Case Study
The knowledge audit is performed on a non-profit educational program, instituted in 1997 at Oakland University, available to undergraduate business students. It uses competitively selected business students to work on IT application projects with various corporate sponsors, who fund the program and mentor the students. The program has had over 45 corporate sponsors, completed over 220 projects, graduated 50 students in the last four years. The students work as a team on each project and move from team to team and project to project over three semesters of this program.

Table 1 shows how the program activities are mapped to knowledge processes. The program acquires (or purchases) no knowledge from outside to complete the project. The knowledge goals of the program are to provide inter-disciplinary applied IT education to business students, and support knowledge sharing and learning among the students. To this end, the following strategies are used:
Business students from all majors are actively recruited
Corporations with IT needs and educational focus are sought for sponsorship
Case problems are used to create multi-disciplinary focus
Teams include students from different majors to encourage cross disciplinary thinking
Teams are evaluated on project success, willingness to mentor, and support of knowledge sharing and learning.

The audit shows that the program's knowledge goals have not been sufficiently linked to all its operational activities, and the firm has not sufficiently communicated its goals and strategies to all the stakeholders. The program uses mostly formal and informal network models to support knowledge sharing, and operates within a flat organisational structure that supports open and free communication across its constituencies (director, faculty, sponsors, alumni and students) to ensure that knowledge is passed from senior class to junior class. The program created a social network and family culture to support much of the organisation's knowledge sharing activities and learning goals of the individual students.

However, as the organisation becomes older and mature, technology may be needed to support some of the capture and sharing of the project knowledge and specific policies are needed to support communication of goals and strategies.

A word of caution: while capturing project knowledge for reuse appears to be necessary, care should be taken on what is captured, given that information technologies are changing rapidly. Not all project knowledge is relevant over time and certain abstraction may be needed to ensure generalisability over time. Also, given that the program operates in a highly transitory mode (students - the knowledge workers, leave the program every two years), it should continue to maintain its small size, use network relationships and family culture to support the knowledge sharing and learning, and seek unobtrusive means to collect the needed knowledge as opposed to creating a very formal and intrusive knowledge capture.

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