Successfully executing the twin transition—the interplay between digital and green transition—is essential for achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (Adenle et al., 2023; Burinskienė and Nalivaikė 2024). The digital transition can greatly enhance the green transition by using technology to optimize energy use, reduce emissions, and promote sustainable practices. Nevertheless, undergoing digital transformation alone does not inherently result in improved energy and environmental performance; it must be coupled with green solutions (Bianchini et al., 2023). Implementing effective science, technology, and innovation policies is essential to tackling the complex challenges posed by the SDGs (Adenle et al., 2023).

Moreover, the European Union considers the twin transition as a pivotal strategy for achieving climate neutrality by 2050, aligning with broader global sustainability efforts (Eurecative 2022; European et al., 2022). The green transition encompasses the strategies for achieving the goals set out in the European Green Deal (Com 2019). Embracing the green transition offers Europe the opportunity to pursue sustainable and inclusive growth. Additionally, the European Green Deal contributes to reducing energy use and lessening dependence on fossil fuel imports (Com 2022). Therefore, integrating digital and green initiatives is essential for enhancing resource efficiency and reducing environmental impacts, all of which are key elements in the roadmap for meeting the SDGs by 2030 as well as reaching a climate-neutral EU by 2050.

The twin transition is a cornerstone in climate change mitigation where buildings have a critical role to play since buildings use high shares of national energy use (Paiho et al., 2023). The building sector represented around 37% of the global final energy use in 2021, where heating and cooling alone correspond to 38% of buildings’ energy use (Pérez-Lombard et al., 2008; IEA, 2023). World-wide, final energy usage in the building sector increased from 28,800 TWh/year in 1990 to 39,000 TWh/year in 2021. In Sweden, energy usage for the same sector has remained relatively stable, with 150 TWh/year in 1990 and 139 TWh/year in 2022 (SEA 2023). Meanwhile, the heated area in Swedish dwellings and non-residential premises increased from 580 to 700 million square meters between 1990 and 2021 (SEA 2023). This means that energy efficiency in buildings has improved according to energy usage per square meter over this period. Nevertheless, there is a need for accelerated process towards energy efficiency and decarbonising of the building sector.

Key technology areas within the twin transition in the building sector include various building energy-efficient technologies (EETs) (Yeatts et al., 2017; Paiho et al., 2023; Belussi et al., 2019; Gibbons and Javed 2022; Zhang et al., 2022) or building energy-efficient (BEE) technologies (Cristino et al., 2021a; Cristino et al., 2021b) that have the possibility to contribute to more energy-efficient buildings. One EET is to optimize energy usage according to the preferences of indoor climate with control of the building energy systems, which have been an ongoing activity in the building industry for decades, through means such as thermostatic valves. The development of digital technologies in all parts of the society has also affected the possibilities to control energy systems in buildings. There is potential to reduce energy usage in buildings with more optimized control of installations by building automation systems (BAS), also known as building management systems (BMS) according to requirements for indoor environment (Määttänen et al., 2014; Thyer et al., 2018; Burak Gunay et al., 2019). However, there are barriers for digitalization in buildings that can be related to factors such as IT security, increased vulnerability and lack of resilience in the event of crisis (Wang et al., 2017). In larger buildings such as non-residential buildings, it is common with use of BMS as a part of the everyday work in facility management (FM) (Brackley et al., 2023; Lane et al., 2024). Even further implementation of digital systems to support energy performance in buildings is possible, as has been advocated in previous studies (Rafiq et al., 2017; Pritoni et al., 2022). In Australia, a lack of energy meters and rigid building automation system have been presented as technical barriers for efforts to join green transition (Rock et al., 2019). Benchmarking tools and energy information systems were proposed by Brackley et al. (2023) as tools that could support EM to improve energy efficiency in buildings. Lack of BMS or upgraded BMS has also been pointed out as a technical barrier for buildings to be a part flexibility markets (Ma and Jørgensen 2018) and therefore a motivation for investments in BMS (Thyer et al., 2018) even for local possibilities for flexible energy usage. Some studies have noted that there seem to be essential barriers for investments in functional and supporting digital tools for FM (Harris et al., 2018; Brackley et al., 2023; Lane et al., 2024), especially when it comes to more advanced tools such as fault detection and diagnostics (FDD) tools (Heimar Andersen et al., 2024). Barriers for implementation of FDD-tools related to high costs for additional sensors have previous been investigated by Ejenakevwe et al., 2021. A further investigation according barrier and drivers for investments in building automation systems is motivated since only a few studies related to barriers to BMS and BAS exist (e.g., Brackley et al., 2023; Woradechjumroen and Li, 2015), but none of them has main focus on barriers to investments in BMS or BAS and no studies have addressed the specific settings and stakeholders in the Swedish building industry. BMS, as an EET, contributes with possibilities of better control of energy usage, especially if energy meters and key indicators are included in the system as a building energy management system (BEMS).

