Information Technology Business Value Model for Engineering and Construction Industry

The idea that the deployment and strategic utilization of information technology (IT) resources as factors of production can be used by organisations to improve performances has been around for many decades. The contributions of the IT resources in improving organisation’s performances give rise to what is termed IT business value (ITBV). There have been varieties of conceptualizations and attempts to measure the ITBV by different researchers. However, most of these attempts to quantify ITBV have led to inconsistencies and paradoxes. Furthermore, a major part of the literature in the area continues to be anecdotal and primarily descriptive. Therefore, there is little evidence of an accepted theoretical framework for applying the ideas and there is even less in the way of empirical evidence concerning the validity and utility of these concepts. The research adopts multi-theoretical concepts of process-based, resource-based and microeconomics views as the theoretical framework in order to mitigate the absence of structured theoretical framework in the previous studies. A non parametric approach of Data Envelopment Analysis was used for empirical testing of the model developed.The findings present an empirically tested model for benchmarking IT-induced productivity in construction industry. Also the outcome of the research establishes that IT provides business value in undertaking the engineering and construction business processes, which leads to significant impact on the organisations performances in the areas of project delivery, customer relationship and overall profit growth.For practical purposes, the model could be used to provide support to managers in decision making on IT investments, utilization of the IT resources and how combination of strategic IT resources with other organizational resources could in increase efficiency in delivering project value chains