Leadership in a Knowledge Era: Achieving the Learning Organization

The emergence of the Knowledge Era has significant relevance to the engineer-procure-construct (EPC) industry, where organization development has been overshadowed by the industry’s penchant to improve production. Constantly updated, dynamic knowledge can improve the industry and open up new possibilities in organizational changes. The EPC industry has a definite need for knowledgebased services to help it modernize and to take advantage of current technology.

In 2003, the Construction Industry Institute established its Achieving Learning Organizations Research Team to study current organization learning techniques and technologies in the EPC and other industries. The results indicate that EPC learning organizations are still in the developmental stage. Because of this, the research team moved away from traditional collecting and presenting of industry statistics. Instead, it began developing a new framework to assist organizations in achieving a learning organization culture.

This publication provides an overview of the research. The research team suggests that EPC companies focus on leadership, champions, direction, technology balance, and resource allocation. In doing so, they will make themselves more adaptable to becoming a learning organization.