Gestão do conhecimento no Ensino Superior Federal: caso UFERSA.

Abstract

The passing of decades has entailed changes not only in people’s way of life, but has also brought consequences to the companies and their management arrangements. The current era of knowledge has elected the sharing of knowledge and the intangible assets of individuals as the biggest competitive advantage and as a value source of institutions. Public service is not on the margin of this trend and recognizes in the Knowledge Management the way of merge efficiency, efficacy and effectiveness with the services offered to citizens. In terms of adhesion, the federal public service is still timid and the adoption of Knowledge Management aims a good diagnosis for its appropriate implementation and execution. Aware of this need, this paper has pursued to verify which are the practices of Knowledge Management adopted by the Federal University of Semi-Árido – UFERSA from the identification in its operational routine. For this purpose, nowledge Management has been situated in the context of public institutions; the situation has been exposed in the university’s framework; there has been presented some of the diagnosis and implementation models pointed by literature and there has been selected the Method OKA – Organization Knowledge Assessment, elaborated by the World Bank and perfected to the Brazilian Public Administration. Starting from a reduced version of the original questionnaire of the method and use of software SysOKA, servers of the four campi of the university were questioned about their perception towards the application of KM in the administrative activities and in decision-making. There has been identified that UFERSA has the best and worst performance to Knowledge Management inside the element of Systems, specifically in the dimensions of Knowledge Infrastructure and KM Program and that the elements of People and Processes present results in its majority unsatisfactory with a margin for improvement. There has also been determined that the scenario of KM at UFERSA does not diverge a lot from the situation of other Brazilian companies: on the whole there are signs of the presence of KM activities, however they still need fostering, encouragement and inclusion at the institutional culture. It is concluded that the Knowledge Management at UFERSA is present in diffused and activities not recognized as such and there are obstacles and little incentive to the creation and dissemination of knowledge. There is unawareness as far as the tool and its benefits, and the knowledge is still retained in the more experienced servers. However, there is a lot of place for improvement since the servers are willing to collaborate with their peers and legitimate the need of circulation information and daily and strategic knowledge in the university.