Model of proactive problem-solving for construction knowledge management

Construction is an experience-based discipline, knowledge or experience accumulated from previous projects plays very important role in successful performance of new works. More and more construction organizations have adopted commercial Knowledge Management Systems (KMSs) for developing their own Knowledge Management (KM) functionalities. The existing KMS's are mostly developed based on Communities of Practice (COPs) for knowledge sharing and exchange. Such approach founds on the reactive problem-solving (RPS) method. That is, the problem raised by the questioner in the COP has to passively "wait" for the members to respond (or react). Previous research indicates that such RPS approach may suffer in poor time and cost effectiveness. This paper proposes a proactive problem-solving (PPS) approach called Model of Proactive Problem-Solving (MPPS) for KMS. Unlike RPS, the PPS proactively solves the problem based on lessons-learned from previous projects. Should the solution is not available; the MPPS dispatches the problem to the most appropriate domain experts so that the problem can be tackled timely and efficiently. The MPPS is described in details, and an example construction KMS that adopts the proposed MPPS is demonstrated. It is found that the proposed MPPS has significant potentials to improve the performance of KMS for construction organizations.