Dare to share

You're sitting in your site office in Basingstoke on Wednesday afternoon, scratching your head about the cladding for your new office block, which has to be finalised by the end of the week. Your client wants you to save money on the original design, but isn't sure how to go about it and wants you to do the groundwork. And you have no idea where to start.

100 miles away in Derby, your colleague has just finished an office block under budget by re-specifying the cladding, to great applause from their client. A quick phone call or email could tell you everything you need to know. But you have no idea the answer is out there - within your own company.

Knowledge management is the key to helping you solve your problems on site quicker, cheaper and more effectively by using what's in your colleagues' heads. It's about using IT to capture the knowledge that is created project by project and is usually only stored in the heads of the project team. So instead of reinventing the wheel on each project, there's a vast database of knowledge available to dip into if you're stuck on a tricky problem on site.

Jason Underwood, manager of Construct IT says he's had a lot of requests for information on knowledge management this year, and that it's the next logical step for a construction company after getting to grips with project extranets. "Company intranets and project extranets are the enabling technologies for knowledge management. Once you've created this knowledge electronically, the next step is to capture it and share it with your organisation."

Learning the lessons
Rob Forrester, a project director for Wates, would agree. "From using project hubs, knowledge management follows naturally. Big clients such as Railtrack are encouraging their suppliers to get into it, but its not happening to any great degree in construction."

Forrester has, however, dipped his toe in the water. He used planning software Primavera on his last project, Leeds First Station for Railtrack. The software identifies potential risks by overlaying historical data onto current information, and once you've completed the project, it shows you where you went wrong and what the problems were. This data is invaluable to the rest of the company, says Forrester.

"Overall visibility, not just for individual projects but for the whole company, is not really happening in the industry at present," he says. "Analysing this data means managers of similar projects in the future can swiftly work out critical paths and be aware of what can go wrong. It gives us a chance to benchmark our activities."

Wates bought Primavera off the shelf and used it straight away, with a few days training at a one-off cost of around £2,500. So you don't have to invest millions in a sophisticated system such as Autonomy to get the value of knowledge management. The cost of an Autonomy implementation varies depending on how many users there are and how much customisation is required, but it's in the region of £2m.

Taylor Woodrow has been making use of knowledge management for 30 years, says Iain Sayers, who is project managing Athena, its document and knowledge management system. "We were handing out advice sheets about lessons learnt from projects in the 1970s, so this is nothing new. But it's only in the last two years that technology has become involved."

It took away the element of chance for the client

David Wills, Bovis Lend Lease

Taylor Woodrow started using its document management system in 1997 for its African operations. In 2000 it rolled it out across the whole company, and added the knowledge management function simultaneously.

"Essentially, it's a clever search engine," says Sayers. "It searches for concepts rather than words, then gives you a précis of each entry, picking out the important concepts, so you don't have to trawl through to see what's useful."

And there's no need to bully staff into inputting the data into the system, because anyone using the document management system automatically feeds into the knowledge management software.

Bovis Lend Lease has taken a different approach, introducing a human element to its knowledge management system, IKonnect. Anyone in one of Lend Lease's offices worldwide can send an email query to the team of IKonnect researchers. They in turn search the database for information on the subject and put the inquirer in touch with people who can help. Simple, but effective, says Bob Webb, executive vice-president for global knowledge sharing.

"Technology can't do the job on its own," claims Webb. "We have used vast knowledge databases in the past but felt it wasn't getting the best value out of the knowledge that was in people's heads. A conversation can also bring out new ideas. It's a service, not a database. If the query can't be answered by the database, the researchers will phone round."

David Wills, a project executive for Bovis Construction says the service gave him the chance to impress a client. "I was asked by a client how best to plan the internal layout of their offices. I put out a query to IKonnect and in two days I got three responses, from London, Sydney and the US, with examples of projects that had used similar techniques and the details of a book by architect on the subject."

"Having this information meant we were able to go to the client and back up the knowledge we had with specific examples, which convinced them they were doing the right thing," he adds. "It took away the element of chance and the fear factor for the client, and helped us establish a good relationship with them."