An overview of benefits and challenges of building information modelling (BIM) adoption in UK residential projects

Purpose This paper aims to present a state-of-the-art review of building information modelling (BIM) in the UK construction practice. In particular, the aim is to examine the scope, value and practical implications of BIM implementation in residential projects by evaluating practitioners’ perspectives working in the Greater London Area (GLA). Design/methodology/approach The paper outlines the general status quo of BIM adoption and maturity in the UK. It then discusses the feasibility of BIM use in residential projects drawing on an online survey and complementary semi-structured interviews with building professionals. The cross-comparison between the evidence base and literature review uncovers the specific benefits, challenges and risks to BIM implementation in the house building sector. Findings BIM is an evaluation methodology that helps the management of digital information throughout the project lifecycle. At a conceptual level, a BIM-enabled project offers quality assurance and on-time delivery, collaboration and communication improvement, visual representation and clash detection and whole lifecycle value. The findings, however, suggest that the most frequently reported benefits are related to collaboration and the blend of product (software) and process innovation, whilst lifecycle thinking and waste reduction are often overlooked. At present, there is widespread awareness on BIM but with a financial barrier to invest in developing digital capabilities, particularly for small- and medium-sized enterprises. Practical implications The paper concludes with a critical commentary on the lack of strategic leadership in both the supply and demand side. The role of policy to streamline commercial drivers for whole lifecycle costing in procurement is endorsed to drive the change management required to address the short-term mind-set of senior management and wider fragmentation of the construction industry, also serving as a research question for further research and development in the field. Originality/value There are relatively few studies evaluating BIM perspectives in UK residential projects. This paper explores the feasibility and “real-life” value of BIM in housing practice, drawing on views and experiences of building professionals in GLA. In particular, the research findings provide an evidence base evaluating the extent to which the house building industry has the expertise and capability to operate in a BIM environment and to comply with the Level 2 mandate and explore which of the generic barriers and drivers of BIM-readiness are more relevant to the design and construction of housing projects

Beyond self-help: learning from communities in informal settlements in Durban, South Africa In: African cities and collaborative futures

In South Africa, over half the population live in urban centres, with one in five households living in informal settlements. Such unplanned settlements form a major challenge in the urban landscape, exacerbating issues related to poverty, inadequate infrastructure, housing and poor living conditions. This chapter investigates various interpretations of self-help approaches, as the term is understood in different ways by informal dwellers, community organisations and external stakeholders, using experiences and lessons learned from good available practice in the Durban metropolitan area. Community participation through co-production strategies and participatory action research methods are used to understand the level of community empowerment and sense of local ownership. The concept of self-building is analysed in terms of identifying key success factors for supporting self-help activities by local government and community support organisations. The study also explores issues related to the project management of a community-led upgrading project, including the role of stakeholder management, procurement and project governance. Empirical data is gathered in the form of semi-structured interviews, observations and focus groups with community leaders, non-governmental organisations, municipal officers and industry practitioners. The research aims to build capacity in local communities seeking to improve their living conditions and assist local authorities in enhancing their planning mechanisms

In search for a widely applicable and accepted software quality model for software quality engineering

Software Quality Engineering is an emerging discipline that is concerned with improving the approach to software quality. It is important that this discipline be firmly rooted in a quality model satisfying its needs. In order to define the needs of this discipline, the meaning of quality is broadly defined by reviewing the literature on the subject. Software Quality Engineering needs a quality model that is usable throughout the software lifecycle and that it embraces ail the perspectives of quality. The goal of this paper is to propose a quality model suitable for such a purpose, through the comparative evaluation of existing quality models and their respective support for Software Quality Engineering

A dataset of community perspectives on living conditions and disaster risk management in informal settlements: A case study in KwaZulu-Natal Province, South Africa

