ISSUES AND BARRIERS IN IMPLEMENTING KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT IN A BUSINESS SCHOOL IN SRI LANKA

Abstract

By definition universities are places of creating and sharing knowledge. Knowledge Management (KM) in higher education institutes has become an emerging research area in the recent past. The main purpose of this paper is to present the findings of a research carried out to identify the issues and the barriers in implementing KM in a business school in Sri Lanka. Since the objective of this research was to understand the situation rather than to find any relationships among variables, the exploratory research approach was used. Mainly qualitative data- interviews with the academic staff, observations and secondary data- were used in the analysis. It was revealed that KM had not become a part of the organizational strategy of the selected business school yet. However, few good KM practices of business school were identified. The barriers in implementing KM can be categorised as personal and organizational. The identified personal barriers were lack of enthusiasm in carrying out research, heavy work-load and consideration of research only as a mean of obtaining promotions while the organizational barriers were, weaknesses in the recruitment and promotion schemes and lack of planning for KM. However, it was revealed that the use of technology for KM is fairly good. The management of the school needs to create a culture that will encourage KM by the staff and students within the school. Some of the recommendations made to the school are, encouragement of collaborative research, making necessary changes to the recruitment and promotion schemes and providing opportunities and funding for postdoctoral research for the senior staff. The key contribution of this research is identification of issues and barriers in implementing KM in a business school in a developing country. This knowledge will be useful not only to the selected school but to any similar school of a university to improve KM. This research was limited to one of the eight faculties of the University. This can be extended to other faculties as well with the objective of identifying best practices in each faculty.