An exploratory study of information maturity in construction and developing a decision-making model

Abstract

The efficiency of a design process has a close relationship with effective information management. However, the increasing volume of digital information makes effective information management in design and construction organisations more difficult, in particular in retrieving high value, high quality and, more importantly, "mature" design information when it is needed. There is a need to develop a tool that can assess, or indeed increase, the maturity of any design information for ease of storage, retrieval and reuse with suitable information management tools. The engineering industry has been striving for this for many years, and has been successful in capturing design rationale. Based on a literature review, the aim of this paper is to describe how the concept of capturing design rationale from the engineering industry and its tool called the Design Rationale Editor (DRed) can be incorporated as a new conceptual tool called the DRed-based decision-making model for use in the design stage of construction. It can capture and evaluate design rationale and hence help designers to make better and more effective design decisions through assessing and perhaps increasing the design information maturity. The definition or concept of information maturity in construction has yet to be explored and will form a major part of future work. Future work will be to demonstrate how design information rationale can be captured and edited along the life cycle in the digital environment through the use of real case studies, and to address any issues and limitations on its applications in the industry.