A Mobile Cloud Shared Workspace to Support Lessons-Learned in Construction Companies

Construction is a project-based industry, and for each project, companies have to cope with specific challenges. Nevertheless, most of these challenges are similar to each other and share many common elements. Thus, projects are an important source of expert know-how and organizational knowledge, but lessons learned in each one are not systematically incorporated into the design and construction phases of subsequent projects. Typically, construction companies do not have effective tools to make an appropriate transfer of this valuable knowledge for future projects. Therefore, shared workspaces could play an important role to do this by increasing communication among workers, organizing work more efficiently, reducing the coordination cost, and keeping an updated overview of the project. This paper presents a mobile cloud shared workspace to support knowledge management along each project. The platform is the result of the research and development work conducted by the authors, supported by a construction company, during the last two years.