All organisations are awash with information and knowledge. The problem is that it is invisible and most people in organisations don't know what their colleagues know. The organisations don't know what their employees know and typically have even less grip on the knowledge available outside – such as that owned by competitors, suppliers, universities and the government.

The role of knowledge management, or KM, is to identify what information and knowledge is important to the organisation, finding out where it is held, and making it available so that staff can apply it in their work.

Anyone in construction who understands the importance of improving their organisation's management of knowledge needs guidance on how to make a sound business case for investing in KM. CAR carried out case study research to underpin this work. We developed a stage-by-stage description of how to make a structured argument for persuading senior decision-makers that it is worth putting effort into developing KM. We also produced a PowerPoint presentation to enable users to make a convincing business for knowledge management in their organisations.