Knowledge management for small occasional construction industry clients: A theoretical framework

The role of a client has significant impacts on construction project performance. Major regular clients (the project owner) can afford in-house expertise to play the role as the client's representative (also called the project sponsor), to enhance the quality, value for money and suitability of the building procured. However, small occasional clients (SOCs) are not likely to enjoy the advantages stated above due to limited budgets and the occasional commissioning of projects. For this reason, it has been said that SOCs show a lack of knowledge that is necessary to act effectively as the client. To counteract the disadvantage, the theories and practices of knowledge management (KM) seem to present a logical way to support SOCs to acquire knowledge. Stemming from organizational competence theory, it could, in part, be adopted to facilitate KM for SOCs. Hence, this paper not only presents a review of several KM theories that appear to offer benefits, but it also addresses the limitations, supplemented by a societal-approached theory. The paper concludes with a societal-approached domain model to facilitate KM for SOCs, which is merely a basis for further research. The entire research framework will be briefly mentioned in the conclusion.