The potential value of an IT application is no guarantee of its success. There are many barriers that need to be overcome before a technology may be developed, adopted, and successfully implemented within the construction industry. It is possible to identify at least three broad types of barrier: (1) In the first place is the issue of actually developing the IT application. The theory may exist defining the concept, but realizing and fine-tuning that concept into a workable application often requires financial and time commitments to research and development that are not readily available; (2) A second class of barriers is concerned with institutional attitudes — these include prejudice against the adoption of new technologies (resulting from, for example, prior bad experiences in the use of such tools, chauvinism, or conservatism), a lack of understanding of the potential of a tool, a lack of resource commitment to its proper implementation (such as, time, personnel, training), concerns about possible legal ramifications in the use of a new technology, and a lack of confidence in the integrity of the output from a new technology; and (3) A third class of barriers is that of quality issues, sometimes grouped under the headings ‘user-friendliness' and ‘integrity' of the software. These include issues such as the ease with which an application can be learned by its users, the ease with which output and results can be interpreted, the convenience of data input, the convenience with which the application can be tailored to work for each specific problem, whether the program is prone to crash, and the reliability of the results. This paper explores these issues, and their possible solution, by means of case studies selected from the construction industry.