Construction informatics in Turkey: strategic role of ICT and future research directions

Construction Informatics deals with subjects ranging from strategic management of ICTs to interoperability and information integration in the construction industry. Studies on defining research directions for Construction Informatics have a history over 20 years. The recent studies in the area highlight the priority themes for Construction Informatics research as interoperability, collaboration support, intelligent sites and knowledge sharing. In parallel, today it is widely accepted in the Architecture/Engineering/Construction (AEC) industry that ICT is becoming a strategic asset for any organisation to deliver business improvement and achieve sustainable competitive advantage. However, traditionally the AEC industry has approached investing in ICT with a lack of strategic focus and low level of priority to the business. This paper presents a recent study from Turkey that is focused on two themes. The first theme investigates the strategic role of ICT implementations from an industrial perspective, and explores if organisations within the AEC industry view ICT as a strategic resource for their business practice. The second theme investigates the ‘perspective of academia’ in terms of future research directions of Construction Informatics. The results of the industrial study indicates that ICT is seen as a value-adding resource, but a shift towards the recognition of the importance of ICT in terms of value adding in winning work and achieving strategic competitive advantage is observed. On the other hand, ICT Training is found to be the theme of highest priority from the academia point of view

Equity-focused developmental evaluation using critical systems thinking

Developmental evaluation questions the ethical basis of an intervention in terms of whether it’s ‘doing the right thing’ rather than merely ‘doing things right’. But developmental evaluation invites a space for exploring not only ethical but also political issues associated particularly with equity-focused evaluations. Drawing on ideas from critical systems thinking (CST) and critical systems heuristics, an evaluation framework with a pro-equity focus is suggested. The framework addresses issues of complex interrelationships, invites theory of change associated with philosophical ethics, and provides a means of surfacing, and potentially transforming, debilitating relations of power in a complex evaluand. A case study of the long-standing Narmada project in India is used to illustrate the workings of proposed framework. The paper describes how the underpinning methodological ideas of CST incorporating triple-loop learning can enhance the practice of developmental evaluation

Systems thinking and Equity-focused evaluations

Questions about access to resources - who gets what? - ought not to be seen in isolation from related questions of power - who owns what? They also ought not to be seen in isolation from questions of knowledge and expertise - who does what? Moreover these questions relate to important questions regarding legitimacy - who gets affected by what some people get? Such questions are often more easily avoided in a normal evaluation for fear of the ethics and politics involved in addressing them. But such questions as formulated above also may not be easy to grasp or work with in terms of an approach to evaluating an intervention. To the systems thinker C. West Churchman (1913-2004), such ethical and political questions were profoundly important. It was Churchman's life-long task to surface the need to address such questions. One of the most significant insights offered by Churchman in order to address ethical issues was the need to engage meaningfully with different perspectives

Construction informatics in Turkey: strategic role of ICT and future research directions

Construction Informatics deals with subjects ranging from strategic management of ICTs to interoperability and information integration in the construction industry. Studies on defining research directions for Construction Informatics have a history over 20 years. The recent studies in the area highlight the priority themes for Construction Informatics research as interoperability, collaboration support, intelligent sites and knowledge sharing. In parallel, today it is widely accepted in the Architecture/Engineering/Construction (AEC) industry that ICT is becoming a strategic asset for any organisation to deliver business improvement and achieve sustainable competitive advantage. However, traditionally the AEC industry has approached investing in ICT with a lack of strategic focus and low level of priority to the business. This paper presents a recent study from Turkey that is focused on two themes. The first theme investigates the strategic role of ICT implementations from an industrial perspective, and explores if organisations within the AEC industry view ICT as a strategic resource for their business practice. The second theme investigates the ‘perspective of academia’ in terms of future research directions of Construction Informatics. The results of the industrial study indicates that ICT is seen as a value-adding resource, but a shift towards the recognition of the importance of ICT in terms of value adding in winning work and achieving strategic competitive advantage is observed. On the other hand, ICT Training is found to be the theme of highest priority from the academia point of view

Towards reframing professional expert support

The paper addresses practical ways of reconfiguring professional expertise in development practice in moving away from the expert as a technocrat. Two projects associated with managing natural resource dilemmas suggest an alternative way of framing intervention involving professional experts providing a more appropriate collaborative learning space for development practice. The paper describes the heuristic devices generated by each project as helpful in bringing out dialectic tensions between practice and understanding, and between systems of interest and situations of interest (or situated problems). Firstly, SLIM (social learning for the integrated management and sustainable use of water at catchment scale) - a European Framework Programme 5 project - exemplifies social learning as a measure of sustainable development. The heuristic illustrates the dependence of sustainability on changes in practice and understanding amongst professionals and other stakeholders as part of concerted - rather than merely individual or even collective - action. Secondly, ECOSENSUS (Electronic/Ecological Collaborative Sensemaking Support System) - a Guyana focused intervention involving several UK universities in collaboration with the University of Guyana and Amerindian community representatives from the North Rupununi wetlands - builds on the SLIM heuristic in supporting the development of practice. Additionally, the ECOSENSUS heuristic provides conceptual space for the interaction between conceptual constructs of distributed stakeholders (that is, systems thinking) including those with professional expertise, and the actual context of intervention (the situated problem). Both SLIM and ECOSENSUS provide heuristics for process-orientated management enabling more meaningful and purposeful interaction between professional/ technical experts and other stakeholders, as an alternative to conventional project-orientated management intervention. An alternative framing may help to steer practice away from the apoliticised comforting linearity of professionalised systematic project management towards more constructive systemic endeavours involving multiple stakeholders

Can the shift from needs-led to outcomes-focused assessment in health and social care deliver on policy priorities?

