Development of Km Model to Simplify Knowledge Management Implementation in Construction Projects

To improve competitiveness, construction companies have to reduce cost and time of completion of projects while improving the quality of projects. Knowledge management (KM) is becoming increasingly important for the construction industry. Lessons learnt from the construction industry have proved that by reusing and sharing knowledge among engineers and experts can enhance construction projects successfully and decrease cost and time of completion, and help in solving problems associated with the projects. Many KM models currently used in the construction industry may have some problems in many circumstances, which cannot be used efficiently and effectively. This paper presents a new KM model that combines many of the recent research outputs from construction domain and other disciplines. The proposed model presents the essential KM activities and features broken down into more manageable parts that are easy to understand and use, which simplifies the understanding of the sources of knowledge, the inputs and outputs, the flow of knowledge and the identification of other variables such as the cultural effects on the organizational knowledge. A case study collected from the industry is used to demonstrate how the proposed KM model can be used to improve the industry KM performance.