Goal and Process Alignment during the Implementation of Decision Support Systems by Project Teams

Despite the significant amount of work in recent years to better understand the implementation of technologies in project-team settings, the research community still lacks an in-depth understanding of the social dynamics around the implementation of a new technology to support decision-making tasks at the operational project-team level. To increase this understanding, this paper presents a longitudinal case study about the implementation of a four-dimensional (4D) decision support system by a project team. This paper provides a grounded analysis of the observations from this study. The analysis shows that the implementation of the 4D system was characterized by a constant negotiation about the goals of the implementation and the process of how to best implement the 4D system. During these negotiations actors applied their technical and project task related knowledge to analyze, understand, and influence the goals and the process of the implementation. This knowledge, however, changed throughout the implementation and hence, the goals and processes of the implementation also changed frequently. On the basis of these findings, this paper suggests that construction management theory and practice should account for the possibility of shifting goals and processes during technology implementations. DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)CO.1943-7862.0000389. (C) 2011 American Society of Civil Engineers.