Applying Knowledge Management (KM) For Sustainable Business Education

1.    Introduction: Today, Business Education system is under great pressure from industry (society) to deliver finished products (graduates and postgraduates) from its system so as to be directly absorbed into industry and that too at a mass scale and in a short period of time. For this the Business Education system has to undertake a strategic approach so as to be able to deliver to industry needs. A new Knowledge Management System, in the Business Education, can be used as a strategic approach to achieve sustainable positive results. Knowledge management caters to the critical issues of organizational adaptation, survival, and competence in face of increasingly discontinuous environmental change. Essentially, it embodies organizational processes that seek synergistic combination of data and information-processing capacity of information technologies, and the creative and innovative capacity of human beings. Knowledge management is the practice of harnessing and exploiting intellectual capital in order to gain competitive advantage and customer commitment through efficiency, innovation and effective decision-making.

2.    Research objectives and Background: According to Marwick (2001), efficient and effective knowledge management typically requires an appropriate combination of organizational, social, and managerial initiatives along with the deployment of appropriate technology. Thus, the main objective of this paper is to discover the factors and method of Knowledge Management that can contribute to the new learning experience that is capable of drawing out the best in a student and more importantly make her ready for being absorbed by industry. For long term sustainability a business institution has to be transformed into a learning organization. The key driver of the transformation is nothing but change in the environment which can be brought by applying knowledge management framework to management institution. Thus the first objective is to study main components of KM which can be applied to a business management institute. With reference to these components study the KM status, benefits, implementation and obstacles in few test institutions.
3.    Research Methods:                
•    To study the components of KM suitable for the business management institute by reviewing literature.
•    To investigate the relevant factors those are important for success of a business management educational institute in terms of KM or organizational learning. The methodology adopted in the study is case study based and was implemented in few Indore’s Test Institutes of Management. A variety of question types were used varying from closed-ended questions to Likert type scales. Around 50 faculty members were contacted and handed over the questionnaire. 38 of the faculty members responded to the questionnaire. The respondents have diverse research interests in the areas of marketing, finance, human resource, information technology, operations and strategy.

The following are the factors under the current study:
•    The general understanding of Knowledge       Management.
•    The current status or condition of Knowledge access.
•    Knowledge Management Environment.
•    Knowledge  Management motivation from top management.
•    The creation and maintenance of knowledge repositories.
•   
4.    Observation and Analysis:
a)    After doing a lot of review of literature we came to a conclusion that the framework consists of three main interlinked components: Knowledge Management of the People, Technology and content. The infrastructure can be viewed as a combination of people, content, and technology. These components are inseparable and interdependent.
i.    Knowledge Management of the People: At the Knowledge Management of the People level, the focus is on managing people, their behavior, their expectations, and their potential to contribute to the success of the knowledge management effort. There should also be a concerted effort to encourage employees to share and use knowledge in the workplace, and to reward people who do so. The framework proposes the following activities to achieve this:
•    Manage people as individuals
•    Encourage Sharing and Use of       Knowledge
•    Encourage Individual Learning and Innovative Thinking
•    Implement reward plans and incentives to promote above
ii. Knowledge Management of the Technology: The second component consists of managing the technology of the organization which will support the overall knowledge management effort. Various technologies support KM but the impact of each technology varies enormously from situation to situation. Several technologies recur in many KM programs, partly because they are generic and pervade many core activities and processes. The main ones are:
•    Intranet and Internet 
•    Groupware
•    Intelligent agents 
•    Mapping tools   
•    Document Management
iii. Knowledge Management of the content: The Knowledge Management of the content component deals with the overall activities that need to be performed in the organization during the knowledge management effort. At this level, the organization needs to carry out the following key high-level activities:
•    Perform a knowledge-based SWOT analysis.
•    Create a vision for the KM initiative and providing a Leader
•    Align the KM effort with the business strategy
•    Plan and Design the KM project (set goals and objectives)
•    Manage the organizational culture and manage change.
•    Manage with a holistic approach.
•    Create and manage organizational learning

b)     Based on Rowley’s (2000) typology of knowledge management objectives in universities, we found that KM-led activities and tools in the areas of knowledge repositories and knowledge access can be sufficiently addressed to advance learning environment in management institution. In tandem with the rapid expansion of management institutions, more emphasis should be put on the cultivation of a knowledge-sharing environment and knowledge valuation. This can lead to making a KM-enabled institution and to implement a KM-led perspective for it to develop focused vision, adaptability to change and innovation for emerging as leader in learning environment.
Innovation, vision, contribution, flexibility, adaptability to change, and lifelong learning agendas are necessary attributes of an emerging leader in learning environments. All these attributes can be well applied with the help of Knowledge Management (KM) of people, technology and content. Based on the above components a questionnaire was designed and was distributed in few test institutes, to investigate the relevant factors those are important for success of a business management educational institute in terms of KM . Conclusions drawn from it are discussed below.
i. General understanding of Knowledge Management: The knowledge base in educational leadership has been the subject of a great deal of reflection, debate, and thought throughout the past decade. Connected with this evolution is the growing interest in performance-based standards as criteria to structure educational leadership programs General understanding of Knowledge Management in the institutions was found to be average.

ii. Current Status or condition of Knowledge access: It was found that institutions have well-established access to published knowledge sources across and within the academic community. Internet connectivity has been an invaluable resource where researchers and academic staff have access to public knowledge including a host of electronic documents and electronic journals. Within one institution, a network based on intranet technology has supported internal communication through e-mail, and access to databases and electronic documents. Most libraries in higher education also have a good coverage of selected sources of information, including databases, and lists of experts. In summary, institutions have been proactive in the area of knowledge access, especially with respect to explicit and public knowledge. Further improvements can encompass issues of security, and access rights for different categories of staff and students.

