Research On Knowledge Management Capability Of Construction Enterprise Based On Maturity Model

As China’s "New Normal" posts new changes for construction enterprises’ development environment, construction enterprises are facing with the challenges brought by the factors like decreasing demographic dividend, rising price of resources, changes of industry policy and implementation of low-carbon economy. In an era that knowledge has become the key element that boosts the development of the world’s economy, construction enterprises must pay attention to the significance of knowledge management to help them meet the challenges they are facing with and gain sustainable competitive advantage. Thus, a tool that helps construction enterprises to evaluate its knowledge management capability and guides their knowledge management practice is highly in need.Maturity Model is a frontier topic in the software industry and project management area. Several maturity levels are identified and described according to the software and project’s performance in difference stages. The usage of maturity model in the study of construction enterprises’knowledge management offers construction enterprises’a practical framework to evaluate its knowledge management status and guides them to manage knowledge more efficiently and maximize the value of knowledge resource.This paper adopts literature review approach, comparative analysis approach and a combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods to study the knowledge management capability of construction enterprises. First, the author conducted literatures reviews in knowledge management area and summarized the related theories about maturity model. Considering the unique features of construction enterprises, the author gave the connotation of construction enterprises’knowledge management capability and described its composing from three different perspectives:infrastructure, process and dynamic. Second, the author studied three popular Maturity Models (CMM, K-PMMM and KMMM) and constructed Knowledge Management Capability Maturity Model for Construction Enterprise (KMCMM-CE). Each maturity level contains several key process areas (KPA) and each KPA is assigned with several indicators to evaluate the knowledge management capability of construction enterprises. In this way, a KMCMM-CE evaluation system was established to provide theoretical support for enterprises to identify its knowledge management capability maturity level. In addition, a radar-based KMCMM-CE analysis model was proposed to show construction enterprises which KPA they need to work on and how to climb to KMCMM-CE’s higher maturity level. In the end, several suggestions were proposed to help construction enterprises improve their knowledge management capability more efficiently according to KMCMM-CE.