Knowledge is regarded as valuable intellectual asset of an organization. Increasing numbers of industries aware of the significant of managing knowledge for organizational operation and commit to develop proper knowledge management framework to enhance operation efficiency. The aim of this report is to develop a knowledge management process to carry out more effective and efficient project work through proper adoption of Knowledge Management System (KMS) and Enterprise System (ER) on knowledge creation, capture, utilization and sharing within and across organisation. Civil engineering is composed of numbers of stakeholders in various professionals, industries and to participate in same worksite and commit in the same objectives. Whilst, the knowledge in civil engineering is mostly generated through practical exercises so that knowledge are in the mind of workers and experts. Therefore, it will be lost easily as long as the project completed or employees leave the organisation. So the suggested knowledge management implementation for this case will mainly focus on managing knowledge with multi-disciplinary work and trans-disciplinary work to capture the best practice for sharing and reuse. Also, it is necessary to identify the main holders of knowledge in order to promote knowledge sharing and creativity and externalise tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge from knowledge holders’ mind to contextual reports. It enable those valuable knowledge from past experience being able to re-sue for the future projects. Consequently, the crucial section of the report is going to propose an insight into the process of knowledge management on transnational operation with organisational level and client project level then target at the objective of time saving and creative respond to client needs. Finally, concluding some recommendations with those problems likely exist while processing knowledge management flow.
Knowledge Management in Civil Engineering firm
Summarizing claims from various experts at knowledge management, knowledge management is sort of procedure and technique for promoting organisational performance and complete assigned task using creation, capture, collection, sharing and implementation of information and knowledge around organisations (Kasimu, Amiruddin & Abdullah 2013). Civil engineering industry involve wide range of employees from diverse professional areas working collectively to accomplish particular client project. It is also a highly dynamic sector as project teams are mostly formed temporarily for single project and are contained variety of problems which are often occurring on ad hoc basis. Therefore, knowledge management become increasingly emphasised within civil engineering organisation since most of the knowledge is so called tacit knowledge which is embedded in workers’ mind from their practical experience and these knowledge is hard to be recorded as part of firms’ intellectual asset for reuse. Systematic Collecting and organised storing by knowledge management enable delivering useful knowledge and information from individual to wider organisation to learn from success or failure for retrieving in the future project and avoid repeat mistake and rework of project (Kasimu, Roslan& Fadhlin 2012).
Furthermore, client centric and labour intensive are two main features of civil engineering so that the transmission of knowledge is not the single crucial part in practicing knowledge management procedure, promoting interpersonal relations within workplaces and selection at recruitment are equally important as workers are the key role in creating and sharing knowledge (Venkateswaran& Aundhe 2013; Kasimu, Roslan& Fadhlin 2012). Individuals bring distinctive knowledge for the same target. It is an initiative to encourage workforce engaging in the multi-disciplinary work and trans-disciplinary work to gather various ideas to work out project, so that strength social network will smooth the flow of