How do you tap into the shared knowledge and experience of your employees? And how do you encourage them to share information? Danny Coyle examines how some companies use the latest IT to achieve just this.
Information technology seems to have a lot to answer for, but one shudders to think where we'd be today without it. As well as often being blamed for the unmanageable torrent of daily facts and figures that comes our way, technology also provides us with the escape route from the piles of information that we could easily find ourselves buried under.

It is the need to pool, organise and make readily available so much of what we produce, that has spawned new phrases like "information management" and "knowledge development." The internet, and its internal equivalent, the intranet, play big parts in the way these new terms are transformed into tangible, useful tools. This certainly applies to the way building services firms operate. Whether it concerns providing information to clients, or having an accessible, company-wide facility for employees to dip into to develop their own knowledge, the solutions seem much easier to come by, if they can be found on-line.

Sharing information
At Arup, each discipline has its own skills network site located on the company intranet, which contains a forum where staff are able to post queries they may have about a current project. That query will appear in the inbox of every other employee in Arup's offices around the world who has subscribed to the service. "It can literally take minutes to get a reply," says associate director Andrew Woodhouse. "If we are working on something and we can't come to a consensus I'll direct someone to the forum and they can see if someone else has come up against a similar problem."

This kind of facility is also used as a promotional tool at Arup. "It's a benefit that a lot of other companies don't have. We can tell clients that we are able to deliver global solutions locally." When a new topic is posted on the forum, it is stored along with all the replies it receives in its own thread and is kept indefinitely on the site. Over time, a sizeable resource of information is built up, all at the disposal of the company's engineers wherever they are in the world. "So even two years down the line, if someone needs to find answers to a problem, they can search the database and locate anything that has been posted on the subject previously," says Woodhouse.

When the first words from Mike Stephens, head of IT at Roberts and Partners are: "We don't actually have an intranet," you wonder if he has been locked in a dark room for the last ten years. Far from it. "I'm in favour of what I like to call appropriate technology," says Stephens. "The internal web based facilities we have are driven by a recognised need." This need has seen Roberts opt for a system based on Microsoft Outlook's discussion forum facility. Stephens says that this system allows the individual to keep track of a subject that they have an interest in, rather than receiving a flow of e-mails that have no relevance to them. "Each question and its replies are stored on their own thread on the forum. It's a good way of capturing knowledge."

It is this link between information and knowledge that web-based tools are helping to bridge. The sharing of information is what has to take place, before the development of knowledge can commence. At the multi-disciplinary EC Harris, internet and intranet technology is used to share information both across the company and with clients. Their ProjectNet software enables their experts to communicate across the world. Knowledge management director Eric Ostrowski says: "We have a virtual community of around sixty experts based in offices all over the world. Using ProjectNet we can post documents on a website and comment and amend them easily. Views can be exchanged over ProjectNet without clogging up the e-mail system."

As part of attempting to "boil to the surface" all the knowledge in each specific area of the company, Ostrowski also uses an electronic questionnaire to find out exactly what each individual knows about their specialism. He then puts the answers into a summary document on the company intranet site as a source of the best possible knowledge the company has to offer. This, he says, allows even the newest employees to equip themselves with the necessary background information quickly and simply. "A graduate who only started yesterday and has a meeting concerning tall buildings can access the technical presentation on the site concerning tall buildings and familiarise themselves with the relevant issues before they go into that meeting."

The company's service delivery system also offers employees information on the best practices for each of the processes that are carried out on every project. "The system maps and outlines all the processes, how they are done, and which documents are needed. It then provides standard documents and guide notes on how to deliver those processes, so it's recording and sharing best practice from across the whole business."

Having a single intranet site as a repository of information for the whole company helps to maintain a global environment.

Tim Wright, head of IT at Amec agrees that the use of the intranet to encourage the delivery of a common set of standards and processes across the many streams of big businesses is a great benefit. "Our intranet site, AmecNet is a collection of some of our business streams' own smaller intranet sites. Having the single site as a repository of information helps to maintain the global environment." Wright also champions the benefits of having an online integrated management system where staff can find guidance on how to carry out company-wide procedures. "Not only does it help staff to follow uniform processes but gives them the mobility to move between different streams of the business because the processes used in one are exactly the same everywhere else. It also promotes the notion externally that we do things in a consistent way."

Teamwork online
Project management is also an area that has benefited from the use of internet technology. Web based software is available that helps streamline the way project teams work and reduce the time and costs involved in the running of large jobs. This software has the capability to organise all project documentation, to handle questions and requests from team members, host numerous formats of cad representations and provide the most up-to-date information of the progress of the project.

EC Harris' ProjectNet software aids the collaboration of project teams on major jobs. Head of IT consulting Geoff Hawkings says: "ProjectNet deals with all the document management on a project. An individual can submit information which will then be distributed to everyone else on the team. The website also handles requests for information or change orders. If one person logs a request on the system, that will go to everyone else on the team. Hawkings says this speeds up the process when changes need to be made. "Rather than having to get a piece of paper to someone with the order on it, it can be done on ProjectNet, and then everyone is notified immediately, and if action is not taken after a certain amount of time, it can send a reminder."

The main benefit to the client of using this kind of web-based software is that information can be accessed by clients much more dynamically than in the past. "This has had a huge impact on client visibility. Whereas information used to be published periodically to update clients on progress, they now have access to a website, that everyone working on their job also has access to, and they can look in and see how the project is progressing whenever they need to," says Hawkings.

Buying and selling
Other than the sharing of information both internally and with clients, the internet has also opened up the possibility for the buying and selling of products on-line. The potential of the internet in this respect is yet to be exploited fully in the construction industry however. This is attributed to the low technical awareness of the main buyers (contractors) who still prefer traditional purchasing methods.

There is an opportunity for buyers to save themselves money through collaborative on-line buying. All it requires is for purchasers of similar products to come together on a site and for one of them to make an offer below the asking price. If enough others join and make an offer in the same price region, the seller will be forced to lower their price. The difficulty is to get enough buyers to come together, and to get them interested in taking the time to compare prices and products across a range of suppliers. If the product comparisons and cost savings could be demonstrated to them in a single format, on a single, or a small number of websites that facilitated collaborative purchasing, the demand for such an activity would surely rise.

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