Abstract

The construction industry is strongly based on the knowledge and experience of engineers and other professionals that work in this sector. However, it seems that construction companies do not count with formal and structured systems for capturing and reusing this knowledge. Knowledge management has been proposed as an approach that would help achieving this purpose by formalizing the way in which companies manage their information and experiences, promoting in this way their capture, processing and sharing inside the organization. A recent study was carried out with the goal of finding out about the level of development and practices of knowledge management in construction companies. The specifics objectives of this study were to: 1) learn more about the level of development of knowledge management in Chilean construction organizations, 2) analyze how construction companies are developing different activities related to knowledge management, 3) identify the best instances and tools to capture and share the experiences and lessons learned, and 4) identify the main barriers in front of the implementation of this approach. This article presents the main results of the study. Main contributions of the paper are the finding of several barriers to the application of a knowledge management system in this sector and the absence of the appropriate processing of this knowledge to allow sharing it along the whole construction organization.