The suitability of IT as a tool to facilitate knowledge sharing in construction alliances

The impact of environmental pressures has led many organisations to combine their resources and form alliances to develop and sustain competitiveness, profitability and long term growth. A review of the literature suggests that construction firms are not significantly different from others in their behaviour in meeting up the challenges imposed by the environment. Trends of forming strategic alliances therefore have embraced majority of the sectors of the construction industry. Not only do alliances act as vehicles for efficient project management but also they provide the opportunity for the organizations to share participants’ knowledge. In this paper, which is based on an ongoing study, we argue that IT could be used as a tool to leverage shared knowledge in alliances to improve organisational outcomes. Indeed the traditional belief among people that “knowledge is power”, which inhibited intraorganisational knowledge sharing, continues to act as a major constraint in alliance knowledge sharing too irrespective of the degree of IT use. In this paper we demonstrate the use of IT to complement other socialisation mechanisms to create new knowledge. In the process we investigate the effectiveness and efficiency of knowledge transfer mechanisms and link organisational outcomes to new knowledge creation.