Consulting Engineering Firms as Learning Organization

This article looks into putting the pattern of Learning Organization (LO) into practice in Consulting Engineering (CE) firms, centered on construction consulting engineering firms. The method used is literature review with a perspective of practicing the subject in some case-studies in the future for measuring the outcomes. Since consulting engineering firms are knowledge-based organizations, practicing knowledge management comes as a key step for being transferred into LO. In this regard two subjects are to be paid attention too. First, consulting firms are project-based firms; so saving and sharing the acquired knowledge as organizational knowledge in each project is important. Second, acquired knowledge in construction projects is mostly tacit knowledge and for knowledge management this comes as a challenging factor. This challenge gets more serious since this tacit knowledge is gained in construction workshops by low-educated personnel. Transforming this knowledge to members of the CE who are high-educated personnel in such condition is tricky. Furthermore, the most optimum condition is when acquiring knowledge in consulting firms is done through a double-loop process instead of single-loop process, which means taking care of the issues _ predicted and dealt with_ before facing them. For implementing an acceptable LO system, CEs must work on their IT infrastructure, particularly in the case that there are several branches of a firm globally distributed. Basically, CEs must change their project-based orientation into long-term orientation and look into each project as a learning program.