Knowledge Management in an Organisational Climate of Uncertainty and Change: A Longitudinal Case Study of an Australian University

Universities are in the knowledge business and are expected to be at the forefront of knowledge management (KM). However, KM in a university is complex given the diversity of stakeholder groups. This is exacerbated in the Australian context by the changing climate of rationalisation, corporatisation and marketisation universities faced in the past decade. This paper investigates KM strategies in an Australian university to uncover barriers to knowledge-sharing among academics. Although the organisational infrastructure supports KM, many academics have not actively embraced it. One reason is that they struggle with KM for operational excellence in the increasing administrative aspects of the academic’s role, rendering them time-poor in terms of KM for innovation in research and teaching. As a first step, we propose a self-defined sub-unit level customised view of the explicit knowledge artefacts provided at the organisational level i.e. a wiki for a school-based community of practice for administrative best practices.