Breaking Barriers: Enhancing Stakeholder Involvement for Digital Technology Adoption in Construction
Digital technologies have the potential to bring considerable benefits to the construction sector including improved efficiencies and workflows, automation and improved accuracy, information sharing and collaboration, improved safety, and reduced costs. However, realising successful implementation of these technologies relies on good stakeholder involvement to understand their digitalisation needs and requirements. Our research identifies six factors which act as barriers to stakeholder involvement in the construction sector.
One of the key challenges when attempting to introduce digital technologies is that often the stakeholders can have different interests, expectations, and abilities. Engaging with the stakeholders is key to understanding their diversity and delivering solutions which best meet their needs.
However, the challenge of undertaking meaningful stakeholder involvement is well recognised. In response general guidelines and approaches such as stakeholder mapping, stakeholder identification and classification matrices, project execution 7C’s framework, and stakeholder management digital tools have been created. Although valuable, these guidelines are generic and do not tend to consider the unique sector specific challenges that need to be taken into account.
To deliver successful digitalisation outcomes we set out to understand the specific barriers to stakeholder involvement within the UK construction sector. We worked with seven construction companies and undertook in-depth interviews with nineteen senior professionals including directors, engineers, architects, and Business Informational Modelling (BIM) / project managers. Through these interviews we were able to identify six themes which hinder stakeholder involvement:
Organisational context and culture.
Digital complexity and ubiquitous change.
Digital leadership and management.
Poor stakeholder involvement in strategic planning.
Communication challenges.
Poor digitalisation stakeholder landscape management.
Ensuring that all those involved in the digitalisation initiatives are aware of the barriers to stakeholder involvement during the digitalisation process is a step in the right direction for the alignment of digitalisation needs, stakeholder roles, and digital technologies adoption requirements. However, it is only the first step. To ensure that digitalisation is truly people-led we need to develop and implement strategies for mitigating the barriers as well as identify enablers to stakeholder involvement. Doing so will improve stakeholder involvement practices and lead to more successful digital technology adoption.
Additional Resources
Hwabamungu B. 2024. Barriers to stakeholder involvement in the digitalisation of the UK construction industry. Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on E-Society. Porto, Portugal: 09-11 March.
Author’s profile
Dr Boroto Hwabamungu is currently a Research Associate in the Made Smarter Innovation Centre for People-Led Digitalisation (P-LD). He is a transdisciplinary researcher driven by the desire to improve digitalisation and digital transformation impact at individual, team, and organisation levels across sectors globally. He is passionate about sustainable digital transformation, digital health, strategic planning, and the impact of digital technologies. His research interests include digital transformation in the health sector, artificial intelligence ethics, health policy implementation, information systems strategy implementation, and the enabling role of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) for development.
If you would like further information on this research please email: p-ld@bath.ac.uk
