TECHNOLOGY STRATEGY AND COMPETITIVE PERFORMANCE IN BRIDGE CONSTRUCTION

Pragmatic construction professionals, accustomed to intense price comp etition and focused on the bottom line, have difficulty justifying inv estments in advanced technology. Researchers and industry professional s need improved tools to analyze how technology affects the performanc e of the firm. This paper reports the results of research to begin ans wering the question, ''does technology matter?'' The researchers devel oped a set of five dimensions for technology strategy, collected infor mation regarding these dimensions along with four measures of competit ive performance in five bridge construction firms, and analyzed the in formation to identify relationships between technology strategy and co mpetitive performance. Three technology strategy dimensions-competitiv e positioning, depth of technology strategy and organizational fit-sho wed particularly strong correlations with the competitive performance indicators of absolute growth in contract awards and contract award va lue per technical employee. These findings indicate that technology do es matter. The research also provides ways to analyze options for appr oaching technology and ways to relate technology to competitive perfor mance for use by managers. It also provides a valuable set of research measures for technology strategy.