No abstract

Knowledge is considered one of the effective assets which control the success of organizations, and its effective management is crucial. Although knowledge has existed and has been used along all projects, the way it was managed was almost intuitive and highly reliable on in-house systems. As a consequence, knowledge management was introduced in the late 1990s to help companies create, share, and systematically use knowledge. Knowledge management can be defined as the identification, optimization, and active management of intellectual assets that create value, increase productivity, and gain and sustain competitive advantage. Construction field, as one of the most complicated fields, is considered a project- based field where numbers of investments in it are in millions every year. Although knowledge in construction is among the main factors for project success, most of this knowledge lies in the minds of the people, which makes it hard to be captured and stored. Accordingly, effective knowledge management in construction is affected by different factors, including the willingness of people to share their knowledge and the mobilization of the workforce from one project to another without sharing lessons learned and previous knowledge. Here comes the role of application of KM, which could help prevent “reinventing the wheel” in construction. This paper aims at offering a comprehensive overview of the application of KM in construction through reviewing extant literature sources. Topics discussed included factors affecting KM, KM tools and techniques, the processes of KM, and the main benefits and challenges facing KM. There are many factors affecting knowledge management and many tools and techniques to manage knowledge. As for the findings of this paper, they took the form of an analysis of the main benefits and challenges facing the application of KM in construction.