In conclusion, there is a need for accelerated development towards energy efficiency and decarbonising of the building sector. The twin transition is a cornerstone, and the use of building automation systems may have a great potential for energy and emissions savings in the buildings sector. However, there is a vast scarcity of studies related to barriers to and drivers for in-vestments in building automation systems. Therefore, there is a great need for a deeper understanding of how building automation could be implemented in buildings.

Due to the urgent necessity for decarbonising the building sector, this article focuses on how the ongoing twin transition could offer enhanced and more energy-efficient control of buildings, utilizing systems like building management systems (BMS). The aim of this paper is to investigate drivers for and barriers to investments in building automation system in the Swedish building industry among different stakeholders involved in development, design, construction, facility, and property management of buildings.

The study is based on following research questions:

• How is decision making of building automation motivated and what are the driving forces?

The research design in this paper mainly has a qualitative perspective. This requires us to answer questions such as “why,” “what” and “how” (Brinkmann and Kvale 2015). From a quantitative perspective, compared numbers are used as indications about the differences between participating groups in the investigation.

In order to possibly reach a larger group than is possible with interviews with limited resources in the research project, a questionnaire was chosen for data collection. This also provides anonymity for the informants.

A questionnaire study (Trost and Hultåker 2016) was designed to identify the driving forces for and barriers to investments in building automation. In Table 1, the theoretical barriers (Sorrell et al., 2004) used in this study are listed, explained, and connected to numbered questions from the questionnaire.

There were also questions with statements related to drivers, the importance of energy and sustainability in general, among others. The formulation of questions was inspired by Lane et al. (2019). All formulation of questions was tested on both people without experience of the subject and professional before it was used in the study. The drivers were divided into three main categories–financial, sustainability and technology development drivers–according to Lane et al. (2019). The questions took the form of multiple-choice questions, estimates, and free text responses. The scales of the multiple-choice questions were mainly divided into four to six different levels. In the analysis data, these levels were converted to a scale from 0 to 1. Presented values shows the average value of the answers in the presented group. The scale for each question can be found in Table 2.

The selection of participants was strategic to catch variations among the informants in relation to which group they belong (Trost and Hultåker 2016) according to the qualitative perspective of the investigation, rather than to catch quantitative statistical variations. An invitation to participate in the study, including a digital link to the questionnaire in Microsoft Forms, was sent by e-mail to people in the professional network of the authors. In total, 34 anonymous answers were collected during April 2022, divided into the following categories and number: five property managers, four people in facility management, two property owners, nine construction project managers, 10 consultants, and four building automation contractors. These categories were placed into three groups–technology providers, decision makers and users–according to Table 3.

Figure 1 illustrates the stakeholders and the decision-making process. The technology providers include consultants, which could also could be described as intermediaries (Janda and Parag 2013) and building automation contractors. The building automation contractors are also providers and sellers. The group decision makers include property owners and construction project managers as they make decisions about investments in building automation. Finally, users as property managers and technicians in facility management are those that benefit from the investment in their everyday work as they use software and interact with building systems. Notably, the process describes investments in new construction and major renovation projects. Investments or supplementary investments in existing buildings are also possible and then the end-users or management in their organization may be decision makers.

This section shows the weighted results from the questionnaire study and is divided into two parts, one for each research question.

Building project leaders must handle and make decisions about a wide spectrum of technologies. Building automation acts at the interface between physical buildings and digital technologies, and competence in both areas is needed to take informed decisions about investments in these systems. At the same time the twin transition provides unique new means for mitigating climate change in the built environment. One such technology is BMS which in fact is one of the more mature technologies within the clean transition. In this study a research gap was identified as few studies were found to be related to motivation, drivers and barriers for building automation, especially in the setting of the Swedish building industry.

A general finding from the study is that even though building automation is a part of everyday work for the users in the study, as well as in the study by Brackley et al. (2023), there is still believed to be potential for a higher degree of implementation.

Improvement of energy performance in buildings was a high motivation factor and anticipation of BMS, together with financial drivers such reduced energy costs among to the users and decision makers in this study. Supporting daily work in FM was a higher expectation and driver among the technology providers, and a challenge to explain the non-energy benefits (NEB) (Nehler et al., 2014) for customers. Both of these perspectives are in line with the drivers, motivation, and challenges found by Heimar Andersen et al. (2024) regarding implementing of even more advanced digital technology for buildings as FDD tools. Another driver found in the present study was that the participating groups had divided opinions of whether or not to support technology development. This difference could be related to whether they are early adopters (Rogers 1995) or not. Safe and secure operation had higher priority among users than experimental development. This aspect of implementation of BMS and building-related digitalization has not been found in the literature referred to in this paper.

