August 22, 2003—The annual cost of rectifying construction defects caused by poorly detailed drawings and operatives being given incorrect instructions has been put a 1bn and blamed at least in part on inefficient communication. This is one of the messages coming out of the IT Construction Best Practice service, a part of the government-funded Construction Excellence program.
The program project manager Dr. John Connaughton, a partner at the Davis Langdon consultancy, says there is plenty of best practice information around. The problem is implementation.
Connaughton told a recent conference that the key to successful investment in IT is to do it as part of a planned strategy. It is essential, he said, to identify clear goals, objectives and measures before final decisions are made. But doubts linger within the construction industry about the contribution that investment in IT makes to the bottom line. Taylor Woodrow director of engineering Roger Blundell told the same conference that IT is not a cure-all for flawed strategies and inadequate processes, let alone failures in human resources. The correct approach, Bludell argued, must be “part of a wider business strategy, the kind of strategy that the construction industry will need to adopt in order to gain the full benefit of its IT investments.”
To help show the way forward, the Department of Trade and Industry has awarded funding for a new project which will allow the application of IT best practice to building contracts in progress, and at the same time benchmark the impact on the construction process.
For more information, contact IT Construction Best Practices.
—Elliott Chase
Reprinted with permission; copyright 2003 i-FM
