Collaborative Knowledge Management—A Construction Case Study
doi:10.1016/j.autcon.2009.03.015
by Bhargav Dave, Lauri Koskela
Salford Centre for Research and Innovation, University of Salford
Abstract: Due to the new threats and challenges faced by the construction industry today, construction companies must seek new solutions in order to remain ahead of the competition. Knowledge has been identified to be a significant organisational resource, which if used effectively can provide competitive advantage. A lot of emphasis is being put on how to identify, capture and share knowledge in today’s organisations. It has been argued over the years that due to the fragmented nature of the construction industry and ad-hoc nature of the construction projects, capture and reuse of valuable knowledge gathered during a construction project pose a challenge. As a result critical mistakes are repeated on projects and construction professionals have to keep “reinventing the wheel”. Given the nature of construction projects, collaborative knowledge management seems to be the most appropriate solution to capture project based knowledge. Information and communication technologies offer a number of solutions to implement collaborative knowledge management solutions. This paper discusses a range of these solutions and presents a case study where a collaborative knowledge management solution is implemented across a multi functional construction company.
The work presented in the case study was carried out while the first author was employed by the case study organisation. A social web application was implemented to solve a particular knowledge sharing problem within the organisation’s concrete pumping business. The new solution provided an effective and simple way to create knowledge by taking employees’ ideas through an iterative cycle of discussion.
Keywords:Knowledge management, Social web applications, Construction
The construction industry fails to retain project knowledge for future reuse. Some common factors behind this are; personnel changing companies or industry, teams being separated after completion of a project, lack of a standard platform to capture and share knowledge, lack of motivation, etc. Many companies have documentation processes such as post project reviews, in place to capture such knowledge, however in most instances these are not properly documented, and if documented they remain locked in archives.
During the monthly meetings and general supervision it was observed that the operators in both workshops regularly identified innovative solutions to solve problems of varying complexity. However due to a lack of formal documentation and sharing procedure, this knowledge was not retained and operators kept “reinventing the wheel” on a regular basis. It was also identified that a significant amount of commonly used information could be shared across the depots, however due to the lack of a sharing platform this could not be achieved.
the following issues were identified, which limited its use in this context:
- Knowledge is only captured in form of documents, which are static in nature and don’t support the knowledge creation lifecycle
- Operators, other than who created knowledge, can’t comment or update documents
- Rich content (i.e. picture, multimedia) is not easy to embed or associate with knowledge
- Searching within the knowledge base is not efficient
- Multiple versions of same documents exist leading to confusion
- Social interaction is important aspect of knowledge creation, this is not supported by the existing platform
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