Change management practices for adopting new technologies in the design and construction industry

Omar Maali,Brian Lines,Jake Smithwick,Kristen Hurtado,Kenneth Sullivan

doi:10.36680/j.itcon.2020.019

Abstract

The architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry has often been accused of being slow to adopt change. Yet the breadth of available technology solutions in the modern AEC industry continues to grow. Companies therefore must be adept at organizational change management; otherwise, the full benefits of technology solutions may never be realized when a company fails to achieve successful change adoption. The objective of this study was to identify the relationships between specific change management practices and organizational adoption of new technology solutions. An industry-wide approach was taken, wherein an online survey methodology was used to collect 167 cases of organization-wide change from AEC firms across the United States and Canada. The method of analysis included a correlation analysis between change management practices and change adoption. Reliability testing and principal components analysis were used to extract a single construct measure of change adoption. Rank-based nonparametric testing investigated if there are statistically significant differences between different groups of participants and technologies. Results include a rank-order of specific change management practices most associated with successful technology adoption. Change-agent effectiveness, measured benchmarks, realistic timeframe, and communicated benefits are the four change management practices that had the strongest association strength with successful change adoption. The discussion addresses how these leading change management practices compare with previous literature. Also, it was found that organization type and job position were correlated with the levels of change-adoption success compared to other listed factors. This study contributes an industry-wide view of change management practices within the context of technology-based change adoption and may assist practitioners to better manage technology adoptions in their organizations.

Highlights

In recent years, the use of new technologies in the AEC industry is increasing due to market pressure to improve productivity, reduce costs, enhance safety, and increase sustainability (Loosemore, 2014)
A potential reason for this contradiction is that this study focused on the adoption of only technology, whereas Lines and Vardireddy did not focus on technology adoption but, rather, examined a wide variety of change type
This study is the first to focus on organizational change management (OCM) practices in relation to adopting technology across the AEC industry as a whole using 167 technology-adoption cases

Summary

Introduction

The use of new technologies in the AEC industry is increasing due to market pressure to improve productivity, reduce costs, enhance safety, and increase sustainability (Loosemore, 2014). There are variations in the degree of technology adoption achieved between companies due to the different change management practices they employ (Lee and Yu, 2016). Adopting a new technology is considered an organizational change since the adoption will affect the processes and protocols in the organization. In this context, organizational change management (OCM) is defined as the steps to implement practices that are different from the organization’s current practices, with the intent to achieve organization-wide goals (Burnes, 2009). The industry has an interest in establishing practices for managing technology adoption in the context of organizational change, so that implementation barriers can be overcome

Objectives

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion