Construction Industry Business Processes Modeled with Object-Oriented Approach

For the construction industry, the demands for optimization and greater efficiency become particularly urgent when the flow of project information extends beyond the borders of organizations. Driven by the need to attain even greater corporate competitive advantages, many business philosophies advocate the use of ?the power of information technology to radically redesign business processes.? However, the adoption of IT in organizations and the configuration of IT in direct support of their business is a very complex process. As one step toward a solution, this paper focuses on the development of an Object-Oriented model for construction practices. An Object-Oriented approach is used to map the corporate business process with IT in terms of a series of reusable business objects, which encapsulate complex business rules. The major advantages of this approach are (a) the tedious redesign efforts of information systems can be waived and (b) applications can run on different platforms through Internet/Intranet connectivity. In contrast to an isolated IT system, this approach allows the construction business process to permeate different organizations, and communication in this system becomes process-to-process oriented.