What Information Brazilian Construction Managers Really Need to Improve the Design Stage Decision-Making Process: A Multiple Case Study

Information has become a key point for competition in global markets. As a first step, organizations need to identify the purpose of information in developing competitive strategies. The development and flow of information is especially critical if the process is dependent on different types of participants. The involvement of professionals with different interests, knowledge, and abilities in the production process results in communication problems at the interfaces among those participating in a given stage and also among different stages of the process. For example, cultural diversity of participants (architects, engineers, customers, etc.), who need to work together to produce a final product can be a major obstacle in construction industry. The objective of this paper is to relate the theory on the usefulness of data and information with the available information about the production process. We take as a specific example, the design stage of the building construction process and evaluate the presence of information, in companies of the building construction industry in two Brazilian cities, Porto Alegre and São Paulo. We accomplished this objective through a multiple case study (Yin, 1994)