Assessment, planning and review are at the heart of the provision of services and support in health and social care in the community, providing key means through which professionals interact with people using their services. These interactions provide opportunities for relationship building, with evidence that involving the person in identifying their priorities and required support can itself improve outcomes. At the same time, professionals use assessment to assess eligibility for support, and assessment has also increasingly become a mechanism for data gathering, to inform a range of requirements at local and national level including planning, commissioning, inspection and performance management. Despite attempts to move assessment from being service-led to person-centred, meeting such a broad range of objectives and requirements can create tensions at the front line, influencing both how interactions are conducted, and the resulting decisions. More recently, there has been an increasing emphasis on outcomes for individuals using health and social care services, including a shift from needs-led to outcomes-focused assessment. This paper considers a recent literature review about shared health and social care assessment, including emerging evidence from the implementation of outcomes-focused assessment in the UK. It concludes that there are promising signs that the recent shift to outcomes-focused assessment might resolve longstanding tensions around assessment, delivering on person-centred objectives and resulting in more efficient and effective use of resources

Mapping knowledge management and organizational learning in support of organizational memory

The normative literature within the field of Knowledge Management has concentrated on techniques and methodologies for allowing knowledge to be codified and made available to individuals and groups within organizations. The literature on Organizational Learning however, has tended to focus on aspects of knowledge that are pertinent at the macro-organizational level (i.e. the overall business). The authors attempt in this paper to address a relative void in the literature, aiming to demonstrate the inter-locking factors within an enterprise information system that relate knowledge management and organizational learning, via a model that highlights key factors within such an inter-relationship. This is achieved by extrapolating data from a manufacturing organization using a case study, with these data then modeled using a cognitive mapping technique (Fuzzy Cognitive Mapping, FCM). The empirical enquiry explores an interpretivist view of knowledge, within an Information Systems Evaluation (ISE) process, through the associated classification of structural, interpretive and evaluative knowledge. This is achieved by visualizng inter-relationships within the ISE decision-making approach in the case organization. A number of decision paths within the cognitive map are then identified such that a greater understanding of ISE can be sought. The authors therefore present a model that defines a relationship between Knowledge Management (KM) and Organisational Learning (OL), and highlights factors that can lead a firm to develop itself towards a learning organization

Examples of long-term and short-term decision-making in the UK, Delaware and Germany – gap-filling exercise in the context of the shareholder v. stakeholder debate and share ownership structure of the company

This paper explores the extent to which the law in the UK, Delaware and Germany imposes an obligation on directors of solvent public companies to take into account the long-term consequences of their decisions while establishing the content and scope of long-termism in these three legal systems. This research draws on the academic literature and performs a gap-filling exercise by identifying examples of long-term decision-making in these jurisdictions, as well as examples of decision-making and conduct that is not long-term in nature. In the gap-filling exercise, case studies are presented in the context of (i) the contemporary shareholder v. stakeholder debate in corporate governance scholarship and (ii) the relevance of the share ownership structure of the company. These two important debates are used as variables to cast light on the ambit of the notion of long-termism, and the structural differences and similarities between the corporate governance systems and concepts of long-termism in the UK, Delaware and Germany

Active learning based laboratory towards engineering education 4.0

Universities have a relevant and essential key role to ensure knowledge and development of competencies in the current fourth industrial revolution called Industry 4.0. The Industry 4.0 promotes a set of digital technologies to allow the convergence between the information technology and the operation technology towards smarter factories. Under such new framework, multiple initiatives are being carried out worldwide as response of such evolution, particularly, from the engineering education point of view. In this regard, this paper introduces the initiative that is being carried out at the Technical University of Catalonia, Spain, called Industry 4.0 Technologies Laboratory, I4Tech Lab. The I4Tech laboratory represents a technological environment for the academic, research and industrial promotion of related technologies. First, in this work, some of the main aspects considered in the definition of the so called engineering education 4.0 are discussed. Next, the proposed laboratory architecture, objectives as well as considered technologies are explained. Finally, the basis of the proposed academic method supported by an active learning approach is presented.Postprint (published version

Presenting the SCL model: adding value to business strategy through UCD principles

This paper presents the Sustainable Consumption Leveraging (SCL) Model and its toolkit, which was developed to help businesses examine their potential for enabling sustainable consumption whilst identifying areas of opportunity to improve their business model and value proposition. The paper begins by establishing the contribution of business towards sustainable consumption and sets out user-centred design (UCD) principles as a valuable approach to leverage sustainable consumption. The relationship between UCD principles and sustainable consumption in a business context was studied through qualitative research. The findings of in-depth interviews with experts, a focus group and a document analysis led to the construction of a theoretical framework, which was used to develop the SCL Model and its toolkit