Managing Maintenance Knowledge in the Context of Large Engineering Projects: Theory and Case Study

Tenix Defence, one of Australia’s largest defence contractors, depends on winning bids and managing contracts for long-lifecycle engineering projects. The ability to capture, manage and deliver project knowledge in explicit formats is crucial to its success. Tenix is moving from a paradigm of traditional paper documents to electronically managing and automating structured knowledge artefacts in a knowledge management framework based on Karl Popper’s (1973) three worlds of knowledge. The new technology captures the authors’ implicit knowledge that was inevitably lost when working with paper documents and also moves aspects of personal cognition from the subjective and personal World 2 into the objective, virtual and persistent World 3.