Before collecting the data from the semi-structured interviews and throughout all subsequent stages of my doctoral investigation, I ensured compliance with the ethical principles of research involving human participants and with the ethical review in the human sciences in Finland (Finnish National Board on Research Integrity [TENK], 2019). After assessing my data collection needs, the choice of research methods, and the background profiles of the study’s participants, I determined that the review statement from an ethics committee was not required, since none of the following conditions established in the TENK guidelines applied in this study:
- Recruiting participants under the age of 15 - Deviating from the principle of informed consent
- Intervening in the physical integrity of research participants - Exposing participants to exceptionally strong stimuli
- Risk of causing mental harm, exceeding the limits of normal daily life, to the participants, their family members, or others close to them
- Possibility of threatening the safety of participants, researchers, their family members, or others close to them
All the interview invitations that were sent via email included a brief explanation of the research objectives and the conditions for processing the collected data. Before the start of the face-to-face interviews, the participants additionally received an informed consent sheet, which can be found in Appendix A: Template – information for interviewees. All interviewees took part in this study on a voluntary basis, without receiving financial rewards or any other kind of compensation. They also had the option to stop answering any questions or withdraw from the study anytime. The audio and video recordings of the interviews started only after the participants had given their explicit consent. At the time of writing this thesis, the original recordings and transcripts of the interviews were (and continue to be) safely stored in an external hard drive without network access. The data will be deleted after my presentation and defense of this dissertation.
5 Results of the publications
In this chapter, I summarize the main results and contributions of Publications I–IV. I also discuss the relation of each publication to the RQs and the overall goals of the thesis. The original publications are attached in full length after Appendixes A–C.
5.1
Publication I5.1.1 Background and research objectives
Publication I is an initial exploratory study of the AEC/FM industry from the perspectives of IS development and the management of information across organizational boundaries. In this conference paper, my co-author and I summarize some of the key findings from the first round of semi-structured interviews, which were conducted in 2018 with 24 subjects from different organizations and stakeholder groups of the Finnish AEC/FM sector.
The title of Publication I purposefully includes the word “exploring” to highlight the goals during the first stage of my doctoral research of discovering and further understanding the industry under study. This paper’s findings reveal significant challenges and opportunities for AEC/FM practitioners, but the implications of such findings are not thoroughly discussed through the lens of existing IS theories because I was still relatively new to the field of study. My co-author and I propose two open-ended RQs in Publication I:
1. How have the stakeholders of the Finnish AEC/FM industry addressed their information exchange needs so far?
2. Which information exchange needs have yet to be addressed and why?
I presented Publication I at the 31st International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (CAiSE), which was held in June 2019 in Rome.
5.1.2 Main results and contribution
AEC/FM practitioners adopt different discourses about the integration of IS across organizational boundaries, depending on whether they refer to construction projects or to the entire lifecycle of a building. Within the scope of individual construction projects, the practitioners consider that their needs are mostly covered by current IS. At the same time, the practitioners consider that their integration needs remain mostly unaddressed in the context of the whole building lifecycle. Although the IS used in construction are often the same ones used in the other lifecycle phases, the practitioners argue that the value of such IS gradually decreases as more stakeholders need to be involved in the information exchange. Consequently, the assessment of the IS effectiveness and business value depends not so much on the IS themselves but on the framing of our
RQs, particularly when we inquire about the number of stakeholders involved and the complexity of the integrations required to share data.
These socio-organizational challenges (Table 5.1) are framed around two units of analysis: (1) building construction projects and (2) the whole building lifecycle. The first refers to individual projects where built assets are constructed according to structured and architectural design specifications. The second portrays any asset of the built environment as if it were a living entity that keeps changing over time. This is not a new idea, and practitioners often refer to it, but the scientific literature lacks theoretical frameworks to study IS integration from the perspective of a physical asset’s lifecycle. The individual stakeholders have a low level of control to influence or change the scope of these two units of analysis because these are derived from the traditional ways of working and the configuration of the AEC/FM industry as a whole.
Table 5.1: Information exchange needs and inter-organizational integration methods mentioned by interviewees (adapted from Publication I).
Information exchange needs Methods of inter-organizational integration
Addressed (Scope: Building construction project)
Managing complexity within each project
Clarifying terms of stakeholder collaboration
Improving coordination of distributed team members Exchanging detailed and standardized information Managing variability among
different projects Using separate software solutions from multiple providers
Implementing interoperable software solutions
Unaddressed (Scope: Whole building lifecycle)
Improving adequacy of information sources
(No specific solutions described by the interviewees)
Reducing information gaps in processes and workflows Clarifying the extent and purposes of data collection
5.1.3 Relation to the whole thesis
Publication I contributes to this doctoral thesis by setting up the background context about the built environment lifecycle (or building lifecycle, see Section 3.2), which is one of the key concepts used to explain the IS integration needs and socio-organizational aspects of the AEC/FM industry in all subsequent publications. In this paper, we also summarize some of the main challenges faced by AEC/FM stakeholders (Table 5.1), which answer RQ1 (threats, external origin or low level of control, and perceived negative impact) from the thesis RQ’s SWOT (Table 4.1): “How does the industry context guide the planned integration of these actors?” We have found that the evaluation about the maturity of an IOIS can be subjective and does not only depend on technical characteristics or the features of the IOIS itself. Therefore, the requirements for cross-organizational IS integration must be carefully evaluated within the scope of previously agreed use case(s). A suitable strategy for the integration of IS across organizational boundaries starts with identifying and mapping the useful minimum data exchange interdependencies among stakeholders.
From a critical standpoint, Publication I contributes more to AEC/FM than to the IS field because it is a study that is strongly grounded on empirical data from practitioner interviews and not so much on existing theoretical frameworks. However, it also represents one of the few studies linking AEC/FM and IS, which provides new mid-range theories that could help explain the main challenges for or barriers to the integration of IOIS in other project-based industries.