    iii. KM Environment: The knowledge management activities such as knowledge creation, transfer and use has traditionally been embedded within the academic reward structure of research and scholarship. Reputation, salary, and opportunities to participate in the further creation and dissemination of knowledge depend significantly upon individual performance. This has potential implications on the formation of KM groups such as communities of practice or interest groups where members are informally bound by a common interest (e.g. engaging in lunchtime
discussions to solve difficult problems) and by what they have learned through their mutual engagement in these activities. Organisational culture with respect to learning and knowledge sharing among the faculty members was mostly informal and limited to peer group internally. Knowledge interactions were restricted to some closed pockets of the individual rooms encompassing a few faculty desks only, mainly through direct communications. Quantum of knowledge communication with external faculty members of other business schools is significantly low. It is interesting to note that substantial knowledge/information communication takes place on informal individual efforts. Sometimes it is required to be known by the knowledge project leader whether the right knowledge is being captured or not. However this initiative is relatively low as of now. It has been experienced that such project feedback facility is almost absent. Finally, it is important to value knowledge and is concerned with viewing knowledge as an asset.
    iv. KM motivation from top management: The Institutes have not taken considerable steps to motivate the faculty members at both individual and group levels towards the process of creating and distributing knowledge. Primary movers for writing articles and books are peer recognition and annual job appraisal. Around 50 percent of the respondents indicated low time availability to take part in the activities related to knowledge contributions. They indicated their busy schedules mostly in teaching and examinations activities. One should note that for any institution of higher learning, published research articles, case studies and other documents may be extremely useful component for knowledge sharing, as well as these contribute to output performance of the given organization in highly positive manner.
v. The creation and maintenance of knowledge repositories: Data accumulated are mostly in the areas of student and corporate information. IT support services are centrally provided and are mostly operational. They are system driven rather than knowledge driven, something which has been highlighted by Rowley as a common inadequacy of educational institutions dealing with large amounts of accumulated data. While information has been readily captured in documents and databases through the various IT systems available, there have been less ready efforts to capture and disseminate knowledge, i.e. information combined with experience and judgment (Nonaka & Takeuchi 1995).

5.    Results & Conclusion:  Knowledge management as a concept is very attractive and provides huge opportunities that should not be missed. It is an engine that transforms knowledge into business value. Knowledge Management can be used as emerging leadership trend in management education. However, implementation of knowledge management is not easy for educational institutes. Institutes have to grab various issues and challenges such as organizational culture, strategy, information technology, and knowledge organization. Despite all these issues and challenges, institutes worldwide have shown keen interest in knowledge management. As far as India is concerned knowledge Management is still in its infancy stage. It has still to go a long way for complete knowledge management implementation, and be a leader.Based on Rowley’s typology of knowledge management objectives in universities, we found that KM-led activities and tools in the area of knowledge access have been sufficiently addressed. In tandem with the rapid expansion of management institutions, more emphasis should be put on the cultivation of a knowledge repositories knowledge sharing environment and knowledge valuation. To become a KM-enabled organization and to implement a KM-led research focus, following results will have to be achieved:

Firstly, institutions should promote and cultivate knowledge -sharing culture among its members so as to enable and support the exchange of tacit knowledge between individuals and groups/teams.  Ideally, internal knowledge-sharing should be proclaimed as a corporate value by universities that is recognised by senior members of the university administration, including board members. Barriers and challenges that need to be addressed in this area include how tacit knowledge can be captured and shared for the good of the university – e.g. to do things, better, faster and cheaper (the know-how). The sharing of know -how plays a key role in many strategic activities and processes such as recruitment and training. In many organisations a ‘need to know culture’ prevails that works against knowledge sharing and innovation. Competition in academia has made works-in-progress confidential and often inaccessible. Researchers are not rewarded based on the extent of internal knowledge sharing activities but rather based on the number of publications in internationally refereed top journals. One of the related challenges is to capture knowledge about best research practices (which usually comes in the form of tacit knowledge, learned through hours of painstaking efforts) and to share that amongst other organisational members. Overcoming such challenges requires appropriate incentives and recognition for knowledge sharing (e.g. during performance appraisals), mutual trust, suitable mechanisms (e.g. regular share fairs) and a caring organisation. As knowledge no longer remains the domain of academia but increasingly is produced and co-produced by public organisations, industry and think tanks, universities are now confronted with very smart competitors who can generate knowledge quickly as well as the challenge of how to participate and accommodate “different practices of creating and warranting knowledge in different domains”

To sum up, the management community and its major stakeholders stand to gain through effective knowledge management and the further development of its knowledge sharing culture enabled by top management support and allocation of sufficient resources, suitable organisational structures (e.g. the appointment of a chief knowledge officer as head of a KM unit), a reward system which puts a premium on knowledge sharing and innovation rather than knowledge hoarding, top notch KM software solutions and effective KM processes. Future KM-related projects include (i) The creation of a central repository of research results and research efforts where contributions by faculty, students and staff are stored and accessed. The idea is to have a digitized archive of efforts for reference and for future generations; (ii) Constant evaluation and testing for cheaper, better and faster tools, both in terms of technological methods, hardware and software. (iii) More emphasis should be put on the cultivation of a knowledge-sharing environment and knowledge valuation In this paper, we endeavored to illustrate the applicability of knowledge management to management education institutions. Based on the case study, we conclude that knowledge management concepts and tools can indeed benefit and have the potential for an institution to become leader in management education.

6.     Limitations: The current study is exploratory in nature and considers the case of few business schools in Indore. It will be interesting to study similar academic houses and compare the results for further precision in validation of the factors considered in the study. It will be extremely useful to generate a model based on confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modelling in order to study independence or co-linearity among these factors and also the impact of these factors on individual performance variables.

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