Knowledge mapping: Concepts and benefits for a sustainable urban environment

Competition and globalisation are putting terrific pressure on organisations to provide a better quality service, to improve the speed to market, and to improve organisational agility and innovation. As organisations try to meet these challenges, they need to be innovative to produce the knowledge intensive services desired by their customers. As an organisation's knowledge base comes to light, it is valued as both organisational intellectual capital and a source of competitive advantage. However, as the amount and depth of organisational knowledge increases, it poses some challenges to an organisation. The key challenges for knowledge intensive organisations are how to identify, map, assimilate, disseminate, and apply knowledge; particularly the mapping of knowledge between different users with different perspectives and purposes. This is especially true with the move towards a sustainable built environment. The knowledge map is a picture of what exists in an organisation or a network. Therefore, it can be used as a tool to evaluate the organisation's knowledge stock; revealing strengths to be exploited and gaps that need to be filled. This paper is based, primarily, on a review of literature as part of an on-going study of Knowledge Management and Change Management within a Sustainable Urban Environment (SUE). It presents the concepts of knowledge mapping, some of its potential benefits, and the main challenges and issues associated with knowledge mapping initiatives within SUE. It also looks at the role of Information and Communication Technologies, which might be of assistance in this regard. The paper concludes that mapping and managing knowledge assets in SUE is an integrated and complex process. This involves social, cultural, financial, and technological considerations. The paper also notes that knowledge mapping can be of immense benefit in a wide range of activities in a sustainable urban environment. It is recommended that more research effort needs to be targeted on how to improve the process of mapping, communicating and using sustainability knowledge across and within organisations.