ICT & innovation: a case of integration in a regional construction firm
Article Sidebar
Main Article Content
Abstract
Construction firms in regional areas face considerable challenges to their competitiveness. Logistics, availability of suitable personnel, unfamiliarity with trading partners, and the tyranny of distance conspire to obstruct profitable engagement beyond their local area. Electronic information and communication technology (ICT) such as web-based project management applications and other forms of collaborative data sharing have the potential to mitigate many of these obstacles, but have yet to gain widespread acceptance, particularly by smaller regional firms who question their cost effectiveness. The attitudes of decision-makers and the impact of their decisions on intra- and inter-firm culture lie at the heart of ICT-mediated innovation. This paper presents a case study of a specialist subcontractor located in regional New South Wales and its involvement in a New Zealand project, whose competitiveness arose from using ICT to integrate its own supply chain. It also provided additional value by triggering collaboration and integration in the broader project team. The case reveals that these outcomes were symptomatic of the organisational culture of the subcontractor, and were achieved through a combination of leadership, collaboration, flexibility and pragmatism, redolent of dynamic capabilities.
Article Details
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
a) Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share and adapt the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
b) Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
c) Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Open Access Citation Advantage Service). Where authors include such a work in an institutional repository or on their website (ie. a copy of a work which has been published in a UTS ePRESS journal, or a pre-print or post-print version of that work), we request that they include a statement that acknowledges the UTS ePRESS publication including the name of the journal, the volume number and a web-link to the journal item.
d) Authors should be aware that the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) License permits readers to share (copy and redistribute the work in any medium or format) and adapt (remix, transform, and build upon the work) for any purpose, even commercially, provided they also give appropriate credit to the work, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. They may do these things in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests you or your publisher endorses their use.