HOW E-COMMERCE IS CHANGING THE FACILITY MANAGEMENT PRACTICES OF BUILDING OWNERS

Abstract

"The corporate Ford of 2010 will look more like Cisco, a company that manufactures very little.” "Direct-to-the-assembly-line ordering will enable Ford to custom configure cars much the way that Dell custom configures computers.” --Forbes, July 17, 2000 The above quotation is an indication of how information technology is changing even old-line manufacturing organizations. The research reported in this paper was motivated by our desire to better understand how information technology and, in particular, the recent phenomenon of e-commerce, was influencing the design and construction industry. Since trends in the building industry are often determined by the desires and programs initiated by large building owners, we decided to focus our research on facility management organizations in Fortune-500 companies.