Exploratory study of sustainability knowledge management in Capital Project Offices

Typical higher educational organizations like universities and colleges are long-lived institutions with large campuses. These organizations inevitably have significant impacts upon the environment and ought to take more responsibilities on sustainability for their communities and regions. This paper explores the means and methods to apply knowledge management (KM) to support Capital Project Offices (CPO) at higher education institutions in the course of sustainable construction. While knowledge is generally regarded as a necessary foundation for sustainability innovation, its capturing and reuses has not been fully materialized in CPO organizations. One of the challenges is to understand and describe the types of sustainability knowledge of importance to CPO organizations. To this end, the authors conducted an in-depth case study at the University of Washington to explore its CPO personnel's perceptions on KM as it relates to sustainable construction. Survey questionnaire and interview were administered to collect data for the case study. In particular, a web-based KM system was used to help situate research participants in a pseudo knowledge capturing and sharing scenario to facilitate data collection. Research findings depict the status quo of KM in the case study CPO, point out barriers of the current practices, and based on the findings, a classification system tailored for CPO organizations to describe their sustainability knowledge is proposed.