Developing a framework of knowledge management system for project management in the construction industry

Knowledge has been increasingly valued in recent years, because it reflects best practice and therefore the success of an organisation or business. Organisations seek better methods of knowledge management (KM), to assist them in motivating their employees to capture, transfer and share knowledge. These are the strategic and people aspects of KM. This research will develop a new framework to represent KM systems (KMS), the objective being to store the knowledge which the organisation has in databases and retrieve it when needed. It consists of four phases, the first of which deals with enterprise project management, whereby project information is transferred to software, some being manipulated via IT and the remainder by human resources, manipulation of human resources depend on their experiences and using methods of knowledge sharing, and the result of this manipulation being recognized as knowledge. The second phase consists of the automatic capture and transfer of this knowledge to a multi-dimensional database; phase three is the building of an E-library, where the knowledge is distributed within the database according to its characteristics; and the fourth and final phase is the measurement of KMS performance, where baseline knowledge derived from earlier projects is used in planning the next one. This will affect the revenues of the organisation, so that this phase represents an objective way of measuring KMS performance.