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The construction industry’s daily processes demand heavy data usage and communication between project participants to meet client requirements. Thus, the application of information technology in project implementation has been increasing in the construction sector (CS) lately. However, the same cannot be seen in public sectors responsible for implementing government projects in South Africa. This study aimed to investigate the causes and effects of the underutilisation of information communication technology (ICT) in the building section of a public sector in a municipality in South Africa.

A qualitative approach was adopted for the study, using a public sector in one of the municipalities as a case study. Face-to-face interviews were conducted among the building unit workers, using unstructured interview questions. The data collected were analysed using the ATLAS.ti software.

The findings indicate a lack of understanding of existing and newly available ICT software and hardware technology among staff within the building technology due to lack of digitalisation in construction projects implementation, inadequate system upgrades, lack of adequate ICT resources, lack of financial resources for internet and software application subscriptions and lack of ICT training leading. The issues mentioned above have led to the outsourcing of projects professionals, slow pace of electronic emails, untrained professionals, usage of different and unlicensed software, resulting in the underutilisation of ICT within the whole building section. This change also adversely affects all officials, especially the junior officials who have graduated using the most recent ICT technology during their studies.

The building department of only one public sector was used for the study; therefore, the findings may not be generalisable. The case study public sector’s name is withheld for confidentiality purposes.

Adequate change management and continuous development, combined with the allocation of proper resources, would be necessary for all staff members. Enormous investments had to be made in the ICT equipment by providing a sufficient budget in the building section of the public sectors. The building section within public sectors should provide change management to all aged skills staff by attending seminars to learn new ICT technology applied within its work environment.

The study established the causes of the underutilisation of ICT in the CS, especially in the public work departments and municipalities, and how this contributes to service delivery.

The future construction site will be pervasive, context aware and embedded with intelligence. The purpose of this paper is to explore and define the concept of the digital skin of the future smart construction site.

The paper provides a systematic and hierarchical classification of 114 articles from both industry and academia on the digital skin concept and evaluates them. The hierarchical classification is based on application areas relevant to construction, such as augmented reality, building information model-based visualisation, labour tracking, supply chain tracking, safety management, mobile equipment tracking and schedule and progress monitoring. Evaluations of the research papers were conducted based on three pillars: validation of technological feasibility, onsite application and user acceptance testing.

Technologies learned about in the literature review enabled the envisaging of the pervasive construction site of the future. The paper presents scenarios for the future context-aware construction site, including the construction worker, construction procurement management and future real-time safety management systems.

Based on the gaps identified by the review in the body of knowledge and on a broader analysis of technology diffusion, the paper highlights the research challenges to be overcome in the advent of digital skin. The paper recommends that researchers follow a coherent process for smart technology design, development and implementation in order to achieve this vision for the construction industry.

The study is interested in knowing “the role of the organizational structure as a mediating variable of the relationship between the information technology and organizational communication”.

The study was conducted in several service companies, and the study adopted the questionnaire as a basic tool for the data collection on the practical side, as 267 opinions were surveyed, in addition to conducting personal interviews, and the normal distribution of data was tested, analyzing, describing and diagnosing study variables, testing correlations and determining direct effects.

Findings show that there is no direct and significant statistical impact of information technology on organizational communications. Whereas there was a positive, direct and statistically significant impact of information technology on the organizational structure. There was also a positive, direct and statistically significant effect of the organizational structure on organizational communication.

This paper is restricted to the role of the organizational structure as a mediating variable of the relationship between the influence of information technology on organizational communication.

As part of the practical implication, the paper suggests the need to increase support and attention to the importance of information technology in service organizations in order to increase coordination and organizational communication and achieve a high ability to explore and exploit ideas.

Apart from the fact that several companies were engaged, the organizational structures of these companies were engaged too to examine the impacts of Information technology (ICT) on organizational communication.

Digital twin (DT) is an emerging technology that enables sophisticated interaction between physical objects and their virtual replicas. Although DT has recently gained significant attraction in both industry and academia, there is no systematic understanding of DT from its development history to its different concepts and applications in disparate disciplines. The majority of DT literature focuses on the conceptual development of DT frameworks for a specific implementation area. Hence, this paper provides a state-of-the-art review of DT history, different definitions and models, and six types of key enabling technologies. The review also provides a comprehensive survey of DT applications from two perspectives: (1) applications in four product-lifecycle phases, i.e. product design, manufacturing, operation and maintenance, and recycling and (2) applications in four categorized engineering fields, including aerospace engineering, tunneling and underground engineering, wind engineering and Internet of things (IoT) applications. DT frameworks, characteristic components, key technologies and specific applications are extracted for each DT category in this paper. A comprehensive survey of the DT references reveals the following findings: (1) The majority of existing DT models only involve one-way data transfer from physical entities to virtual models and (2) There is a lack of consideration of the environmental coupling, which results in the inaccurate representation of the virtual components in existing DT models. Thus, this paper highlights the role of environmental factor in DT enabling technologies and in categorized engineering applications. In addition, the review discusses the key challenges and provides future work for constructing DTs of complex engineering systems.

This paper describes a small research project undertaken in a technical college in Qatar on the use of iPads in the classroom. iPads were trialed for a semester each in mathematics and physics classes; students completed pre- and post-surveys. Classroom observations were carried out and interviews were conducted with both faculty (N=3) and students (N=19). Over 80% of students reported positively on the iPad as being “helpful” to “very helpful” for learning new things and course materials, for increasing their interaction with online course materials and getting course information and for exploring additional material related to course topics. Faculty perceptions of iPad use in class were also positive.

