E-Human Resource Management 19

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The next two definitions broaden these definitions by addressing corporate
universities’ critical role in knowledge management, and in leading and support-
ing a corporate learning system:
“A corporate university is an educational entity that is a strategic tool
designed to assist its parent organization in achieving its mission by
conducting activities that cultivate individual and organizational learning,
knowledge, and wisdom.” (Allen, 2002, p. 9)
“A corporate university is a company-run post-secondary educational
entity that focuses on enhancing the knowledge and skills of its workforce
members by strategically intertwining learning with work. Whether it
exists as a physical campus or a virtual one, the focus has shifted from
providing a classroom to developing a learning process where networking
the entire organization’s knowledge becomes the priority.” (National
Alliance of Business, 2002)
Together these definitions describe the potential breadth of corporate univer-
sities today, and highlight some differences in their goals, foci, and emphasis,
depending on the organization. In addition, the last definition reminds us again
that at this point in the evolution of corporate universities, a key challenge is to
closely align the corporate university mission and structure with an organization’s
strategic objectives. Recent research efforts have begun to develop frame-
works that detail the various components of the corporate university (Argote,
McEvily, & Reagans, 2003; Prince & Stewart, 2002).
Differing Foci of Corporate Universities
A commonly raised issue is whether corporate universities are simply human
resource training departments with a new name. The literature suggests this is
not the case. In fact six possible foci have been identified for corporate
universities.
These foci are not mutually exclusive. From Table 1, it is apparent that

corporate universities differ from each other even though some have elements
of all the foci under their corporate university umbrella. Table 2 identifies
Keeping Up with the Corporate University 149
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common differences cited in the literature between traditional HR training
departments and today’s corporate universities, and thus provides character-
istics of corporate universities as they continue to emerge.
Major Influences on
Corporate University Growth
As previously mentioned, the conceptualization, development, and implemen-
tation of today’s corporate universities have been significantly influenced by
three major trends:
Table 1. Corporate university foci
Sources: Fulmer (2002), Global Learning Resources (2001)
Focus Description
A training department with a new
name
Focus on traditional HR training and development
Competency-based career
development
Focus on developing individual skills and providing the tools
necessary to meet business challenges, including career
development activities, facilitating succession planning, and
helping to retain key employees
Change-management Focus on easing major changes and transformations within the
company
Initiative driven Focus on facilitating the accomplishment of a corporate-wide
initiative
Leadership development Focus on management development and leadership

Customer-supplier relationship
management
Focus on educating and managing employees, suppliers, and
customers about customer-supplier relationships

Table 2: Differing characteristics of traditional HR training and
development departments and corporate universities
Sources: Barley (2001); Meister (1998)
Traditional HR Training Corporate Universities
& Development
Reactive Proactive
Short-term focus Long-term focus
Problem oriented Strategically aligned
Proprietorship Partnership
Compartmentalized Integrated (under one umbrella)
Individual development focus Corporate growth focus
Limited role for higher education Expanded role for higher education
Resistance to evaluation Grounded in evaluation (ROI)
Classroom based More Web-based delivery
Limited metrics Effective measures
Open enrollment Managed enrollment
Learning as an employee benefit Learning as an employee requirement
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1. Recognition of human resource management as an instrumental player in
corporate strategy (Prince & Stewart, 2002; Becker et al., 2001);
2. Emergence of knowledge management concepts and their integration into
organizational practices (Argote et al., 2003; Allee, 2002; Alavi &
Leidner, 2001); and

3. Availability and continued development of new technologies that support
e-learning approaches to human resource development (Allen, 2002;
Rossett, 2002).
These trends, taken together, have contributed to the significant growth of
corporate universities and ultimately influence their role in the organization.
Today’s corporate university is actively exploring what was once considered
the “holy grail” of training departments — a link between training, job
performance, and an organization’s goals.
Strategy and Human Resource Management
In recent years, organizations have awakened to the critical need to include
human resources as part of their strategic planning processes (Spitzer &
Conway, 2002; Becker et al., 2001; Aldelsberg & Trolley, 1999; Rossett,
1999). Many factors have influenced this change; for example, organizations
are recognizing that:
• employees and their continued work-related learning are key to organi-
zational goal attainment;
• corporate strategies must link training and development (learning) to key
business goals, with an emphasis on measurement, such as return on
investment (ROI ) and the accompanying new tools for human resource
measurement;
• continuous improvement at all levels requires ongoing work-based learn-
ing opportunities — that is, organizations need to become “learning
organizations”;
• partnering with multiple organizations requires learning about, from, and
with other organizations and helps each organization meet its own goals;
Keeping Up with the Corporate University 151
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• the extensive diffusion of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems has
opened up extraordinary opportunities, often bundled under the label of

