Technology adoption in construction.

Abstract

Due to the complexity, high risk, and conservative character of the construction industry, many technologies do not become widely adopted. Even though vendors make determined efforts to overcome this and disseminate their technologies, the customers’ decision making processes for adopting construction technologies at the organisational level largely remain unknown. This thesis investigates the extremely complex issues related to the current practices of technology adoption in construction. It tests the hypothesis that construction companies follow a specific logical process linked to need, project objectives, characteristics of the adopting organisation, and the characteristics of the new technology to be adopted. The study explores how construction companies make the decision to uptake a new technology by focusing on customer and vendor activities, their interactions, contributing factors, and people involved in the process.

Over a period of four years, seven technology exhibitions were visited to immerse the author in the customer-vendor market community and collect substantial first-hand data regarding the strategies of the vendors. This was coupled with conducting 147 semi-structured interviews spread across Australia and North America. The credibility of the results is increased by providing detailed descriptions of the process. Finally, key factors and individuals involved in the process were identified and ranked using the Analytical Hierarchy Process.

The major original contributions of this thesis are the Construction Technology Adoption Framework (CTAF) and the recognition of the vendor dissemination strategy spectrum. CTAF is a framework that delineates the stages of the process that customer organisations use when deciding to adopt a new technology and the parallel vendor activities. It is extensively validated by thematic analysis of the interviews and factor analysis. The vendor dissemination strategy spectrum consists of five classes of patterns of vendor activities that relate to the technology type being sold and the size of the vendor. The thesis offers a framework covering the key factors that vary across this spectrum: Physical appearance, Interpersonal relationship, and Technology demonstration (PIT). It is extensively validated by both fuzzy and hard cluster analysis methods.

The thesis also introduces the Downtime, Interpersonal relationship, and Technology operation quality (DIT) framework, and a study of the customer organisation factors relevant to technology adoption. The DIT framework delineates the implementation factors that are important in making new technology decisions. The customer organisation factors include the personnel roles in the organisation, the effect of organisational structure, and the effect of attitude to technology. These contributions are cross validated between customer and vendor responses and between Australia and North America.

The significance of these contributions is that they enable vendors to understand how to match their dissemination strategies with customer expectations in each stage of the technology adoption process. It also provides a benchmark for new construction companies to use the current best practice in decision making. Understanding the CTAF decision framework also helps industry bodies and government organisations that seek to generally raise the use of new technology in the industry. The theoretical significance is that it unites the vendor perspective with the customer perspective and covers a wide range of construction technologies.

The scope of the thesis is limited to technologies in the construction industry in developed nations. Future research is warranted to more clearly delineate any differences with developing nations or related industries.