Critical success factors for the implementation of a knowledge management system in a knowledge-based engineering firm

This research identifies factors that are crucial to the success of a knowledge management system (KMS) implementation in a prominent Australian engineering consultancy firm. The study employs the Delphi method to solicit the opinions of experienced market leaders in the Australian construction industry, and then benchmarks the organisational profile of the consultancy firm against the Delphi findings. From this comparative case study, recommendations are made pertaining to the organisational and cultural changes required within the consultancy firm in order to improve its readiness to successfully implement a KMS.

An analysis for the causes of accidents of repair, maintenance, alteration and addition works in Hong Kong

This study unveils causes of accidents in repair, maintenance, alteration and addition (RMAA) work. RMAA work is playing an increasingly important role in developed societies, including Hong Kong. Safety problems associated with RMAA work in Hong Kong has reached an alarming level. In view of rapid expansion of the RMAA sector and rising proportion of accidents in the construction industry, there is a pressing need to investigate causes of RMAA accidents. Structured interviews were conducted with RMAA contractors to explore causes of accidents in the RMAA sector. A two-round Delphi method with 13 safety experts was subsequently employed to verify the interview findings and rank the relative degree of importance for various causes of accidents. Accidents happen in RMAA work due to intersection of reasons. One of the root causes of accidents in RMAA works is low safety awareness of RMAA workers; however, wider organizational and industrial factors are not negligible. This study sheds light on why accidents happen in the RMAA sector. Only when the factors leading to accidents are identified can effective measures be made.

Empirical study to investigate the difficulties of implementing safety practices in the repair and maintenance sector in Hong Kong

Repair, maintenance, minor alteration, and addition work (RMAA) has become more and more important in developed societies, but its safety performance is alarming. For example, RMAA projects accounted for 53.2% of the total construction market and the percentage of RMAA accidents to all construction accidents in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) increased considerably in 2007. The RMAA sector has a huge potential for safety improvement. This study aims to explore and evaluate the difficulties of implementing safety practices in RMAA work. The mixed methods approach was adopted, and semistructured interviews and a two-round Delphi survey were conducted for the data collection. Major difficulties were identified, including limited safety resources for small and medium enterprises (SMEs), difficulty in changing the mindset of RMAA workers, and difficulty in performing safety supervision. These obstacles for implementing safety practices in the RMAA sector, if successfully removed, could significantly improve the safety performance of the RMAA sector and the construction industry as a whole.

Determining safety climate factors in the repair, maintenance, minor alteration, and addition sector of Hong Kong

The accident record of the repair, maintenance, minor alteration, and addition (RMAA) sector has been alarmingly high; however, research in the RMAA sector remains limited. Unsafe behavior is considered one of the key causes of accidents. Thus, the organizational factors that influence individual safety behavior at work continue to be the focus of many studies. The safety climate, which reflects the true priority of safety in an organization, has drawn much attention. Safety climate measurement helps to identify areas for safety improvement. The current study aims to identify safety climate factors in the RMAA sector. A questionnaire survey was conducted in the RMAA sector in Hong Kong. Data were randomly split into the calibration and the validation samples. The RMAA safety climate factors were determined by exploratory factor analysis on the calibration sample. Three safety climate factors of the RMAA works were identified: (1) management commitment to occupational health and safety (OHS) and employee involvement, (2) application of safety rules and work practices, and; (3) responsibility for health and safety. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was then conducted on the validation sample. The CFA model showed satisfactory goodness of fit, reliability, and validity. The suggested RMAA safety climate factors can be utilized by construction industry practitioners in developed economies to measure the safety climate of their RMAA projects, thereby enhancing the safety of RMAA works.

Strategies for improving safety performance of repair, maintenance, minor alteration and addition (RMAA) works

Purpose Managing and maintaining infrastructure assets are one of the indispensible tasks for many government agencies to preserve the nations' economic viability and social welfare. To reduce the expenditures over the life-cycle of an infrastructure asset and extend the period for which the asset performs effectively, proper repair and maintenance are essential. While repair, maintenance, minor alteration and addition (RMAA) sector is expanding in many developed cities, occurrences of fatalities and injuries in this sector are also soaring. The purposes of this paper are to identify and then evaluate the various strategies for improving the safety performance of RMAA works. Design/methodology/approach Semi-structured interviews and two rounds of Delphi survey were conducted for data collection. Findings Raising safety awareness of RMAA workers and selecting contractors with a good record of safety performance are the two most important strategies to improve the safety performance in this sector. Technology innovations and a pay-for-safety scheme are regarded as the two least important strategies. Originality/value The paper highlights possible ways to enhance safety of the rather under-explored RMAA sector in the construction industry.

