Knowledge Management Practices in Higher Education Institutions: a Systematic Literature Review

Across the globe, the role of Higher Educational institutions (HEIs) as knowledge providers has been scrutinized and challenged by the various stakeholders. Therefore, HEIs, especially in developing countries are putting efforts to manage their knowledge based strategic assets. To answer this challenge, knowledge management (KM) tools and techniques have been proposed to make use of HEIs knowledge assets in accordance with the demands of the time. The study reported in this paper intended to explore the research on KM in HEIs of South Asian countries and propose a conceptual framework. A systematic literature review (SLR) has been conducted to identify, select and retrieve relevant scholarly literature from well-established academic databases by following a precise protocol and a systematic data extraction strategy. The findings of the study shown that limited research on KM in the HEIs’ context has been conducted in both theoretical aspects and empirical implementations. The findings also disclosed different factors that affect the main agents of KM in the context of their professional practices as faculty, administrative staff, librarians and information professionals in HEIs. As the result of the analysis of the literature review findings a conceptual framework is proposed in this paper which is expected to provide a good foundation for future research as well as pave the way towards more successful KM implementations in HEIs.