Establishing Knowledge Management Model of Quality Management Systems for Higher Education Institutions

Introduction

Higher education institutions (HEI) adopt quality management systems (QMS) standards to provide fundamental requirements in optimizing products and services as value-added to their stakeholders such as students, parents, industry partners, and staff. Though the concept of knowledge management (KM) is not new, past studies that focused on KM within QMS standards such as ISO 9001:2015 are still lacking. Hence, there is a vast opportunity and gaps for future KM research within the implementation of QMS to be conducted.

HEI refers to an institution that provides education at the tertiary level. Primary activities are knowledge-intensive, such as delivering lectures, providing consultation, and conducting research and development. While conducting the knowledge-intensive activities, there are interactive processes involved between delivering the knowledge, managing it, document it, and simultaneously ensuring that services delivered are conformed to the quality standards adopted by the institution. The knowledge conversion model developed by Ikujiro Nonaka and Noboru Konno (1998), Nonaka (1994), and Nonaka et al. (2000) indicates what they derived as the knowledge conversion process that involves interaction processes and activities between two types of knowledge (explicit and tacit). Therefore, the implementation of KM as part of the quality strategy assists in solving the quality problems, as shown in Table 1.