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

Terry Calhoun, Commentator
Society for College and University Planning (SCUP)
University of Michigan

D'es IT on your campus know what it knows? For example, if a technician in the Anthropology Department were to call your support line and say: "I've got a professor here who's just bought a Nextel (Motorola iM1100) wireless modem and wants it installed to work on his Windows XP machine, but I'm having problems," what do you tell him? Pick one:

(a) Never heard of it. We don't support that.
(b) Never heard of it. I'll ask around.
(c) Never heard of it, but wait a sec … "John D'e over in the School of Education has installed one of those, why don't you call him."

At most universities, the helpful intent but ignorance represented by (b) would be the typical response, even though at many of those schools the senior IT staff would prefer the answer to be (a). I hope you didn't pick (a), but maybe you did. [It's not the direction this piece is going, but we will write some other time about the dissonance between making our jobs easier (and fitting into the budget) and supporting the institution's mission.]

We think that more of you could have answers like (c), and within budget too, if there were some effort put into campuswide knowledge management systems for IT staff …

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