A Pragmatic Approach to Develop Financial IT Systems for Small Construction Companies

In this paper, we present the results of a four month action research study with a small builder that focused on exploring and improving the builder's financial decision making processes with IT solutions. The paper shows that, while existing IT systems, in general, did not integrate well with the financial decision making processes of the builder, it was possible to pragmatically develop a custom tailored system that only and specifically catered to the builder's needs. The action research study also shows that the AJAX (Asynchronous Java and XML) architecture of the cost control application supported the development of such a pragmatic system well. Overall, the study shows the technical feasibility of pragmatically developing custom tailored software systems closely together with practitioners using AJAX architectures. Overall, the paper provides a first indicator that such pragmatic development can overcome the problems that small construction companies have with supporting their financial decision making processes with IT systems.