Best Practices of Organizational Change Management for Adopting New Technologies within the AEC Industry

The architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry has often been accused of being slow to adopt change. Yet in the modern AEC industry—where the breadth of available technology solutions continues to grow—companies must be increasingly adept at organizational change management to maintain their competitive edge. When a company fails to achieve successful change adoption, the full potential of technology solutions may never be realized. The objective of this study was to identify the relationships between specific change management practices and organizational adoption of new technology solutions. An industry-wide approach was taken, wherein an online survey methodology was used to collect 167 cases of organization-wide change from AEC firms across the United States and Canada. The method of analysis included a correlation analysis between change management practices and change adoption. Reliability testing and principal components analysis were used to extract a single construct measure of change adoption. Results include a rank-order of specific change management practices most associated with successful technology adoption. Change-agent effectiveness, measured benchmarks, realistic timeframe, and communicated benefits are the four change management practices that had the strongest association strength with successful change adoption. The discussion addresses how these leading change management practices compare with previous literature. This study contributes an industry-wide view of change management practices specifically within the context of technology-based organizational change adoption, that may assist practitioners to better understand and manage technology adoption process in their organizations.