Start Date
11-8-2016
Description
Megaprojects are symbolic milestones of human history. From the Great Pyramid of Giza and the Great Wall of China to the Hoover Dam and the Manhattan Project, history is marked by an array of megaprojects. Some megaprojects are born out of necessity while others showcase power and status of individuals, groups, or countries. Most megaprojects are one-of-a-kind endeavors to which traditional project management principles are neither applicable nor suitable, rendering the holistic study of megaprojects especially difficult. Regardless of the recent uptick in research on megaprojects there is no systemic framework that can help systematically assess and guide megaprojects and megaproject research. In the absence of such a framework there is a significant risk of bias in planning the projects and the topics researched. In this paper, we present an ontology of megaprojects and discuss how it can help analyze individual megaprojects and synthesize the corpus of megaproject research.
Recommended Citation
Syn, Thant and Ramaprasad, Arkalgud, "An Ontology of Megaprojects" (2016). AMCIS 2016 Proceedings. 1.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/amcis2016/ITProj/Presentations/1
An Ontology of Megaprojects
Megaprojects are symbolic milestones of human history. From the Great Pyramid of Giza and the Great Wall of China to the Hoover Dam and the Manhattan Project, history is marked by an array of megaprojects. Some megaprojects are born out of necessity while others showcase power and status of individuals, groups, or countries. Most megaprojects are one-of-a-kind endeavors to which traditional project management principles are neither applicable nor suitable, rendering the holistic study of megaprojects especially difficult. Regardless of the recent uptick in research on megaprojects there is no systemic framework that can help systematically assess and guide megaprojects and megaproject research. In the absence of such a framework there is a significant risk of bias in planning the projects and the topics researched. In this paper, we present an ontology of megaprojects and discuss how it can help analyze individual megaprojects and synthesize the corpus of megaproject research.