Abstract—Small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) which account for 99 percent of construction companies in Europe cannot afford to invest in complex technological solutions. Instead, they prefer to interact with a very simple mechanism that can help them to improve their business. It has been reported that the most frequently identified issue in construction industry is related to collaboration and disintegration of different participants. The aim of this study is to identify affordable current market’s software for collaborative team working, document management, and on-site information management in small- and medium-sized construction companies (SMCCs). Such software should be an affordable tool for collaboration, on-site information management, and document management in SMEs. Based on the results of interviews with 12 IT professionals, the selected software was ‘DropBox’. Simplicity, functionality, security, and affordability are the main features of this software. The result of this study is useful for SMCCs to implement information technology in their companies.
Index Terms—Collaboration, document management, information management, information sharing.
Mehdi Nourbakhsh and Javier Irizarry are with School of Building Construction, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, USA (e-mail: mehdi.nourbakhsh@gatech.edu).
Samaneh Zolfagharian and Rosli Mohamad Zin are with Faculty of Civil Engineering, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM), Skudai, Malaysia.
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Cite: Mehdi Nourbakhsh, Samaneh Zolfagharian, Rosli Mohamad Zin, and Javier Irizarry, "Affordable Software for Collaboration, Document Management, and on-site Information Management in Small- and Medium-sized Construction Companies,"
International Journal of Engineering and Technology vol. 4, no. 4, pp. 460-463, 2012.