This article describes a dataset of community perspectives on living conditions and disaster risk management in Khan Road, a non-serviced informal settlement, located in Pietermaritzburg, the capital of KwaZulu-Natal province in South Africa. The data were collected by local community researchers via a structured questionnaire of 159 informal dwellers conducted between August and September 2022, using mobile phones via KoboToolbox. The dataset was analysed using exploratory data analysis (EDA) techniques. This household survey is part of a research project aiming to develop an evidence base of opportunities, risks and vulnerabilities related to housing construction and resource management in incremental upgrading of informal settlements in South Africa. This dataset can be used by local practitioners and policymakers involved in decision-making for informal settlement upgrading and help them prioritise resources and upgrading interventions based on what informal dwellers need. Furthermore, this cleaned dataset could support the analysis of further South African data guiding the development of digital platforms as a real-time resource management tool or guide the enhancement of existing theoretical frameworks in the field of participatory design and co-production used by academic scholars

Towards developing a software process improvement strategy through the application of ethical concepts

Aligning Software Process Improvement with the business and strategic goals of an enterprise is a core factor for process improvement. Achieving success in Software Process Improvement (SPI) has shown to be a problematic challenge for countless organisations. SPI, as a discipline, can be described as a set of use cases, each use case describing the logically related activities that must be undertaken. In addition, each use case is a description of the interactions between itself and the participants, i.e. the Actors. The nature of these interactions more often than not may demand, from the participant, the recognition, and fulfilment, of ethical duties. In this paper we customise a theoretical framework developed by the US Content Subcommittee of the Impact CS Steering Committee that specifies traditional moral and ethical concepts, which can be used to identify the moral issues concerning the Software Process Improvement field. An application of these conventional and generic ethical concepts is made to use cases such as: Determining Business Needs; Conducting Process Improvement Assessment; the Tailoring and Creation of Processes; and Deployment. In doing so a number of ethical issues are highlighted. In the application and utilisation of SPI: business process engineers, software engineering teams, process improvement managers, and so on must be aware of these ethical duties, which have been identified by the application of the moral and ethical concepts, as presented in this paper, in order to become more responsible professionals in general. We propose a set of heuristics for ethical engagement with the SPI discipline proposing that an effective SPI strategy must be underpinned with ethical consideration

Imperative ethical behaviours in making systems development and deployment compliant with health & safety and well-being

Literature on systems development has been progressively identifying the importance of social aspects in systems development, to the extent that this process has been considered a socio-technical system. More often than not there is a failure of participants in the recognition, and fulfilment, of ethical duties concerning the concepts of health and safety and wellbeing. The purpose of normative ethics is to scrutinise moral standards for the rightness and wrongness of actions, the ultimate goal being the identification of the true human good. A rational appeal can be made to normative defensible ethical rules in order to arrive at a judicious, morally justifiable judgement. In this paper our first step is to report on the findings of a literature review, which presents the current health and safety issues concerning usage of computers in organisations and the workplace. Secondly, we identify and list some basic generic Deontological and Teleological moral principles and theories that can serve as normative guidelines for addressing the issues pinpointed in the initial step. Thirdly, we prescribe a set of moral rights and duties that must be exercised and fulfilled by protagonists in systems development and software engineering in order for them to exhibit moral behaviour. Each of these suggested actions are substantiated via an appeal to one, or a number of the normative guidelines, identified in the second step. By identifying, and recommending a set of defensible moral obligations that must be fulfilled in the development and deployment of systems, protagonists such as: project managers, software engineering teams, systems analysts, clients, etc. can fulfil their ethical duties, thus increasing the likelihood a deployed system that is compliant with principles of health and safety and wellbeing of its users. Ultimately systems development and deployment must be underpinned with ethical consideration

Achieving sustainability: from innovation to valorisation and continuous improvement

