Capturing knowledge from facilities management practice - issues and possibilities

This is an exploratory paper that looks at issues and possibilities in relation to capturing experience and knowledge from facilities management practice. The underlying premise is that hitherto, current facilities management practice is largely unstructured leading to tremendous waste of facilities managers’ time (a critical resource) in day-to-day problems solving. If facilities managers’ ‘attention resource’ is to be optimized, then a structured way of capturing their experience should optimize waste associated with ‘re-inventing the wheel’ within the organization concerned. The possibilities of linking recurring problems to specific or related knowledge content within the scope of activities of facilities management (FM) can potentially provide a fruitful path for exploring and managing the capture, analysis and classification of emerging core knowledge areas as corporate knowledge unique to the particular business and portfolio setting. This paper begins with a critical analysis of the concepts behind ‘knowledge management’ and other management tools like business process reengineering, total quality management, project and risk management; as they currently appear in published literature. This analysis considers the notion of knowledge and how it is able to be managed as well as providing context to the emergence of knowledge management as a “new wave” management technique. Issues surrounding current definitions of knowledge management will form the basis of the derivation of a working definition that will be used to propose a knowledge management model for facilities management practice. The proposed knowledge mapping model will combined knowledge captured from FM practice and content matching against commonly accepted FM core activities/areas or competences. The paper will explore issues and consider possibilities of structuring a proposed knowledge content that reflects the realities of practice.