Impact Assessment Model for Low Cost (Shoestring) Digitalisation in Small Construction Organizations

Abstract

Adopting low-cost (shoestring) digital solutions in organisations should be followed by assessing the business and digitalisation impact. Evaluating the impact of low-cost (shoestring) digital solutions on improving business and digitisation benefits becomes essential for small organisations. This paper introduces an impact assessment model for digital shoestring solutions developed through the digital shoestring program. The proposed model assesses the impact of the low-cost digital solutions on 1) the business and 2) the digitalisation benefits after their installation. The model’s suitability is tested through a single exploratory case study performed with a small construction supplier. The case study highlighted that some digital solutions in the digital shoestring solutions catalogue affect only a part of the business benefits. The case study results also showed that the digitalisation benefits are not comprehensive enough to assess the digitalisation level achieved. Motivated by the case study results and inputs from literature, we propose an updated and novel impact assessment model that can be used uniformly across industries and adheres to multiple commonly accepted IoT reference architectures. This model will output the levels of digitalisation achieved and provides a comparative score of the achieved business impact for the digital solutions deployed at small organisations.