The Software Process Improvement methodology plans and implements improvement activities to achieve specific goals, for example, increasing development speed, achieving higher product quality, and reducing costs. The approach paves way for the implementation of SPI innovations in software organisations. Innovation is the successful implementation of novel and appropriate ideas within an organisation. Innovation is underpinned by the concepts of creativity and invention. Often organisations, projects and individuals fail to gain adequate value let alone added value from their innovations. The term valorisation encompasses all activities that maximise the achievements of a project and innovation. The emphasis is on optimising the value of the project and innovation for diverse stakeholders (society, community, institutions, and individuals) and boosting its impact. In this paper, the authors report on the understandings and collective experience gained over several years in industry as well as academia culminating in the design and implementation of the European Union VALO Project which dissemination and exploitation. VALO outputs include the elements of the training and online examination for possible certification to become Valorisation experts. The insights gained from the VALO project, enabled the development of a valorisation strategy which is used, alongside quality strategies to enable the development of a Quality and Valorisation of Projects Framework. The genericity of the framework provides the potential foundations for successful projects of high quality and maximises the valorisation of project and innovation results. Software development projects (and projects in general) fail regularly. These quality failures manifest themselves in late deliveries, over-budget, not satisfying the users’ requirements and more importantly poor reliability. Quality attributes are system qualities (such as availability, modifiability, performance and security), business qualities, (such as time to market, cost and benefit, product lifetime and target market), and architectural qualities (such as conceptual integrity, correctness and completeness). Whenever any of these qualities are compromised a system can be considered a total or partial failure. Moreover, after a project’s completion, there is often evidence that it fails to deliver sustained value to stakeholders. In this paper, we examine the challenges and benefits of sustainability viewed from a STEEPLED multidimensional analysis

Health, safety and well-being through ethical behaviours in computer and information systems development and deployment

Literature on systems development has been progressively identifying the importance of social aspects in systems development. However, there is often a failure of participants in the recognition, and fulfilment, of ethical duties concerning the concepts of health, safety and wellbeing. A rational appeal can be made to normative defensible ethical rules in order to arrive at a judicious, morally justifiable judgement. In this paper our first step is to report on the findings of a literature review, which presents the current health and safety issues concerning usage of computers in organisations and the workplace. Building on our earlier research basic generic Deontological and Teleological moral principles and theories we prescribe a set of moral rights and duties that must be exercised and fulfilled by stakeholders in systems development in order for them to exhibit moral behaviour. By identifying, and recommending a set of defensible moral obligations that must be fulfilled in the development and deployment of systems, protagonists such as: project managers, software engineering teams, systems analysts, and clients, can fulfil their ethical duties, thus increasing the likelihood a deployed systems that are compliant with principles of health, safety and wellbeing of its users

Ethical issues invoked by Industry 4.0

Industry 4.0 is universally referred to as the fourth industrial revolution. It is a current trend of automation and data exchange in manufacturing technologies. The computerisation of manufacturing includes, amongst other, cyber-physical systems, the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing and cognitive computing. There are many challenges in the realisation of Industry 4.0. In order to adopt a "smart factory" and improved (software) processes many ethical considerations need to be identified and considered if a company is to obtain an ethical development and deployment of Industry 4.0. The purpose of normative ethics is to scrutinise standards about the rightness and wrongness of actions, the ultimate goal being the identification of the true human good. A rational appeal can be made to normative defensible ethical rules in order to arrive at a judicious, ethically justifiable judgement. In this position and constructive design research paper our steps are: First we report on the findings of a broad literature review of related research, which refers to the current challenges in the realisation of Industry 4.0. Second, we identify and list some basic generic Deontological and Teleological ethical principles and theories that can serve as normative guidelines for addressing the challenges identified in the initial step. Third, we prescribe a set of ethical rights and duties that must be exercised and fulfilled by protagonists/stakeholders in Industry 4.0 implementation in order for them to exhibit ethical behaviour. Each of these suggested actions are substantiated via an appeal to one, or a number of the normative guidelines, identified in the second step. By identifying and recommending a set of defensible ethical obligations that must be fulfilled in the development and deployment of smart factories, protagonists such as: employers, project managers, technology suppliers, trade unions, (on a microscopic level) and chambers of commerce, local and national government (on a macroscopic level) and other can fulfil their ethical duties. Thus, a deployed Industry 4.0 solution can result in technological change, social change and changes in the business paradigm, which are all ethically justifiable. Ultimately all the improvement processes of Industry 4.0 implementation must be underpinned with ethical consideration