Impact of ICT on Construction Industry: Challenges, Opportunities and Framework

High complexity and logistic challenges

Factors such as terrain, climate and elevation of an areas affects setting up of ICT infrastructure. This has been a problem in remote villages which are inaccessible. Construction firms in such region have challenges adopting to the current technological trends due to network issues.

With the rapid industrialization and growth of real estate sector buildings are becoming more complex. The construction manager will have to coordinate different components of the building. With traditional methods this has proved to be impossible. This has forced many construction companies to adopt these methodologies. There have also been trend of sustainable building and zero energy building (ZEB) these technologies requires the construction manager to implement ICT systems such as BIM and 3D printing which will assist in simplification of the building process (Machado,2014).

Aims and objectives

The main reasons why this research was conducted are formulated below, they include

? To find out how the use of ICT is impacting the construction sector. This includes how management and actual construction methods have been simplified, and how most of the construction firms are using ICT to survived the high business competition in the sector.

? To explore various challenges that are inhibiting growth of ICT in construction industries. Analytic approach is taken to investigate all the factors and how these problems can be solved.

? To establish an appropriate framework that private investors and the government can use to ensure success of ICT in construction

? To investigate the potential that ICT has in the industrialization of building. This is assessed to show how the country economic conditions can change when ICT is adopted

In the recent years there have been an increased usage of Decision support System (DSS). The implementation of this system has eased the process of road construction since they have been used for monitoring and detection of any harmful material that can cause environmental pollution. With DSS and image processing construction workers have the ability to analyze ONU code which have been installed on loading trucks. With embedded circuit and a control unit the DSS is able to show any information about the actual condition of the hazmat plates. Performance measures and the vehicle location can also be obtained, this trucking simplified road construction process hence minimizing actual project costs. Geographical information (GIS) system has played an important role in success of DSS.GIS is linked to the three main layers of DSS which includes hardware systems, software and the database where the collected information is stored. This facilitated real time tracking of vehicles where hazmat flows were analyzed risk index for the highway calculated.

Decision based ICT applications.

Ethics is a fundamental part of any research project. It was important to conceal the identity of all the participants who were involved in the data collection process. The questions asked were general question so as to protect the privacy of the respondent. The respondents were asked to sign legal forms which guaranteed their safety in case of any information breach. The respondents were given a choice of leaving if they felt the research was violating any kind of their belief or was making them uncomfortable.

Most companies’ executives left their daily routines and sacrificed their time for the research. As for the workers there were given some money, the money was supposed to finance them since most of the participants came from countries with high poverty rate.

Construction workers were notified before commencement of the interview the methods, aims, potential hazards and the anticipated benefits of the research. The interviews were voluntary and no one was forced to give information unless by their own will.

In this paper both research methodologies were used this method was preferred in some cases since it enabled the research to have close involvement in the study. The researcher could easily identify various misconception by the scientific community. Some minor issues that are seemed as less important can be critically be assessed when this method id used. Various possible relations were also identified when this method was used. Some social factor which seemed to have less effect on ICT growth were greatly studied and a lot of insight was gotten from such studies.

In some sections of the research, it was very difficult to come up with numerical representation of statistical data. It was necessary to use qualitative research when the analysis of the respondent background was being analyzed. The narrative style of portraying such data was effective. These ICT and construction executive narratives were recorded and notes taken for easier analysis. In the field of social science validity of the data can’t be properly assessed. Therefore, it is correctto say that qualitative analysis adds flesh to the skeleton presented in the quantitative analysis.

This refers to the direction of which the research is taking there are various definitions of research strategy depending on the study case on most cases it refers the inquiry of the research methods. There are namely 3 major types of research strategies. They include

• Qualitative
• Quantitative
• Triangulation

The following conclusion were drawn from the research.

? It was noted that construction companies which were using modern ICT tools such as BIM, cloud computing, management application and social media apps had huge revenue compared to the one that were still using the traditional methods.

? 3 D printing and 4D visualization apps were seen to increase their functionality rapidly due to the high innovation in the sector. In the future there is possibility that 3D printing will be used in construction of huge buildings, high innovation also made the apps more complex and therefore construction manager had a hard task of finding the necessary development tools.

? The adoption of ICT was very different in Brussels compared to Nairobi. The third world countries were still lagging behind and therefore policies were to be implemented to change the situation.

? The literacy levels had a very high effect on how ICT in construction was being perceived. Countries which had lower literacy levels were very reluctant to transition to the use of ICT. The older generation of construction engineers also hard difficulties in adopting this new trend.

? From the interviews and online surveys conducted It was noted that training programs were needed to educated construction worker on the importance of using ICT. This initiative was to be supported by government and private investors. With this training most of the developing nations could achieve economic stability.