An article, Zavanti to analyse use of collaboration technology by the Australia Construction Industry, on Australia’s infolink website says that Zavanti (formerly Powyr) has launched a market research project designed to investigate the use of construction collaboration technologies and project extranets by the Australian construction industry.
It says the study, conducted by John Lowry from Expert Eye, aims to provide a representative, quantifiable measure of the various benefits identified by people with first hand experience of using collaboration tools on live projects, thus providing the first set of objective statistics and figures from an Australian perspective (in this respect, it sounds as though the survey will cover much the same ground as the ground-breaking UK research project undertaken by the NCCTP in 2006 – see post).
The results will form the basis of the paper which will be delivered by Lowry at the CRC for Construction Innovation 3rd international conference in Queensland in March 2008.
The survey is now available online and will be open to participants until mid November.
I had a look through the survey (hosted by surveymonkey.com – already familiar to me from submitting responses to some student projects). While it is very brief and basic (almost solely tick-box type questions), it does at least ask some of the same kinds of questions asked by my friends at Benchmark (now Redshift) when they managed the NCCTP survey. Direct comparisons will be difficult though as this project will have less control over the sample. The NCCTP project was a telephone survey and the researchers were able to screen respondents, establish roles and responsibilities, and ensure a good cross-section of different disciplines. However, put that minor niggle aside – if you are an Australian extranet user, complete the survey.