Study of drivers for adoption of information technology by local engineering consulting firms in construction industry

While usage of Information Technology (IT) is worldwide increasingly becoming the salient feature of professional services in construction industry there is a gap in developing countries in explaining its adoption contray to abound reports in developed world. This research focused into addressing the said gap mainly with objective of assessing influential factors that drive adoption of IT in local engineering consulting firms in Tanzania construction industry. The research was based on questionnaire survey where by data were gathered through self administered questionnaires responded by sampled local registered consulting firms. The results indicate that adoption of IT is mainly driven by need for technological benefits such as efficiency, cost reducation and high quality with organizational and environmental factors revealed to be insignificant. IT usage is mainly for designing, administrative tasks and for e-mails. Strategic internet based applications like e-business are yet to be exploited and potential for their continuing adoption revealed to depend on widely networking of users and alignment to strategies. IT adoption is mainly constrained by electric power and high cost of hardware and software. It is recommended to policy makers to further facilitate infrastructures development and a role model in IT usages so as to accelerate networking of users. On the other hand practitioners have to adopt IT strategically with potential of attaining more technical business applications like e-business, electronic data management and tele-working as these are the incumbent future of business globally.