Knowledge audit on special children communities

Abstract

This paper reports on how knowledge audit analysis was conducted for special children (SC) communities in Malaysia context. The purpose of the knowledge audit is to determine the knowledge requirement of SC communities which may reveal the required, available and missing knowledge and the person involved related to SC. Four communities of practice (CoPs) have been identified namely Parents, Educators, Medical Experts and Researchers. The knowledge audit has been conducted in four phases. There are Knowledge Needs Analysis, Knowledge Inventory Analysis, Knowledge Flows Analysis and Knowledge Mapping. Questionnaires and interviews were conducted as knowledge audit tools for facilitating the collection of data, information and evident. In order to represent the knowledge audit results, matrices presentation is used. These representations help in tracing knowledge and verify the results with the CoPs more clearly. The result shows that knowledge audit yields a number of benefits that include the missing gap between required and available knowledge. The requirement can be used to develop a one stop center for SC communities to communicate among other CoPs. Subsequently, recommendations can be derived for better managing of the knowledge.