Deibert et al. Mobile Technology in the Construction Industry Mobile Technology in the Construction Industry – the Impact on Business Processes in Job Production

Research on mobile technologies has received an increasing attention. However, most of the existing literature focuses on the use of mobile technologies on a managerial level, with technology as an enabler for information and communication exchange. The impact potential and their corresponding functionalities at the operational level have not yet been analyzed. This study addresses this gap. The key objective is the development of a conceptual model to explain how mobile technologies impact business processes in the construction industry on the operational level. Thus, a generic model will be developed on the basis of existing literature, especially the concept of Task-Technology-Fit. It emphasizes how task complexity affects the required effort of individual information access, information capturing as well as the timeliness of information. Then, it will be deduced how mobile technologies affect the forces and relationships in this model. The evaluation of the model shows that there is a strong influence of the reduced effort for accessing information on the process performance if there is a high task complexity. In addition to the new level of analysis (the system user is a worker instead of a manager), a new method of performing the model evaluation is utilized. For this evaluation, a 3D-laboratory experiment is combined with a computer simulation