BMM Impacts of Technologies Studies

These two Benchmarking and Metrics (BMM) reports published in 2001 and 2006, report on leading data at the time of publication regarding extent of implementation and beneficial impact of information technologies to support project execution and improve performance.

Principal findings are that there is evidence that use of information technologies has benefits on capital project outcomes on multiple metrics, although different methodologies measure different results. There also appears to be evidence of a learning curve for adopters that may impede performance improvements until some maturity using the tools is achieved.

Of note, these two reports utilize two different approaches to measuring the impact of information technology on project performance. The earlier document (BMM2001-10) tracks direct use of specific “design/information technologies” whereas the later document (BMM2006-11) tracks more abstract indices of information technology use for specific task/work functions. These work functions occur at higher and lower levels of definition. These reports track a key evolution in measuring IT use from direct use of specific technologies to more distributed use of technologies on work functions or processes. This change came about as technologies proliferated (and interacted), it become more difficult to assess the impact of a specific technology on performance. Thus a preference in reports to assess level of IT use on project work functions as a way of capturing level of use on common tasks. Both reports also contain methodological approaches of wrapping up level of use into an overall use or index score.