Sustaining social innovation enterprises through a design led innovation framework

Constant changes in the global economic environment require companies to revisit traditional assumptions about how businesses create and capture value (Teece, 2010). In recent years, management practice literature has focused largely on better understanding business models and business model innovation (Amit, Zott and Massa, 2010; Johnson, Christensen and Kagermann, 2008). Much has been written on the benefits of linking design and design thinking to organisational strategies and business transformation. However, very little has been researched and reported on regarding the impact of design led approaches to triple bottom-line opportunities such as, social innovation enterprise. In the context of this paper Design Led Innovation is defined as the tools and approaches which enable design thinking to be embedded as an element of cultural transformation within a business. Being Design Led requires a company to have a vision for top line growth founded on deep customer insights and expanded through customer and stakeholder engagements. The outcomes of this are then mapped to all aspects of the business, enabling the vision to be successfully implemented and achieved. It is the latter part of this definition where we believe Design Led Innovation has the greatest value in transforming social innovation enterprise into a sustainable business venture. However, we also acknowledge that enabling these firms to think strategically about their business model is difficult given the unique operational and funding challenges that often characterize many social enterprises. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to pose the question, do sustainable innovation enterprise innovate their business model? And if so, how? It is the authors’ opinion that such enterprises only innovate at the product or system level without a complete understanding of the business model structure, which underpins the long term viability. However, in this paper we challenge this notion and explore if such firms can overcome their size and operational constraints to become sustainable enterprises using a design led approach. This is achieved through contextualizing business model innovation, briefly defining social innovation enterprise and profiling a new and emerging industry in Australia – Clean Technology. Future research challenges and opportunities are also presented.

Tomorrow's Technologies

Australian research and technological solutions are now being applied throughout the world.

Safety climate : recent developments and future implications

Safety climate is a current interest to construction practitioners and researchers. The concept of safety climate has been actively explored in the field of Industrial and Organizational (I/O) psychology but yet in the construction industry. This paper aims to review the literature of safety climate in a systematic manner and highlight future directions for safety research and development of safety practices in the construction industry. The value of safety climate lies on its ability to predict safety behavior. Safety climate, as a mediator, unfolds the relationship between organizational variables and safety behavior. It, as a moderator, affects the effectiveness of any safety initiatives to improve safety performance. Future research directions would be likely to look at relationship between organizational factors and safety climate using multi-level analysis. To the construction industry, safety climate measurement is a good indicator to assess safety performance. Empirical studies show that frontline supervisor would be the best conduit to create a positive safety climate at workgroup level. It is believed that this paper is beneficial to researchers interested in behavioral aspect of construction safety and industry practitioners striving for safety on site.

Theory based production and project management

This paper gives an overview of an ongoing project endeavouring to advance theory-based production and project management, and the rationale for this approach is briefly justified. The status of the theoretical foundation of production management, project management and allied disciplines is discussed, with emphasis on metaphysical grounding of theories, as well as the nature of the heuristic solution method commonly used in these disciplines. Then, on-going work related to different aspects of production and project management is reviewed from both theoretical and practical orientation. Next, information systems agile project management is explored with a view to its re-use in generic project management. In production management, the consequences and implementation of a new, wider theoretical basis are analyzed. The theoretical implications and negative symptoms of the peculiarities of the construction industry for supply chains and supply chain management in construction are observed. Theoretical paths for improvements of inter-organisational relationships in construction which are fundamental for improvement of construction supply chains are described. To conclude, the observations made in this paper vis-à-vis production, project and supply chain management are related again to the theoretical basis of this paper, and finally directions for theory development and future research are given and discussed.

Capable but not able : the effect of institutional context and search breadth on the absorptive capacity-corporate entrepreneurship relationship

This study investigates how the interaction of institutional market orientation and external search breadth influence the ability to use absorptive capacity to raise the level of corporate entrepreneurship. The findings of a sample of 331 supplier companies providing products and services to the mining industry of Australia and Iran indicate that the positive association between absorptive capacity and corporate entrepreneurship is stronger for companies with greater external knowledge search breadth. Moreover, operating in a less market-oriented institutional context such as, Iran diminishes the ability to utilise a firm’s absorptive capacity to raise their level of corporate entrepreneurship. Yet, firms operating in such contexts are able to overcome these disadvantages posed by their institutional context by engaging in broader external search of knowledge.

