Competitive strategy for quantity surveying practices: the importance of information technology

Strategic planning in pursuit of competitive advantage has become a wide‐spread modern business objective. The construction industry shows some evidence of strategic planning implementation; however such concepts are mainly adopted by large contracting companies that have the resources to identify and develop competitive weapons such as information systems/technology (IS/IT). For professional service firms in construction, the nature of the service, the form of client‐customer relations and thus the style of competition are quite different from those followed by contractors. The relevance of competitive strategy and the competitive use of weapons such as IS/IT for professional service firms in construction has not, as yet, been quantifiably tested. Therefore this paper aims to address this imbalance in construction organization research by identifying the competitive strategies used by quantity surveyors based in the UK and assessing the support that IS/IT provides to the competitive strategies of members of this profession. A survey of quantity surveying practices questioned which competitive strategies are followed, how these strategies are implemented and the extent to which IS/IT is being used in each strategy's implementation. The results of this survey, in association with existing competitive strategy and IT literature, are used to derive a new model which proposes specific strategies that UK quantity surveyors can and are using to influence their competitive positioning.