Investigating the Application of Knowledge Management Systems in Saudi HEIs: A Design Science Approach

Abstract

The effective management of individuals’ expertise is absolutely necessary in order to maintain and preserve the intellectual resources of modern organisations within the knowledge-based economy. Expertise held primarily by experts should be recorded and encoded to avoid its depletion. It should be effectively incorporated into organisational processes so as to enhance productivity, competitiveness, and efficiency in the provision of services and goods. Higher education institutions (HEIs) are knowledge-intensive organisations that create and disseminate knowledge — to both students and society. Indeed, they are the most prominent producers, storehouses, and exporters of knowledge in society. Academics are a key source of knowledge in HEIs, and, crucially, they can more easily meet the stringent demands they face in terms of achieving a high degree of teaching quality by participating, with others, in the sharing of teaching practices. Teaching practices (TPs) emerge from expertise as methods, techniques, or ways of performing specific tasks. Therefore, it is incumbent on HEIs to adeptly manage the diverse types of TPs used by their academics — in order to improve the institutional performance sustainably. The predominant medium currently adopted amongst instructors in Saudi universities for TPs management is the traditional human-centric approach which focuses on the transmitting of knowledge via face-to-face meetings such as workshops, round tables, focus groups, and some printed materials. The human-centric approach has been found to be largely unsuitable for managing academics’ knowledge, in the context of Saudi universities because it is possible to reach only a limited number of people in a given time via this mechanism. It is concluded, then, that the employment of a knowledge management system (KMS), which incorporates Web technologies, in an HEI will lead to enhancement in terms of the knowledge management (KM) processes carried out amongst academics. This research adopts a three phases design science research methodology (DSRM). The first phase, problem identification, reviews the literature and conducts an investigative study. The resultant literature review shows that the existent KM solutions are not well aligned with the higher education processes and KM activities among instructors. In addition, an investigative study is conducted by collecting quantitative data via questionnaires and qualitative data via several semi-structured interviews with academics from various different Saudi universities — in order to capture academics’ perceptions. The study shows that academics lack interest in sharing their knowledge using the existent KM approaches. Thus, to tackle this issue, the solution design phase, which is the second phase of the DSRM, proposes a KM framework that enhances the processes of KM by enabling expertise to be collected and shared through the articulation and management of TPs generated in an HEI. In this phase, the framework is implemented as a system called TPMS, which allows academics to document, store, retrieve, and evaluate TPs effectively. The system also encourages and motivates academics to share their knowledge by implementing motivational affordances as powerful methods which motivate individuals to share their TPs with others. Finally, the evaluation phase, which is the last phase of the DSRM, includes testing the system in a real-world context, within a community of academics, in order to evaluate the academics’ experience and also their perceptions relating to the usefulness and usability of using the system for managing their TPs. The main experiment was designed and conducted such that 80 academics were asked to use the system. Before they used the system, the results of a pre-test survey were collected from these academics to assess their perceptions of usefulness regarding the ex