published in the CDBB publication series. It was submitted to BAM 2019 Conference – 3rd – 5th September 2019

https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.47667​

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