In this session, we invited Hongyi, Knowledge Management Officer of the Real Estate Department at Alibaba Group, to share how the construction industry uses DingTalk Docs for process and correspondence management; the 9 most common types of knowledge in the construction industry and how to classify and archive them; and how to use the Knowledge Base to enable efficient collaboration across engineering, design, operations, and other departments.🌟 Related industries: Construction, Real estate
🧀 About us
The Real Estate Department of Alibaba Group is responsible for the engineering and construction of Alibaba Group’s headquarters and office campuses.
🧀 About the Knowledge Officer
Hi, everyone. I’m Hongyi. I currently work in the Real Estate Department of Alibaba Group, where I lead knowledge management projects for the department.
- Former Operations Lead and Assistant to the President at Shanghai Mingcheng Enterprise Group
- Former Regional Operations Lead at China Fortune Land Development
- Currently in charge of knowledge management at the Real Estate Department of Alibaba Group
🧀 Before we start, let me share a recent story from work
Through this short story, I want to convey that knowledge is intangible, but the inheritance of knowledge is tangible and requires a carrier.How knowledge is passed down, yet so easily forgotten
🧀 Let’s talk about what knowledge management is
What is knowledge management?
“Knowledge management is the process of continuously creating new knowledge within an organization, disseminating it effectively, and quickly applying it to new products, services, technologies, and processes.”— Excerpt from “The Wise Company” by Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka
The DIKW model: Defining knowledge
The core of knowledge is precipitation, dissemination, and sharing — ultimately serving innovation.The data we receive every day is scattered. When data is enriched with attributes such as who, what, when, and where, it becomes information. After information is refined, it becomes valuable applications. Finally, valuable information serves innovation and is transformed into wisdom.The DIKW framework supports research and analysis through the following steps:Raw observation and measurement produce data.Analyzing the relationships between data produces information. This information can answer simple questions such as: who? what? where? when? why? Information implies an audience and a purpose.Applying information in action produces knowledge. Knowledge can answer the “how?” question. Knowledge consists of actionable relationships and habitual ways of working.Using knowledge through communication among the wise and self-reflection produces wisdom. We can use wisdom to answer questions about why and when to act. Wisdom is concerned with the future. It implies hints and lagged effects.
The SECI model: How knowledge evolves and how it applies to the DingTalk Docs Knowledge Base
❓ What is knowledge socialization? At first, all team knowledge is essentially empirical — it lives in individuals’ minds. The first step is to socialize team knowledge by bringing it out into the open. To do that, you need a platform where team members can showcase and externalize what they know. 👉 Practical guidance Create a company-wide Knowledge Base to provide a container for accumulating and carrying knowledge. ❓ What is knowledge externalization? Externalize the Knowledge Base so that more people can use it. The design of the Knowledge Base should emphasize broad reach so that it is widely known and accessed. 👉 Practical guidance Through various promotion and outreach methods, expand the reach of knowledge so that more people who need it can access and learn from it. ❓ What is knowledge combination? Next comes combination. You need to create specific scenarios. After people are exposed to the information, do they have concrete applications for it? 👉 Practical guidance Organize relevant activities or important projects so that team members can put the information they encounter into practice. ❓ What is knowledge internalization? At this stage, you need to understand how well employees have truly mastered the knowledge. Once mastered, they will improve. From there, the cycle begins again. 👉 Practical guidance Use incentives to encourage members to actively contribute new knowledge or iterate and upgrade existing knowledge.🧀 Why do we value knowledge management?
The importance and significance of organizational knowledge management
Precipitation and sharing Build a knowledge collaboration space and foster a culture of knowledge sharing. The Knowledge Base helps the team accumulate knowledge and serves as a carrier for team-wide knowledge sharing. Organizational culture Pass down team knowledge and support individual growth. The Knowledge Base supports employees’ self-improvement and growth, and creates connections between people and between people and history. The Knowledge Base carries the history and key milestones of the department. For new hires joining the company, they can quickly get up to speed by learning from the knowledge accumulated in the Knowledge Base. Innovation and application Spark organizational innovation and become a learning organization. In essence, the goal is to continuously bring in fresh ideas. Otherwise, the organization stagnates. People can rely on past experience and keep going on autopilot. But you won’t encounter new things from outside, and while others move forward, you may stand still.The importance of organizational knowledge management (the current state and pain points)
😭 Pain point 1: Everyone knows it’s important, but it’s never the most urgent. 😭 Pain point 2: When you need it, digging through the past is painful. Companies often wait until they reach a certain scale before starting to build their knowledge base. By then, they realize that recovering past materials is extremely difficult. A lot of important documents and information gradually disappear into history and are lost during personnel handovers. Every handover causes information attrition. 😭 Pain point 3: There is no time or resources to do it well in the early startup phase.🧀 How do we solve these problems?
