The 21st century is now seen as the time for the construction industry to embrace new ways of working if it is to continue to be competitive and meet the needs of its ever demanding clients. Collaborative working is considered by many to be essential if design and construction teams are to consider the whole lifecycle of the construction product. Much of the recent work on collaborative working has focused on the delivery of technological solutions with a focus on web (extranets), CAD (visualisation), and knowledge management technologies. However, it is now recognised that good collaboration does not result from the implementation of information technology solutions alone. The organisational and people issues, which are not readily solved by pure technical systems, need to be resolved. However, approaches that exclusively focus on organisational and people issues will not reap the benefits derived from the use of technology, especially in the context of distributed teams which are the norm in construction. Work currently being undertaken at Loughborough University aims to bring together the benefits enabled by the technology, with the organisational, and its people issues to provide a framework enabling high level strategic decisions to be made to implement effective collaboration. This paper reports on the initial stages of the project: the background to the project, the methodology used, and findings from the literature survey and the requirements capture survey conducted as part of the project.

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The efforts to share and reuse knowledge generated on construction projects are undermined mainly by the loss of important insights and knowledge due to the time lapse in capturing the knowledge, staff turnover and people's reluctance to share knowledge. To address this, it is crucial for knowledge to be captured 'live' in a collaborative environment while the project is being executed and presented in a format that will facilitate its reuse during and after the project. This paper uses a case study approach to investigate the end-users' requirements for a methodology for the 'live' capture and reuse of knowledge, and the shortcomings of current practice in meeting these requirements. A methodology for the 'live' capture and reuse of project knowledge is then presented and discussed. The methodology, which comprises an Web-based knowledge base, an integrated workflow system (IWS) and a Project Knowledge Manager (PKM) as the administrator, allows project knowledge to be captured 'live' from ongoing projects. This also incorporates mechanisms to hasten knowledge validation and the dissemination of the knowledge once it has been validated.