TOWARD A NEW MODEL FOR THE ADOPTION OF WEB-BASED KNOWLEDGE SHARING SYSTEMS AMONGST ACADEMICS IN SAUDI ARABIAN HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS

Knowledge sharing has become a significant source of success in Knowledge Management (KM). In many organisations, knowledge management is often inadequate when it comes to web-based knowledge sharing, particularly among academics who work in Saudi universities. To ensure that a knowledge sharing system can be well implemented and used when communicating internally in an academic context, there is a need to know why academics accept or reject the use of web-based knowledge sharing systems. Therefore, the aim of this research is to determine the factors that affect academics' behaviours toward using web technology to share knowledge in Saudi Arabian higher education institutions. Furthermore, a web-based knowledge sharing adoption model is constructed based on the factors which already exist in technology acceptance theories, such as the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) and Task-Technology Fit (TTF), as well as other factors which are explored in knowledge sharing literature reviews to enrich the proposed model. Then, the model will be edited and refined using mixed method approach. The future work will expand the model and evaluate it to ensure that it fits the academics' needs.