Evaluation of IT in the Danish Construction Industry

How are companies in the Danish construction industry identifying the value achieved by investing in and using information technology (IT)? This question has become more important and is the subject of this paper.The construction industry has characteristics which may have some influence on how companies manage (and evaluate) their IT systems and what their requirements are. With the aim of identifying the sophistication of IT evaluation a questionnaire has been sent to 648 Danish companies in the construction industry. Primarily findings in the area of IT strategy and evaluation of IT systems are presented in this paper. The findings are compared with other related surveys and some comparisons will be made between these.The analysis of the survey indicates in general that the evaluation of IT is unsophisticated and insufficient in the construction industry. These indications are, however, found to be in some degree dependent on company size. Several companies in the survey conduct evaluation of some IT investments, but often using informal procedures. However very few companies do post-implementation evaluation of IT, and this fact may make them unable to identify the success of their IT investments. There are also indications that many of the respondent companies cannot document evidence of IT benefits.