Knowing What You Know—Who Has, Where Is, Your Tacit Knowledge

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Knowing What You Know—Who Has, Where Is, Your Tacit Knowledge

4/23/2003

By Terry Calhoun

D'es your campus have any e-mail lists of IT professionals they can use to ask each other questions? Even a single list would be useful, but lists on various topics can also be invaluable. Do you have classes for faculty and staff on particular software tools? If so, do those who attend get to join virtual communities of other users and professional experts for further learning and to share tacit knowledge? If not, why not? Setting up a Lyris list is very little work.

One minimalistic knowledge management tool is to break down structural barriers to communication. In a recent interview with the CIO of Johns Hopkins University, one of the main points made was that having a single CIO for the hospital system as well as for the university created major benefits for IT. "When it was two separate IT organizations we tripped over each other a little bit and did not use our collective resources as well as we could have." She g'es on to say that she’s worked to utilize the talent in the school of engineering’s computer science department and institute for security as well. So, just by having one CIO for a collection of units that in most places might have two, there is more sharing of knowledge than there otherwise would be—a form of knowledge management.

Collaboration is something that we used to think of as optional, to be done when more important things are out of the way. As Brian Hawkins of EDUCAUSE puts it: "In essence we thought of collaboration as an avocational approach. The challenges that we face today with the speed of change, and the transformations that are overtaking us, call for us to firmly come to grips with the notion that collaboration is the only means of competitive survival." [For a superb example of an IT-related higher education association that is working with a good topical taxonomy and good IT tools to manage knowledge, check out the EDUCAUSE Information Resources Library.]

Brian Hawkins is speaking of inter-institutional collaboration and we’re encouraging intra-institutional, cross-departmental collaboration, but the principle’s the same—it’s no longer a luxury to collaborate, but a minimal practice. Probably no department on campus collaborates, at least within itself, better than IT, so we’re ahead of most there. But how often do the folks in IT at the business school talk to the folks in IT at the medical school on your campus?

So, what will it be? Minimal databases of who-knows-what, or open communications channels between departments, or ongoing virtual communities for post-meetings and post-workshops? What d'es your school’s IT staff do to encourage movement of individual tacit knowledge to institutional explicit knowledge? We’d love to hear from you: terry.calhoun@scup.org.

About the author: Terry Calhoun is Director of Communications and Publications for the Society for College and University Planning (SCUP). You can contact him through CT's IT Trends forum by clicking here. View more articles by Terry Calhoun.

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Terry Calhoun, "Knowing What You Know—Who Has, Where Is, Your Tacit Knowledge," Campus Technology, 4/23/2003, http://www.campustechnology.com/article.aspx?aid=39374

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