Should medium-sized contractors still implement home-made information technologies on construction sites?

Abstract

Despite the increasing dissemination of the Building Information Modeling (BIM) approach, many firms are still far from BIM and are only starting to adopt information technologies. We conducted an ethnographic action research with an industrial partner that implements information technologies on its construction sites, with a strong preference for home-made applications. Results show that the development of such applications faces difficulties and that multiple iterations and versions are necessary before achieving the expected goals because the required competencies are lacking among internal development teams. Moreover, initial needs evolve considerably throughout the application’s development and evaluation process. However, notwithstanding the difficulties encountered during the different application development phases, the industrial partner believes the decision to be worthwhile because of the desire to have internal control over the project data and the need to consider certain specificities related to business processes.

Keywords

small- and medium-sized enterprises / mobile computing / mobile cloud computing / information technology for construction / construction site / ethnographic action research

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