Towards a stepwise improvement tool for construction e-Business: conceptual approach

The higher pace of development of technology has had momentous effects on all aspects of the business sector. Electronic ways of conducting business activities have taken the industry to a new era and construction organizations are moving away from traditional processes to modern ways of working through the use of electronic media. The impact of the current economic crisis has also made the use of e-business activities vital and essential to achieve better performance, productivity improvements and efficiency savings for construction businesses. Even though the possibilities afforded by e-business are evident, the level of implementation is not elevated as expected within the construction industry compared to other industries. While traditionally being backward in adopting new technologies, construction organisations have considerable e-business usage gaps from large scale to small, medium and micro level businesses. This difference reveals that there is a plausible opportunity for advancement and it needs to be captured and managed. Hence for construction organisations currently using e-business tools and for those who have yet to use and seek to adopt e-business tools, there is a need to undertake an analysis of their business processes and working methods to ensure efficient and effective use of these tools. This doctoral study will bridge this gap and need of the industry by aiming to develop an “e-business Capability Maturity Model (CMM)” as a tool for step-wise improvement of capability to carry out construction e-business activities. The benefit of such tool is to help construction organisations to know how to move from one level to the other by improving their e-business capabilities and thereby improving organisational processes. This paper presents the concept of CMM for construction e-business and the indicative research methodology.