Collaborative Environments and Their Effect on Construction Companies: the Current Context

The research reported in this paper was aimed at exploring the introduction of IT enabled collaboration to construction companies and managing the changes required to obtain full benefits. The paper firstly presents the results of a literature review on the current collaborative working approaches in construction and general causes of failure in IT implementations. This revealed that 80 to 90 per cent of IT investment in large construction companies did not meet their performance objectives. It can be partly attributed to the fact that use of collaboration technology remains low among 99% of companies in the UK construction industry usually referred to as Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs < 250 employees) whom are key players in supporting large construction companies. Secondly, the paper presents the results of a literature review on the organsiational factors affecting the success of collaborative environment implementations. The paper then concludes with the necessity to investigationg the right combination of factors which contribute towards the improvement and implementation of collaborative environments and some insights into how the current perspectives of the construction SMEs on the implementation of collaborative environments can be obtained.