ABSTRACT
The transition to a Business Information Modelling (BIM) collaborative working environment poses a number of challenges and risks, as well as benefits, for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the construction sector as a whole. The real challenge here, one would argue, is for those large organisations with experience and expertise in BIM to match their legitimate marketing discourse with a similar level of actions by providing reliable and credible case studies and even collaborate with SMEs to raise industry level and help to achieve a faster and smoother transition to BIM. Opportunities offered to SMEs and micros by BIM technologies have been the subject of a long debate and may range from work efficiencies to a full business transformation. Navigating generic and bespoke aspects of BIM is an exercise every built environment organisation will have to go through as part of an analysis of their business model and the separation between discipline-specific and cross-disciplinary activities.
