Abstract:
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 inef cient;
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 ef cient 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 rst 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 con dence 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.
