Knowledge Management (KM) is perhaps broadest in its scope, but Document Management (DM) and Project Management (PM) also have a part to play in integrating project teams and delivering the sort of collaborative culture that most construction industry pundits are saying is critical to the future success of the sector.

Firstly, we hear views from Will Yandell, a Director of Union Square Software, who during the past three years should be credited with  trying to "educate" the entire construction supply chain as to what KM is, just how far reaching a KM strategy can become and what benefits can be derived.

Then Paul Muir, CEO of document management vendor McLaren Software Ltd., will warn against the kind of tunnel vision that leads companies to a failure to understand the scope of document management, prompting far too many departmental implementations that miss out on the significant advantages of being able to link document management systems with business processes.

Will Yandell: Is KM just the latest buzz word put about by consultants and software houses to generate interest ? Maybe. Have individuals and organisations misrepresented it, claiming significant gains when these have yet to be realised ? Perhaps. In my view the important questions are: can it reduce costs, differentiate your business or generate revenue? The answer to all three of these is a very definite yes and has been for all our clients. 

To begin with we need to consider where we have come from.   My current experience is that most organisations now have a grasp of what KM is and will generally offer up a reasonable definition.  Many claim to have KM strategies (particularly the larger ones).  The majority understand that KM initiatives are inevitably change projects requiring significant cultural shift and commitment from senior management.  But how they go about starting a KM initiative or prioritising what should be in the scope is where things start to fall down.

It is not enough or indeed acceptable for someone to stand up at a board meeting and say: "we need a new KM system" and quite rightly so, there needs to be proper justification and a clear understanding of why the organisation needs one and what it will deliver. It is certainly easier for someone to say: "we need a new accounting system" or "printer" because these are clearly identifiable by the established benefits that they will deliver. 

I'm not going to start defining KM here, this is well documented elsewhere and is not within the scope of this submission (read one of our papers!).  However, in summary it is basically about being "joined up" - the purists might start shuffling their feet and scoffing at this point.  However, most organisations in the sector are not i.e. they fail to link together the most basic elements of knowledge in ways that are meaningful to their most important people i.e. those employees involved in delivering projects and therefore value.

This is why organisations from all parts of the sector have decided to work with us. Not because we are good at KM or that we can deliver a shrink-wrapped KM strategy (like a shrink wrapped accounting system) but because we can help them realise significant efficiency gains by improving their delivery of projects or allowing them to offer new services from which they can generate incremental project related revenue.

Clearly this is a bold statement, but if you think in terms of an organisation as having a project as its key deliverable then all data and processes come under the KM heading and therefore the scope of a KM project. This is why KM is such a difficult subject for organisations to contemplate; on the one side its quite simple and all about being "joined up" and delivering projects more efficiently and on the other its about everything you do as an organisation - the implications are potentially immense !

The KM projects that we have been involved in have not necessarily started as KM projects, their inception has typically been more precise.   For example, many of our clients start with a desire to improve contact management. This soon leads on to a more general discussion about marketing, enquiry management and before you know it, you have to include document management, which leads into a wider discussion about quality and document control, which leads nicely into project collaboration, supply chain integration and so on...

Where do you stop ? The answer is you don't.   A KM project can start almost anywhere.  The important thing is to realise that your current initiative should be part of a wider KM strategy. So, regardless of what your starting point is, be it to improve quality, deploy an intranet, streamline financial reporting or just get your project archiving sorted it should be part of a much wider review of the way you are structured as a whole.

If this sounds like I have reduced KM to being fundamentally about integration then so be it.  If you want to call it KM and say that you have a KM initiative or KM strategy then that's fine but at the end of the day it all adds up to the same thing:
KM in construction is maturing rapidly.
KM is about being better organised within a more "joined up" environment.
KM is fundamentally about improving your delivery of projects and therefore about everything that you do.

Paul Muir: Departments will have differing views over exactly what document management is and this factor alone can reduce competitive advantage.  Whilst an engineer may view it as the management of drawings in a CAD environment, the work that they do has a direct impact on those responsible for contract negotiation, payment collection and project management.  In far too many instances the ability to control and link the business processes that deliver content to other systems is missing. 

All of the information that a business needs is held in its underlying IT infrastructure, which is made up of document management, HR, ERP and CRM systems, etc., but is not being linked across each repository and business agility is being impacted as a result.  Far too many departments are left to their own devices when it comes to choosing an IT solution, so now is the time for businesses to pull the disparate components together and manage them effectively. 

The true value of content can only be realised in the context of a business process.  The issue here is not the current state of document management applications but how content can be more effectively managed in the future.  A company that has the ability to organise content across the organisation instead of limiting it to a departmental level has a major advantage, building stronger business processes through a shared infrastructure.

The move towards collaborative working has already highlighted how the sharing of information can provide real business benefits and the astute organisation should be thinking of taking this one stage further by integrating its internal systems.  By failing to act on this now businesses are encouraging departmental tunnel vision and it is their bottom line that will suffer as a result.

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