The aim of this research is to identify the characteristics that give rise to motivations to use social apps in light of behavioral concepts related to consumers’ desires and emotional values.

Netnography is used as the main methodology to analyze and categorize user profiles of online social networks. These profiles are presented through conceptual headlines, which highlight the main characteristics of each user group.

The results of the study show that many users have become dependent on the WhatsApp application, either for technological reasons or for social reasons related to fashion and status.

Few consumers actually explained the ways they use mobile social networks in the context of the procedures and level of communication performed. However, the influence of social contexts in the consumer environment is changing perceived values focusing on prestige and status to technological elements that the majority of consumers use.

Practical implications are directly related to forming business connections in a less formal and more hedonic environment, improving market results while fostering user enjoyment. In addition, the ongoing updates to WhatsApp have brought new functionalities and improvements to previously weak features.

Although other applications offer means by which to talk and send messages, WhatsApp continues to be (as of early 2021) the most used platform for conversation in Brazil. The sovereignty of WhatsApp is directly linked to its social value, which is related to the number of consumers who daily interact via the network.

The purpose of this research is to develop a generic framework of a digital twin (DT)-based automated construction progress monitoring through reality capture to extended reality (RC-to-XR).

IDEF0 data modeling method has been designed to establish an integration of reality capturing technologies by using BIM, DTs and XR for automated construction progress monitoring. Structural equation modeling (SEM) method has been used to test the proposed hypotheses and develop the skill model to examine the reliability, validity and contribution of the framework to understand the DRX model's effectiveness if implemented in real practice.

The research findings validate the positive impact and importance of utilizing technology integration in a logical framework such as DRX, which provides trustable, real-time, transparent and digital construction progress monitoring.

DRX system captures accurate, real-time and comprehensive data at construction stage, analyses data and information precisely and quickly, visualizes information and reports in a real scale environment, facilitates information flows and communication, learns from itself, historical data and accessible online data to predict future actions, provides semantic and digitalize construction information with analytical capabilities and optimizes decision-making process.

The research presents a framework of an automated construction progress monitoring system that integrates BIM, various reality capturing technologies, DT and XR technologies (VR, AR and MR), arraying the steps on how these technologies work collaboratively to create, capture, generate, analyze, manage and visualize construction progress data, information and reports.

The purpose of this paper is to emphasize the increasing importance of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in smart tourism destinations, in their integration in the activity of the tourism companies, and in their interaction with visitors/tourists. In summary, it is intended to evaluate in the city of Porto how the use of technology before, during and after the visit influences the tourist experience.

The authors empirically investigate the importance of using ICTs during tourism experience, assess the access/availability of ICT at the destination and its importance in tourist’s decisions. It is analyzed if the applications and/or information available on the internet are important and positively influence the tourism experience in Porto, that is, the degree of tourist satisfaction. The empirical evidence is based on a quantitative analysis, using a data set involving 423 tourists in the city of Porto.

The importance of the internet access at the destination, especially in places like airports and hotels, since most tourists are primarily using their mobile devices and computers during the trip, and the existing information technologies available in the destination (internet, smartphones or other mobile devices and applications) are considered very important in explaining tourists’ experience.

This study identifies the strengths and weaknesses of the technological strategies, providing useful information for destination management, discussing innovation in tourism, and proposing a framework that empirically evaluates how technological components used in smart tourism destinations can improve tourists’ experiences.

This paper aims to describe a method for Internet-of-Things-devices to achieve industrial grade reliability for information transfer from wireless sensor systems to production systems using blockchain technologies.

An increased security and reliability of submitted data within the sensor network could be achieved on an application level. Therefore, a lightweight, high-level communication protocol based on blockchain principles was designed.

Blockchain mechanisms can secure the wireless communication of Internet-of-Things-devices in a lightweight and scalable manner.

The innovation of this research is the successful application of general blockchain mechanisms to increase security of a wireless sensor system without binding to a dedicated blockchain technology.

The purpose of this paper is to present a conceptual model that defines the essential components shaping the new Digital Supply Chains (DSCs) through the implementation and acceleration of Industry 4.0.

The scope of the present work exposes a conceptual approach and review of the key literature from 1989 to 2019, concerning the evolution and transformation of the actors and constructs in logistics and Supply Chain Management (SCM) by means of examining different conceptual models and a state-of-the-art review of Industry 4.0’s concepts and elements, with a focus on digitization in supply chain (SC) processes. A detailed study of the constructs and components of SCM, as defined by their authors, resulted in the development of a referential and systematic model that fuses the inherent concepts and roles of SCM, with the new technological trends directed toward digitization, automation, and the increasing use of information and communication technologies across logistics global value chains.

Having achieved an exploration of the different conceptual frameworks, there is no compelling evidence of the existence of a conceptual SCM that incorporates the basic theoretical constructs and the new roles and elements of Industry 4.0. Therefore, the main components of Industry 4.0 and their impact on DSC Management are described, driving the proposal for a new conceptual model which addresses and accelerates a vision of the future of the interconnectivity between different DSCs, grouped in clusters in order to add value, through new forms of cooperation and digital integration.

This research explores the gap in the current SCM models leading into Industry 4.0. The proposed model provides a novel and comprehensive overview of the new concepts and components driving the nascent and current DSCs. This conceptual framework will further aid researchers in the exploration of knowledge regarding the variables and components presented, as well as the verification of the newly revealed roles and constructs to understand the new forms of cooperation and implementation of Industry 4.0 in digitalized SCs.