Identificação do nível de maturidade em gestão do conhecimento das instituições de ensino superior: uma avaliação da Escola de Administração da UFBA

One of the consequences of using intense, consistent, and conscious knowledge in organizations was the change in the importance of the use of organizational resources. Knowledge and its use for creation and innovation have become the most valued production factors and sought to generate competitive differentials that enable organizations to survive and win in this globalized world. The creation of new knowledge depends on the continuous interaction between people, which occurs through the exchanges and social relations, dialogues and debates that occur within a group. The interactions generate, therefore, new perspectives, new premises and new understandings of reality causing individual knowledge to generate new forms of knowledge in individual and collective scope, increasing thus its forms of production, diffusion and socialization. Emerged, of course, the need to proceed on those aspects and mechanisms of management of organizational knowledge, in order to avoid not only the loss of intellectual capital or even the possibilities of their use, but also to ensure that they are available and accessible to the right people at the moment and certain spaces, giving rise to a new academic and corporate area that came to be called Knowledge Management (KM). Specifically, in relation to higher education institutions – HEI, these are primarily knowledgebased organizations, and who use it both for its social production (teaching, research and extension) and to qualify their management processes, which makes the KM strategic to HEI. In this function, this study sought to identify the degree of maturity in Knowledge Management in a HEI, using as a case study the School of Administration of Bahia (Business School) of the Federal University of Bahia. For the research were developed: bibliographical research, interviews, and survey research structured with institution members. It was concluded that the observed institution has a great shortage of processes and practices that help to manage their knowledge, which may be generating loss of knowledge, efficiency and competitiveness.