An approach to facilitate knowledge streams of occasional individual building industry clients at the pre-project stage

The normative models guiding the purposeful activities of the building industry client have been presented. However, it is unknown if individual clients follow the normative pattern of activities although they comprise eighty percent of building industry clients. In particular, more attention needs to be paid to occasional individual clients at the pre-project stage because, in general, occasional clients show a lack of knowledge at this stage. To counteract the lack of knowledge, theories and practices of knowledge management (KM) can provide a logical means to support them. The reviews of knowledge theory and KM suggest that knowledge should be approached as streams (or flows), rather than assets to manage; people-bound aspects, such as attitude and behaviour, should be considered with system-bound aspects, and knowledge 'Ba' (or context) should be focussed to facilitate knowledge streams. Given that the necessary knowledge for occasional individual clients also flows at the societal level, in order to sustain the knowledge streams for them, two approaches to cultivate Ba are suggested: Market appraoched Ba where the service providers maintain knowledge for marketing; network-approached Ba where the clients provide knowledge for maintaining reference power. Information systems (IS) can provide the infostructure, the ontological base of knowledge streams and supports epistemological knowledge streams. In order to exmine the conceptual model stated above, enquiry themes are investigated: Do individual clients have proper attitude on their role and behaviour in seeking information to take on their role? Through real world investigation of individual clients who were selected through rigorous strata random sampling, the feasability of implementing the approach is validated. Analysis of results also contribute to the specification of a web-based system, the ontological part of application. Although testing its prototype is beyond the scope of this research, when tested, it would evaluate further the ideas developed in this thesis.