“e-HRM,” for communicating with an organization’s employees, workflow
improvements related to HR activities, and the management of organiza-
tional learning initiatives;
• spreading and sustaining organizational culture, especially in today’s
global organizations, requires new ways to coordinate and deliver consis-
tent information and values about one’s organization;
• quality is a strategic goal requiring involvement of employees (at all levels),
customers, and suppliers in organizational change efforts;
• developing measurement standards for quality requires organization-wide
learning through training (e.g., Six Sigma; ISO 9000+);
• national and international standards of excellence (e.g., Malcolm Baldridge
Awards) facilitate the sharing of organizational “best practices”;
• lifetime employability, effective recruitment, and retaining best employees
have renewed importance; and
• learning is no longer just an employee benefit, but rather a competitive
necessity.
Each of these factors points to the need for continuous learning by employees
and requires a strategic role for human resources. As an organizational entity,
corporate universities have emerged as a means to initiate, coordinate, imple-
ment, and evaluate organizational learning to meet organizational goals.
Knowledge Management
Knowledge management is a high priority topic today because companies are
struggling to keep up with the ever-increasing rate of change in their environ-
ments and the resulting need for analysis of greater variety and complexity
(Malhotra, 2001). Organizations need to be able to evaluate and adapt faster
than ever. In the short term, they need the ability to bring as much organizational
knowledge, wisdom, and experience to bear on business challenges as pos-
sible, and faster than ever. In the long term, and this is where corporate
universities come in, organizations need to determine gaps in their knowledge
competencies and work diligently to close those gaps.

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Knowledge management has been prominent in the literature since the 1980s
and its definition is still evolving. However, there are some enduring common
components. Knowledge management is about maximizing the knowledge
assets in a company and recognizing that the combination of information,
knowledge, and wisdom that both humans and digital files (e.g., e-mail, Excel
spreadsheets, Word documents) possess represent an asset (Barth, 2002).
Whereas traditionally the working axiom was “knowledge = power, so hoard
it,” today the theme has become “knowledge = power, so share it and it will
multiply” — quite a different approach (Allee, 2002). In summary, knowledge
management is about the creation, retention, and transfer of knowledge within
the organization (Argote et al., 2003).
Knowledge management is best understood, not as an end, but as a means or
a tool (Malhotra, 2001). That is, knowledge management is the path to better
understand a company’s mission, competitive environment, and/or perfor-
mance, and for creating value from knowledge-based assets. Such a process
often includes capturing, retaining, and sharing the assets “among employees,
departments, and even other companies” (Santosus & Surmacz, 2002),
including assets that may exist across many miles.
“With on-demand access to managed knowledge, every situation is addressed
with the sum total of everything anyone in the organization has ever learned
about a situation of a similar nature” (Bellinger, 2002, p. 6). Knowledge
management, therefore, can increase the effectiveness of the organization and
result in greater customer value (Barth, 2002).
Over the past few years, the concept of knowledge management (KM) has
moved from niche applications limited to certain industries to a generally
discussed concept across all types of business. Today, “every business is
a knowledge business; every worker is a knowledge worker” (Allee, 2002,

p. 1).
Currently KM use has taken two tracks: KM related to information technology
and KM related to people (Sveiby, 2001). IT-related KM, that dates back to
the late 1980s, focuses on the management of information through sharing
information (e.g., via intranets, Web technologies, e-mail, virtual teams, and
groupware applications such as Lotus Notes); managing and analyzing large
volumes of management-oriented data — past and present (e.g., through
databases, data warehousing; data mining; and On-Line Analytic Processing,
or OLAP); and tools to create interactive e-commerce applications that can
bring the supplier and customer closer to the business than ever before (Allee,