Regaining control: Finding the information needed for effective decision making

SYNOPSIS: Information technology is becoming a bottleneck in large construction projects. While computerized systems are theoretically capable of providing well-organized repositories of project information, actual practice lags far behind. The current state of the art for construction information management is generally a collection of capable, but poorly linked systems, which are often not available to all project participants. Project management currently accepts the resulting costs of these inefficiencies because unaware of the productivity gains that could be achieved. This paper presents a vision for a unified construction information repository, and explores the technical and organizational issues faced by large projects when implementing it. A first step is to recognize the benefits of centralizing and sharing information: it improves project efficiency and decision making. The centralized information repository is therefore a means of assisting the collaborative effort. The goal of effective inter-company collaboration clearly places the responsibility for managing project information above the level of the individual project participants. This realization is the key to implementing information management systems for large construction projects Experience from the Kárahnjúkar Hydro-Electric project is presented. The paper concludes with a short outline of a more complete implementation of the authors ’ vision, currently under development