Knowledge audit for UTM faculty of computing information systems doctoral community

Abstract

In order to educate students to conduct their research properly with high quality, Faculty of Computing of UTM has established the program for the PhD information system (IS) students. Supervisors and lecturers as one of the members of this community rely only on their pervious teaching/supervising background and this is not a good point in this fast growing knowledge sharing era. On the other hand, students who are involved in this program need the specific knowledge to conduct their research with high quality and this knowledge should be prepared for them by program’s head in the well-organized manner. These conditions will limit the quality of this program. Knowing the kind of knowledge and the actual placement of it in this program as well as the method of capturing, using and improvement of it are also crucial issues. In order to gain such kind of understanding, knowledge audit (KA) is the key. This paper presents the results of conducting knowledge audit among this PhD IS community. To capture the knowledge researcher used both interview (for supervisors and lecturers) and questionnaire (for students only). Among 75 active students the questionnaire was distributed only to 50 students and 5 experts lecturers were selected for interview. The results are presented based on the main components of knowledge audit which are knowledge needs, knowledge resources and location and knowledge flow, and also knowledge sharing analysis respectively. The results shows that almost 60% of required knowledge is available within university and based on it knowledge directory was proposed. Based on the missed knowledge author prepared recommendations for faculty to take care and prepare it as fast as possible.