The Concept of Enterprise BIM: Current Research Practice and Future Trends

The construction industry lacks a comprehensive and holistic way of utilizing Building Information Modeling (BIM) throughout a building’s life-cycle, where the transition to Asset Management (AM) and Facility Management (FM) is particularly lacking. Enterprise BIM (EBIM) is an emerging, unexplored, holistic organizational concept that is designed to support and optimize business management throughout the entire life-cycles of buildings and infrastructure. However, current understanding and implementation of EBIM is rare. To fix this gap in knowledge, this paper defines the EBIM concept and assesses associated perspectives from research and practice in order to integrate BIM more strongly into the enterprise’s core processes and other needs at different levels within the organization and externally. To achieve a higher and more efficient utilization of building data, however, EBIMs need to develop a clear life-cycle-based information management strategy, including coordination and communication between all stakeholders. The paper highlights and discusses the importance of both available and missing standards related to the effective implementation of EBIM. Several existing open standards have been identified to help strengthen the EBIM concept. The paper identifies a need to develop standards to integrate BIM and IoT (the Internet of Things) and standards that can handle both structured and unstructured data. The authors have conducted a wide-ranging review of research, practice and existing standards and considers today’s potential for using EBIM, as well as discusses existing challenges and future research needs. Furthermore, the EBIM concept is contextualized by providing a case study with focus on cleaning. This study identifies a need to develop best practices in interdisciplinary collaborative projects. Such practical implementation requires integrated and standardized information and technology management and the exploitation of the available technologies in interdisciplinary interaction with those involved in the various processes and the flow of information throughout the life-cycle.