IMPLEMENTATION BARRIERS FOR KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT : FOR SMEs IN INDIAN CONSTRUCTION INDUSTRY

Sammanfattning: The construction industry is one of the largest industries in the world and its contribution to the Indian GDP is 7.74% and the Indian construction industry is worth $120 Billion. Though major part of the sector is governed by the small to medium enterprises. The SMEs work from small cities to larger metropolitans. With new technologies coming to front everywhere due to globalization and ease of communication through the media such as the internet, many companies have tried to adopt Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). Managing the critical information has always been an issue in these sector, and any lessons learnt from the previous project or ongoing project goes in vain as they fail to use this information efficiently. Use of knowledge management systems (KMS) is uncommon but is known in the Indian industries but the construction sector is far behind in this area. Many large companies (mostly telecom, but some construction companies) are using KMS or similar systems; but there is no such evidence of use of a KMS by the SMEs in the sector. So, keeping this in mind, the purpose of this thesis is to identify the barriers in implementation of a Knowledge Management System of Small-to-Medium Scale Construction Companies in India. The work is based on a questionnaire survey from Indian cities Delhi, Pune and Ahmednagar. Using statistical analysis methods, we have investigated into the barriers that are hindering use of Knowledge Management in the SMEs in India. From the analysis and the findings, we have projected major issues in the sector such as information and communication technology, Human resources, Organization level and on Market level. A clear look at these showed that the organizations were facing issue with identifying relevant knowledge to store or they cannot figure out what they will need in the future. Other prevailing factor are lack of motivation and lack of the absorptive capacity which hinders the implementation of the Km effectively. Another concrete finding was rapid change in the IT tools which create time lag between the organization action and the response to it because of the time needed to get familiar with new technology.