State of knowledge-based management in project networks - case in Finnish infrastructure construction sector

Abstract

Finnish infrastructure construction sector has challenges in productivity and advancing digitalization. We suggest that these problems can be explained with inadequate knowledge-based management (KBM) practices: When information goes missing, employees must collect the information repeatedly. When organizations haven’t identified their information needs, data is collected but never used. The purpose of this research is to discover what is the priority of development to improve KBM in project network. A project network in Finnish infrastructure construction sector typically consists of project companies and public customers. This research was conducted by distributing a survey on maturity of KBM to 22 Finnish organizations in infrastructure construction. 10 of these organizations are customer organizations and 12 are project companies. The results are analyzed with a framework suggested for the maturity survey. The results show that, in the project network, customer organizations have less developed KBM practices than project companies, which is not surprising. The interesting point, however, is that the results highlight the importance of the customer organizations in information sharing in the project network. Therefore, the inadequate KBM practices of customer organizations seem to weaken the productivity of the whole project network.