Cost and Benefit Assessments of It Systems in the Construction Industry

This paper describes five case studies in which four IT evaluation methods have been used to complete a cost and benefit assessment of different IT investments in companies from the Danish construction industry. It also compares the usage of the framework Measuring the Benefits of IT Innovations, which also has been used on a few English case studies. The evaluated IT investments in the Danish case studies are (1) upgrading to AutoCAD 2000, (2) implementation of Documentum WorkSpace, (3) a strategy for usage of project webs, (4) choosing between two project webs and (5) implementation of a CITRIX application. In the English case studies the following IT investments were evaluated; (1) implementation of DOCS Open and (2) implementing a company wide Intranet. The experiences of completing the five case studies in Denmark have been that Net present Value in most cases produced a negative output whereas the methods Information Economics and Measuring the Benefits of IT Innovation showed a more positive output. The last method Critical Success Factors was found to be less useful because of the format of the output. Completing the IT evaluations revealed that two major activities are difficult to complete. First it was found difficult to identify the benefits and second, the estimates of the benefits’ value were generally considered as very uncertain.