Background of the Study

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CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background of the Study

Many researchers have found out that there are some problems in construction industry, which are related to knowledge flow during a building project’s life cycle. They also explained that this problem could arise from tacit dominated area of building projects. Some of these notions are discussed below: Paulson 1976 and Jin Levitt 1996 stated that incomplete knowledge transfer cause unnecessary rework delay and lost revenue in the construction industry. Ibrahim 2005 explained that knowledge always tends to lie on the critical path of workflow, and as a result affects duration as well as its cost. Hence, we know that in 2005 construction industry was still facing this problem. In addition, Ibrahim and Nissen 2007 believed that knowledge, which was moving through the building project’s workflows, could affect its performance. Furthermore, Ibrahim Paulson 2008 in their qualitative research revealed how incomplete knowledge flows can influence competitive advantage in the construction industry. Nissen 2006 expressed that the flow of knowledge was critical to an organization success. Furthermore, he supports that the flow of knowledge always tends to lie on the critical path of workflows and, as a result, affects organizational performance. 2 Therefore, Nissen 2006 and Ibrahim and Paulson 2008 expressed importance of knowledge flow to complete a building project successfully. Ibrahim 2008 found that one characteristic which contributes to the knowledge loss phenomenon is the different dominating knowledge types for each lifecycle phase. She argued that knowledge problems could relate to knowledge type. Therefore, the study supports the need to consider different knowledge types in construction industry situations. Wheeler Sanvido and Norton, 1994 divided the life of an architectural construction project into nine major phases from planning to occupancy of the facility. Wheelers fourth, fifth, and sixth phases cover the design stage of a building project to determine sub activities and outputs Sanvido Norton, 1994. Martinez1998 stated that knowledge leaks resulting from the lack of a heightened degree of knowledge sharing, cause repeated mistakes, dependence on a few key individuals, duplicated work, lack of sharing of good ideas, and slow introduction of new products or market solutions. Therefore, in support of Nissen 2006 who stated that knowledge sharing is one stage in knowledge flow life cycle, Martinez had similarly expressed that these problems are due to knowledge flow that cause time and cost overruns. Additionally, Ahmed 2005 stated that engineering firms are facing pressures to increase the quality of their product and to have even shorter lead-time and cost reduction. Many researchers such as Macmillan 2001, Martinez 1998, and Ibrahim 2008 have argued to refocus on the design stage in a building project life cycle since this is the source of long-term time and cost overruns, which arise from inefficient knowledge flow. Indeed, Ibrahim and Paulson 2008 pinpointed that 3 the critical stage where knowledge loss starts to be initiated, is when the building project’s team is still struggling to integrate the structural and service requirements of a building while the project sponsor has locked-in the cost and time factors as the source of many design mis-coordination. Accordingly, it is the purpose of this study to improve the knowledge flows at this problematic source. O’dell et al. 2000 Mertins et al. 2001 explained that many practitioners get benefit from knowledge management including revenue growth, shorter design time etc. Shelborn 2006 also stated effective KM could reduce project time and cost, improve quality, and provide a major source of competitive advantage for the construction organizations. For this purpose, O’dell 2000 and Shelborn 2006 have introduced KM as a solution for time and cost overrun. This study gains further support as many researchers such as Paulson 1976, Jin Levitt 1996, Ibrahim Paulson 2008 emphasize that there are recurring problems related to time and cost in the construction industry. Furthermore, they argued that a large amount of these problems could be explained from the knowledge flow perspective. Studies by Ibrahim and Nissen 2007 and Shumate, Ibrahim and Levitt in press provided empirical support on how the overall performance of a building project’s team is related to their tacit comprehension specifically to the early design phase. Additionally, researchers such as O’dell et al. 2000, Mertins et al. 2001, Shelborn 2006 and Ibrahim 2008 have stated that effective knowledge management can reduce building project’s time and cost and improve quality. Therefore, the researcher posits that focusing more on implementing knowledge management process during 4 design stage can facilitate knowledge flow for improving quality while maintaining time and cost. Despite the abovementioned arguments, Pektaş 2006 highlighted the lack of research in better understanding and manipulating knowledge flows in project organizations. Even though these organizations have the desire and need to learn from experience, Scott and Harris’s 1998 study noted reasons of lacking of time and money and increasing pressure of upcoming work for not capturing and sharing knowledge effectively. For knowledge to be sustainable for competitive advantage and the improvement of organizational performance, project organization must gather and store all its reusable knowledge and make it accessible to others Javernick et al., 2007. Hence, this thesis supports Levitt 2007 who had suggested that future work about discovering how new processes and mechanisms can facilitate knowledge sharing to deliver a built environment which is more economically, environmentally and socially sustainable through a global supply chain Levitt, 2007. It is in this direction that this study wants to focus on.

1.2 Definition of Terms