Discovery: First, we need a great tool — DingTalk Docs
Convenience Built into DingTalk. Interface adaptability Similar to a desktop experience, easy to use, with a low learning curve. Timeliness Record and accumulate knowledge anytime. You don’t need to wait until you have time to organize everything before uploading; you can record on the fly. Even if you don’t have time right now, you can organize it later. This ensures knowledge isn’t lost. Interactivity Knowledge doesn’t stop at the written word. The content listed in DingTalk Docs and the knowledge accumulated there can be opened up so that others can edit it. For example, when I raise a question in a document, others can comment, leave messages, and interact. If a Collaborator finds something unusual or sees room for improvement, they can leave an Inline comment and notify the Owner of the document. This allows everyone to continuously iterate and refine the knowledge.Mapping: The 9 main types of knowledge resources in the construction industry
Business knowledge: Knowledge generated through business processes and managed within business systems.Employee knowledge: Individual skills, knowledge potential, work experience, and work records.Process knowledge: Knowledge embedded in business processes, with expert support at key stages.Organizational memory: Records of existing experience for future use. This can take the form of a Knowledge Base, or knowledge guidance tools that include cases and historical archives.Customer knowledge: Deep insights gained through customer relationships, used to improve product and service quality and win more customers.Product and service knowledge: Products should carry knowledge content, with knowledge-intensive services provided around them.Relational knowledge: Improving knowledge flows across domains, such as leveraging relationships with suppliers, customers, and employees.Knowledge assets: Intellectual capital, patents, and intangible IP — controlling their development and use.External knowledge: Data and Documents from public Sources (such as publications and the internet).
Adoption: How to roll it out internally and help employees use it
Pain point scenario 1: Sharing and Collaboration
The construction industry involves a wide range of professional content. We have engineering staff, design staff, cost staff, procurement staff, planning managers, operations staff, finance staff, and so on. When you need to deliver a comprehensive project report, you must include content from all of these angles and dimensions.Before
In the early days, the typical approach was: as the reporter, I had to collect inputs from five or six other people, telling each of them what to do and how to do it.After
Now, after I set up the framework, everyone co-creates on a shared document. Edits can be made anytime, and everyone can see what others have changed in real time. When archiving, I just need to do a quick cleanup, and all my related files are ready.Pain point scenario 2: Reporting
Reporting materials produced at work often need to track historical Versions. We want to be able to find past materials for review — historical materials should be traceable.Before
Historical materials were scattered across different employees’ computers, making them inefficient and incomplete to look up.After
All departmental work outputs are now traceable. Search makes it easy to quickly find historical materials, helping streamline the preparation of reporting materials.Pain point scenario 3: To-Do
Before
Tracking progress relied on manual follow-up or basic Excel spreadsheets.After
DingTalk Docs can automatically generate follow-up To-Do items, preventing omissions and time slippage.🧀 Practice sharing: Using the Knowledge Base for process and correspondence management in construction
What is a construction project?
A construction project refers to the collective term for various buildings and engineering facilities that provide the material and technical foundation for human life and production. Construction projects are organized, purposeful, large-scale economic activities. By natural attribute, construction projects are classified into building engineering, civil engineering, and electromechanical engineering.
Key stages of a construction project and document management priorities
| Stage | Pre-investment | Construction preparation | Construction | Completion |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Main work | Investment opportunity research, feasibility studies, project evaluation, and decision-making. The main goal at this stage is to assess the necessity, possibility, and feasibility of the investment. | Preliminary and construction drawing design, site acquisition and construction-condition preparation, equipment and engineering tendering, contractor selection, and contract signing. | Through construction, efficiently achieve project objectives within the defined scope, schedule, cost, and quality, in line with design requirements. | Conduct integrated commissioning, completion acceptance, and final summary evaluation of the project. |
| Document control priorities | Decision-support documents | Requirements management, drawing management, government approval document management | Contracts, communication notes, correspondence | Completion deliverables, completion documents |
| Common control methods | Local computer storage | Local computer storage / system storage | Proprietary systems / local computer storage | Proprietary systems / local computer storage |
| Storage requirements | Storage, Manage permissions | Storage, Manage permissions, collaborative work | Storage, Manage permissions, collaborative work | Storage, Manage permissions |
| DingTalk Docs | Storage ✔, Manage permissions ✔ | Storage ✔, Manage permissions ✔, collaborative work X | Storage ✔, Manage permissions ✔, collaborative work ✔ | Storage ✔, Manage permissions ✔ |
Case scenario: Correspondence management
Correspondence reply requirements: Replies must be provided within the time specified by the tender documents or contract. The industry standard is to reply within 15 days. Correspondence not replied to in time may be considered as accepted by Party A.Before
A receipt log was created in Excel, and incoming correspondence was tracked offline, item by item. Issues:- Manual follow-up easily led to omissions.
- Reply timelines were prone to errors.
- Correspondence often involved multiple disciplines, making collaboration difficult.
After
Improvement: Use the DingTalk Docs Knowledge Base.- Set up a directory for easy sharing.
- Maintain a tracking log that links directly to the correspondence.
- Lock in the responsible person and deadline, generate To-Do items, and prevent omissions.
🧀 Looking ahead: What more can we do for team knowledge management?
Knowledge management as standard setting
- Use the DingTalk Docs Knowledge Base to host enterprise/BU standards and enable:
- Permissions management (resolving the issue of access scope for confidential standards)
- Feedback collection (using the Comments feature to gather standard iteration feedback fully online, with no omissions)
- Historical version archiving (resolving the issue of older standards being lost after iteration)
🧀 Recap: Quotes from the Knowledge Officer
Knowledge management is the process of continuously creating new knowledge within an organization, disseminating it effectively, and quickly applying it to new products, services, technologies, and processes.The core of knowledge is precipitation, dissemination, and sharing — ultimately serving innovation.Knowledge is intangible, but the inheritance of knowledge is tangible and requires a carrier.The Knowledge Base helps teams accumulate knowledge and serves as a carrier for team knowledge sharing.Team knowledge can spark organizational innovation and turn the organization into a learning organization.In DingTalk Docs, you can comment, leave messages, and interact, keeping knowledge continuously updated and iterating.
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