The moderating role of entrepreneurial management in the relationship between absorptive capacity and corporate entrepreneurship : an attention-based view

Building on the attention-based view, we argue that companies need a challenging mechanism to focus their absorptive capacity attention on corporate entrepreneurship versus mainstream activities or other purposes. We suggest entrepreneurial management as the attential driver for deploying absorptive capacity towards corporate entrepreneurship. From our analysis of a sample of 331 supplier companies providing products and services to the mining industry of Australia and Iran, we observe that absorptive capacity positively affects corporate entrepreneurship. The data also demonstrate that the effect of absorptive on corporate entrepreneurship increases when firms adopt the entrepreneurial culture and reward systems. However, the entrepreneurial growth and resource orientations negatively moderate the relationship between absorptive capacity and corporate entrepreneurship.

An approach for extending Building Information Models (BIM) to specifications

The Construction industry accounts for a tenth of global GDP. Still, challenges such as slow adoption of new work processes, islands of information, and legal disputes, remain frequent, industry-wide occurrences despite various attempts to address them. In response, IT-based approaches have been adopted to explore collaborative ways of executing construction projects. Building Information Modelling (BIM) is an exemplar of integrative technologies whose 3D-visualisation capabilities have fostered collaboration especially between clients and design teams. Yet, the ways in which specification documents are created and used in capturing clients' expectations based on industry standards have remained largely unchanged since the 18th century. As a result, specification-related errors are still common place in an industry where vast amounts of information are consumed as well as produced in the course project implementation in the built environment. By implication, processes such as cost planning which depend on specification-related information remain largely inaccurate even with the use of BIM-based technologies. This paper briefly distinguishes between non-BIM-based and BIM-based specifications and reports on-going efforts geared towards the latter. We review exemplars aimed at extending Building Information Models to specification information embedded within the objects in a product library and explore a viable way of reasoning about a semi-automated process of specification using our product library.

The importance of use and end-of-life phases to the life cycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of concrete : a review

Global climate change is one of the most significant environmental impacts at the moment. One central issue for the building and construction industry to address global climate change is the development of credible carbon labelling schemes for building materials. Various carbon labelling schemes have been developed for concrete due to its high contribution to global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. However, as most carbon labelling schemes adopt cradle-to-gate as system boundary, the credibility of the eco-label information may not be satisfactory because recent studies show that the use and end-of-life phases can have a significant impact on the life cycle GHG emissions of concrete in terms of carbonation, maintenance and rehabilitation, other indirect emissions, and recycling activities. A comprehensive review on the life cycle assessment of concrete is presented to holistically examine the importance of use and end-of-life phases to the life cycle GHG quantification of concrete. The recent published ISO 14067: Carbon footprint of products – requirements and guidelines for quantification and communication also mandates the use of cradle-to-grave to provide publicly available eco-label information when the use and end-of-life phases of concrete can be appropriately simulated. With the support of Building Information Modelling (BIM) and other simulation technologies, the contribution of use and end-of-life phases to the life cycle GHG emissions of concrete should not be overlooked in future studies.

Time pressure and coworker support mediate the curvilinear relationship between age and occupational well-being

As the proportion of older employees in the workforce is growing, researchers have become increasingly interested in the association between age and occupational well-being. The curvilinear nature of relationships between age and job satisfaction and between age and emotional exhaustion is well-established in the literature, with employees in their late 20s to early 40s generally reporting lower levels of occupational well-being than younger and older employees. However, the mechanisms underlying these curvilinear relationships are so far not well understood due to a lack of studies testing mediation effects. Based on an integration of role theory and research from the adult development and career literatures, this study examined time pressure, work–home conflict, and coworker support as mediators of the relationships between age and job satisfaction and between age and emotional exhaustion. Data came from 771 employees between 17 and 74 years of age in the construction industry. Results showed that employees in their late 20s to early 40s had lower job satisfaction and higher emotional exhaustion than younger and older employees. Time pressure and coworker support fully mediated both the U-shaped relationship between age and job satisfaction and the inversely U-shaped relationship between age and emotional exhaustion. These findings suggest that organizational interventions may help increase the relatively low levels of occupational well-being in certain age groups.

Cyclone Tracy and the road to improving wind-resistant design

Early on Christmas morning 1974, tropical cyclone Tracy devastated the city of Darwin leaving only 6 per cent of the city’s housing habitable and instigating the evacuation of 75 per cent of its population. The systematic failure of so much of Darwin’s building stock led to a humanitarian disaster that proved the impetus for an upheaval of building regulatory and construction practices throughout Australia. Indeed, some of the most enduring legacies of Tracy have been the engineering and regulatory steps taken to ensure the extent of damage would not be repeated. This chapter explores these steps and highlights lessons that have led to a national building framework and practice at the fore of wind-resistant design internationally.