Assessing the Quality of Electronically Communicated Information at Construction Field Level

Abstract

Current construction practice is suffering from a lack of effective communication. Adopting a ubiquitous smart communication system which provides reliable information will assure operation performance. However the quality of a piece of information exchanged through project network needs to be appraised. An IT-based communication interface, the eCKiosk, has been developed and tested with the goal to improve work performance. This paper presents the Bayesian Belief Network (BBN) procedure to capture how users evaluate the information quality provided by eCKiosk. Poor data quality may lead to variety of expensive process wastes such as idleness, rework, injuries and safety violations. Using such cause-and-effect relationships, this paper will show how a trained BBN is capable of measuring quality of e-communication. Also, a practical example of one quality indicators, ease-of-use, is presented. Learning curve theory is applied to properly model the changing efficiency interacting with proposed IT-based tool.