Critical steps to knowledge mapping in facilities management organisation

Knowledge mapping is an on-going quest within an organisation to survey, audit and synthesise the knowledge within an organisation. Auditing knowledge within an organisation identifies knowledge gap, classifies, sorts and identifies the knowledge flow within the organisation. Synthesis is the ultimate stage in knowledge mapping where the processes, peoples and knowledge mapping tools are cleverly linked to each other and elucidate the relationship among them. However, the absence of knowledge management approaches in the organisation, arguably, causes deficiency of structured and purposive knowledge mapping. For facilities management organisations, the question of where and how to start and what is needed to commence the knowledge mapping initiative in the organisation leave facilities managers in limbo. Facilities managers in Malaysia realise the importance of their knowledge rich organisations being mapped. This is to ensure that they do well in the competitive business environment and gain recognition of their important role in supporting prime activities of the clients organisations. The literature review and survey interview amongst facilities managers in Malaysia reveal that it is crucial to identify knowledge assets in an organisation very early on. Through knowledge mapping, expected benefits can be fully exploited.