IT support for field personnel is starting to appear on bridge inspection sites, construction sites, and on the manufacturing floor. ENR magazine now regularly advertises palm computing-based systems for recording data on a construction site. This support can, and should, take on many forms and functions and needs to be carefully designed and evaluated like any other important tool used in the field. With careful design and implementation, IT devices for the field should have tremendous impact on the productivity of field personnel. If the devices are not carefully designed to take account of the field context and the abilities and preferences of the field personnel, field workers will not use these tools
