The need for technological and administrative innovation is a recurrent theme in the UK construction reform agenda, but generic improvement recipes are beginning to give way to a more focused prescription; Building Information Modelling (BIM). The current strategy is to mandate the use of BIM for government projects as a way of integrating the design, construction and operation of publically procured buildings. This aspiration represents a partial turn away from a focus on managerialist agendas towards a belief in the power of digital practices to achieve the aspiration of integrated working, collaboration and innovation, a trend that is being reflected globally in relation to both national and firm-level policy interventions. In this paper we subject this 'BIM revolution' to critical scrutiny. By drawing on theories of the digital divide we develop a critical discourse around the ways in which political reform agendas centred on BIM might not stimulate innovation on a wider scale, but could act to disenfranchise small firms who are unable (or unwilling) to engage with them. This critical analysis presents important new research questions around the technocratic optimism which pervades the current reform discourse, the trajectory of industry development that it creates, and the policy process itself.

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The UK government is mandating the use of building information modelling (BIM) in large public projects by 2016. As a result, engineering firms are faced with challenges related to embedding new technologies and associated working practices for the digital delivery of major infrastructure projects. Diffusion of innovations theory is used to investigate how digital innovations diffuse across complex firms. A contextualist approach is employed through an in-depth case study of a large, international engineering project-based firm. The analysis of the empirical data, which was collected over a four-year period of close interaction with the firm, reveals parallel paths of diffusion occurring across the firm, where both the innovation and the firm context were continually changing. The diffusion process is traced over three phases: centralization of technology management, standardization of digital working practices, and globalization of digital resources. The findings describe the diffusion of a digital innovation as multiple and partial within a complex social system during times of change and organizational uncertainty, thereby contributing to diffusion of innovations studies in construction by showing a range of activities and dynamics of a non-linear diffusion process.