Abstract:

The knowledge society requires new forms of access, fruition and reuse of the information and needs new practices for the management of every organizational process. To date, it is possible to assimilate the educational institution to an enterprise; the nature of service provided by the school (cultural services of a social value) characterizes this particular type of enterprise. The Educational Enterprise has a central role in the knowledge-based economy. The citizen of tomorrow have to build a dynamic and flexible knowledge, easily adaptable to the labour market needs. In this profoundly changed context are multiple the educational challenges: for this reason, educational systems must tend to optimize their service management practices. The reference to corporate culture and the definition of good practices can support the desired improvement process. In this paper, these authors want to reflect on educational process in relation to demands of knowledge society. Starting from the study of the specialist literature, we will try to offer a theoretical framework for the definition of the Educational Enterprise; borrowing some characters from corporate culture we hypothesize an improvement in the management of multiple educational practices and, consequently, the enhancement of customer satisfaction. In our case customer are students who regularly attend the university; specifically we will focus on the value of information and communication technologies if they are used for managing organizational processes, and making contact whit stakeholders to meet their needs. The considerable technologization of the experience forms, that includes the most common daily practices, like that educational, has deeply re-designed our society, changing behaviour patterns, status and rules of our cultural life. Technological features, particularly, can deliver considerable information about the quality of the educational service provided and can contribute on its evaluation and its effective improvement. In the first part of this theoretical article these authors want to briefly illustrate the contemporary condition of the Knowledge Society: specifically how the new paradigm has changed the educational experiences in Higher Education. In the second part, we present a possible synthesis between the corporate culture and that of Higher Education, to understand if effectively exist this relationship: in terms of characteristics, models, structures, practices. The main purpose of this research is to formalise the feature of the educational enterprise in order to define some good practices, and improve the quality of the education offering to the labour market's demands.

Keywords:

Knowledge Society, ICT, Educational Enterprise, Knowledge Management, Education Practice.