The findings that investments in BMS are connected to high investment cost and poor profitability according to these high investments costs is in line with the findings in a paper (Woradechjumroen and Li 2015) from 2015; this means that nearly a decade of digital development has not contributed with more cost-effective BMS, even though there has been extensive technology development of the tools and proposals for other solutions to minimize investment costs (Syah and Ieee 2016). According to the informants in the study by Brackley et al. (2023), further investments in BMS for optimization in existent buildings were also connected to barriers such as high cost and lack of capital, which is in line with the results of the present study. Improvements that were pinpointed were upgrades of BMS including submeters, which were connected to high cost and uncertain pay back. Also, Rock et al. (2019) and Lane et al. (2024) promoted the need for meters and updated BMS to functional digital tools that could support FM in their daily work to improve energy efficiency in buildings and contribute to the green transition. This allows for a more general applicability of our study. BMS is one of the more mature technologies in the twin transition according to Paiho et al. (2023) and even so, the cost-effectiveness seems to be one key barrier to higher deployment levels. This in turn leads us to propose that generally speaking, high level of adoptions of twin technologies including BMS, most likely needs some sort of policy adoption such as has been the case for PVs.

A knowledge barrier (Cooke et al., 2007; Kangas et al., 2018; Solnørdal and Thyholdt 2019; Carlander and Thollander 2023) was found in the study, as knowledge is needed for both decisions about investments and for use of building automation. Knowledge is also connected to and needed for decisions regarding IT security (Wang et al., 2017) and how to handle data. The evolution of digital systems such as BMS has meant a transition from the traditional means of managing buildings based on one or a few members of the facility management team that manually serves the building-related technical systems based on their practical knowledge, to a specialist management model where the building automation system can only be fully understood by a few specialists who possess specialist knowledge and are often located outside the core facility management team. Further, the knowledge that traditional facility management staff possess and the knowledge that specialist building automation experts possess needs to be bridged, since their respective knowledge does not appear to overlap sufficiently.

Apart from operational knowledge parts (that is, FM and building automation expert staff), a BEM decision-maker must also possess knowledge about the pros and cons when making the decision of the investments. In this study, decision makers were found to be less motivated to invest in such systems than users. This is further complicated by the fact that the decision makers in this study do not use building automation systems themselves. We found few studies that highlight how decisions in building projects about investments in BMS and other digital tools could be made by others than the users, which makes the present study stand out. Barriers for implementing digital tools for monitoring-based commissioning in the field was found by Harris et al. (2018) related to the disconnect between decision makers and expertise in building technology, which could be compared with the situation in the present study, as decision makers have less knowledge and information about building automation.

Within the energy service research area, the existence of a facilitator is of key importance (Bleyl et al., 2013). This is an important result from the present study–that a facilitator serving the decision-makers when making investments in BMS seems to be highly needed. Knowledge networks in industry have been shown function as such facilitator to resulting in higher improvement levels in relation to energy efficiency (Johansson et al., 2022). A general take away from this is that twin transition technologies may sometimes be in need for facilitators for successful adoption.

In Sweden, several networks exist for buildings in general, such as Belok for non-residential buildings, Bebo for residential buildings, and industry associations for specific stakeholders as for instance property owners. However, our study seems to show limited support for building-automation-related services and facilitators/networks that serve decision makers, apart from the large real-estate owners that have the opportunity to have in-house competence. But according to the Swedish Property Federation (Fastighetsägarna, 2024), 80 percent of Swedish real estate companies only have one to four employees. This may explain why there was a vast difference in the knowledge that the decision makers have about building automation systems. Thus, a key conclusion is that a facilitator is needed, as knowledge is required for both decisions about BMS investments as well as for its use.

This study aimed to contribute to knowledge about drivers for and barriers to investments in building automation system in the Swedish building industry among different stakeholders involved in development, design, construction, facility, and property management of buildings. Improved energy efficiency was found to be an important motivation for investments in BMS for users and decision makers, but the technology providers elevated more easy work as important. The main driver for investments in BMS was related to reduced energy costs, while for the decision makers, financial barriers such as risks and hidden cost were most important. An important knowledge barrier was found as knowledge is needed for decisions about investments, use of BMS and decisions regarding IT security, such as handling of data. The study was limited with few respondents but highlights differences in perspective between the answering groups that would be of importance to explore further. Also, differences between different types of buildings and ownership would be of importance to include in future research. Deeper knowledge is required about how to facilitate the need among different decision-makers and users about BMS investments and use. On a broader scale, the paper argues for the need to include facilitators as a core part of future policies within the twin transition.