【正文】 ts, then, are justifiably described as plex, largely because of the quantity and interdependence of the ponents that make up the project. Explicit recognition of interdependency in project management approaches. One of the fundamental mechanisms that the AEC/FM industry has developed for dealing with plexity is the approach of dividing project work into welldefined work tasks and assigning each work task to a specialist group. These tasks are then carried out, to a large extent, as if they are fairly independent from each other. To be sure, each participant has some notion that their work must follow certain work and must precede other work, and that certain actions or outes of their work will influence others. By and large, however, participants focus primarily on their individual tasks, with any concerns about these interdependencies addressed in a very ad hoc and reactive way. Most participants try to optimize their own work while the few people responsible for managing the project as a whole have little opportunity to optimize the entire system. Clearly, it is beneficial to anize work in such a way as to minimize interdependency among work tasks. However, we contend that a weakness of current project management practice is that it tends to treat typical AEC/FM work tasks as being far more independent than they actually are. Instead, project management approaches should strive to make the interdependencies between work tasks more explicit. This does not increase interdependence and plexity, but it does make the existing interdependency and plexity more visible, and therefore more manageable. In summary, AEC/FM projects 1 Paraphrased from HomerDixon 2021, . 共 18 頁 第 3 頁 are plex because of the quantity and interdependency of their ponents, and project management techniques should strive to make these interdependencies explicit. Information, Information Management, and Information Technology. All design and management tasks on AEC/FM projects are fundamentally information processing tasks: they take existing project information as input and produce new project information as output. Even construction tasks, which deal with the processing of physical resources, require information as a significant resource. Yet the information resources and information flows are rarely considered and managed explicitly, and are instead treated as implicit in assigned work tasks and physical project ponents. This makes the management of this important resource haphazard, and makes the application of appropriate information technology more difficult. Information Management. We suggest the following general approach to information management (IM) on AEC/FM projects. The IM should adopt a processbased approach, anizing the project into its work tasks. The IM approach should then consider three main issues: 1) the information requirements for each task, 2) the munication requirements between tasks, and 3) the integration across tasks and munications. For each task, the IM should evaluate what the information input requirements are, what IT tools should be used for supporting the task, and what the information outputs are. For munications, the IM should evaluate what information flows must exist between tasks (including their required characteristics such as sender, receiver, mode, content, etc.), and what information and munication technologies are used for these munications. For the integrative analysis, the IM should examine the integration across all tasks and munication flows (., adopt a holistic view and mon IT platforms, rather than addressing each task or munication flow in isolation). This includes integration across anizational boundaries and integration with existing (and future) technologies. Disparate views of a project. As stated previously, all design and management tasks work with information rather than physical resources. This information all describes or models the physical construction project, and thus it can be said that all designers and managers work with information models of the project. However, each task often works with its own unique view, perspective, or type of information model. This wide range of disparate views adds to the fragmentation of these tasks. There is very little of a mon, shared vision of the project across all participants—at least until the physical structure begins to emerge, which provides a unifying mon perspective for all participants. A unified IT view. One of the opportunities of emerging IT is the ability to create building information models: semantically rich information models of construction projects that include both 3D geometric information (3D CAD) along with nongeometric information (everything from material properties to construction costs and schedules). These models support a wide range of advanced analytical and predictive software tools, including virtual project representations such as photorealistic 3D renderings and walkthroughs, and they support extensive information sharing and software interoperability throughout the lifecycle of the project (as exemplified by the Industry Foundation Classes, IFCs, see International Alliance, 2021 and BLIS, 2021). This technology does not require that all project information be bined into a single model, but it allows linkages and interoperability between the various bodies of project information. This technology offers opportunities to create a more unified approach to project management in two ways. First, by linking together disparate views of project information and supporting software interoperability, it provides a technical platform for achieving a more integrated approach to project management. Second, the “ virtual building” created by these technologies has the potential of acting as a mo