Implementing information management in construction: establishing problems, concepts and practice

Information management practice falls under various themes: vision and policy, change implementation, alignment of strategies to information technology (IT), business process re-engineering, the review of new systems and IT infrastructure. It has been found from exploratory case studies in the construction industry that the current management of information is characterized by systems in which: i) information exchange between project parties is limited to paper, a medium in which retrieval is very slow and inefficient; ii) functional departments maintain their own data structured to suit their particular needs; iii) most information searching and transfer between project parties and clients are paper based, providing constant source of delays; iv) no efficient interfaces exist between departmental systems to access information electronically; and v) the impact of IT investment to date has been limited. These characteristics can be first traced to the general lack of coherent management policy and vision on information management. Also, although construction is a distinctly collaborative business environment, for historical, cultural and legal reasons, there is no desire to consider seriously the use of collaborative IT tools. Thirdly, although there is a degree of knowledge of business process evaluation and improvement techniques such as business process re-engineering (BPR), it appears there is less confidence for management to adopt such tools in its drive to solve information management problems. Finally, the lack of progress in adopting IT to widely improve communication is related to the fact that until now stand-alone departmental systems have been the norm. Above all, the culture of the industry dictates that each function maintains total independence in all aspects including information retrieval and exchange. The result is that experience of implementing corporate IT systems is lacking and it is clearly affecting the ability to examine the potential of emerging IT or appraise current infrastructure.