Towards Successful Social Collaboration in BIM-based Construction: A Review

Abstract

The existence of digital applications in construction industry has opened the floodgates to a better integration and collaboration. In particular, Building Information Modelling (BIM) provides construction stakeholders greater visualisation of project information and communications across multi-organisations. Despite the explicit benefits, the study on what it takes to drive the successfulness of social collaboration in BIM still remain elusive. This paper presents a review of the literature to identify the key elements of social collaboration in BIM-based construction projects. The review identified three key elements (i.e. foundational platform, organisational context and behavioural context) which together form the nexus for successful social collaborative practice. The findings in this study extend the collaboration literature in construction domain by providing deeper insights into the characterisation and importance of social collaboration in digital environment.