Proceedings COBRA 2010 The Construction, Building and Real Estate Research Conference of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, Dauphine Université, Paris, 2-3 September 2010 (2010)

Knowledge management practices in the construction industry

Revista : Proceedings of The Construction, Building and Real Estate Research Conference, Royal Institute of Ch
Tipo de publicación : Conferencia No A* ni A

Abstract

The construction industry is strongly based on the knowledge and experience of engineers and other
professionals that work in this sector. However, it seems that construction companies do not count with
formal and structured systems for capturing and reusing this knowledge. Knowledge management has been
proposed as an approach that would help achieving this purpose by formalizing the way in which companies
manage their information and experiences, promoting in this way their capture, processing and sharing inside
the organization. A recent study was carried out with the goal of finding out about the level of development
and practices of knowledge management in construction companies. The specifics objectives of this study
were to: 1) learn more about the level of development of knowledge management in Chilean construction
organizations, 2) analyze how construction companies are developing different activities related to
knowledge management, 3) identify the best instances and tools to capture and share the experiences and
lessons learned, and 4) identify the main barriers in front of the implementation of this approach. This article
presents the main results of the study. Main contributions of the paper are the finding of several barriers to
the application of a knowledge management system in this sector and the absence of the appropriate
processing of this knowledge to allow sharing it along the whole construction organization.