Organisational change management for the implementation of collaboration environments

Although emerging technologies offer the construction industry many opportunities for IT-enabled collaboration environments, the companies adopting these technologies usually fail in achieving the full benefits from their implementations. The reason for this is found as focusing too much on the technical factors and ignoring or underestimating the factors related to change, implementation, human and organizational factors, and the roles of the management and end-users. Each new information technology implementation involves some change for the organization and the employees, and is therefore a source of resistance and confusion unless special attention is paid to managing this change. This research aims to find how to introduce collaboration environments to construction organizations and how to manage the changes required in order to obtain the full benefits from their implementation. In order to achieve this aim, the theoretical concepts and previous work on collaboration environment implementations in construction industry, and change management with a focus on organizational change management are reviewed. The perspective of the construction organizations on the implementation of collaboration environments are investigated conducting case studies. Based on the findings from the literature review and the case studies, an organizational change management framework is developed for implementing collaboration environments. A computer based prototype is also developed in order to automate the framework. The framework and the prototype are evaluated by the industry professionals.