Applying Knowledge Management in Higher Education: The Creation of a Learning Organisation

Abstract

Knowledge Management (KM) has recently received considerable attention in the computer information systems community and is continuously gaining interest by industry, enterprises and academia. As we are moving into an era of "knowledge capitalism", knowledge management in combination with information management will play a fundamental role towards the success of transforming individual knowledge into organizational knowledge. Higher education (HE) institutions are in the knowledge business, since they are involved in knowledge creation, dissemination and learning. The increasing economic importance of knowledge, which nowadays redefines the links among education, work and learning, makes the role of KM in HE crucial. In this framework, this paper presents the key concepts of human-computer interaction in knowledge management, discusses their applicability to HE and proposes the creation of learning organisations in HE institutions, as an innovative way to apply KM to HE.