A proposed approach to comparing the BIM maturity of countries

BIM concepts and tools have now proliferated across the construction industry. This is evidenced by the comparative results of BIM adoption rates reported through a number of industry surveys. However these surveys typically cover a small number of industry stakeholders; are intended to establish adoption rates by organizations rather than markets; and are unsupported by theoretical frameworks to guide data collection and analysis. Based on a published theoretical framework, this paper proposes three metrics to augment survey data and help establish the overall BIM maturity of countries. These metrics apply to noteworthy BIM publications (NBP)s and assess their BIM knowledge content (BKC). NBPs are publically-available industry documents intended to facilitate BIM adoption; while BKCs are specialized labels (e.g. report, manual, and contract) used to describe NBP contents. The three metrics - NBP availability, NBP content distribution, and NBP relevance - are applied in assessing the knowledge deliverables of three countries - United States, United Kingdom and Australia - chosen for their similar construction culture and active BIM scene. The paper then discusses how these complementary metrics can inform policy development and identify market-wide knowledge gaps.