Initiating Knowledge Management in Colleges and Universities: A template

Step 1. Find a champion from top administration; form a KM planning team

A lot of times, the need for knowledge management (or strategic transformation, overhaul, etc.) stems from a perceived crisis, and the opportunity arising from such a crisis. This crisis may come from the larger macro environment affecting the university – an accreditation body threating to withdraw accreditation, student admission or retention rates going down, staff / faculty not having had raises, etc. With KM, the opportunities might be to retain students, achieve student learning outcomes, achieve excellence in research or teaching, enable greater connection and collaboration between faculty members across the campus, or to enhance collaboration between different departments. Effective KM can lead to better decision-making capabilities, reduced time to develop products such as curriculum or research outputs, improved academic and administrative services, reduced costs (Omerzel, Biloslavo, & Trnavcevic, 2011), increased productivity (Arntzen, Worasinchai, & Ribiere, 2009), improved efficiencies and improved quality of output.

Irrespective of whether the College President, Provost or Dean learns of KM from news outlets or its success in other organizations, or a faculty or staff member brings it to the notice of the administration, there needs to be a champion of KM in top administration. This can happen once s/he is convinced that the status quo in the University needs to change, and that KM can provide a solution.

Top administration support is crucial to drive the idea of KM college-wide and to provide the support, resources and incentives for KM. The administration can also help put together a planning team in place that can drive the KM process forward. Some budget, financial and other resources may need to be provided to the team and its work. This team may be top-down (with members nominated by the college administration), bottom-up (with members emerging from individual schools) or a mix of both. When selecting members for such a team, it is crucial to include key stakeholders from different schools and constituencies. The KM process should be driven by people who are likely to be most affected by the results – the faculty and staff (either college-wide or within a school or unit, depending on the scope of KM). It should also have representation from administration, as well as students. Rogers (1995)’ Diffusion of Innovation theory classifies people into innovators, early adopters, the early majority, the late majority and laggards. Since KM is all about change management, it is helpful to include innovators and early adopters (those who are more enthusiastic about change) in the team. The team should have a good facilitator throughout, who can be a person trained in KM or change management, someone from the Center for Excellence in Teaching or the college Assessment Committee. The facilitator must have the skills to get groups to brainstorm together in retreat-like settings.

One thing to note is that this should be a facilitation and coordinating team. Rather than making and imposing decisions, its job is to bring together all the people in the KM process. All stakeholders affected by the results of the KM process (faculty, staff, students) must have a say, and choice of participation in the process.

• • Mechanism: The primary mechanism will be conversation about KM with top administration, and subsequent consultation for team formation involving various stakeholders.
• • Outcome: The outcome is buy-in for KM, and support and resources in terms of people and budget. By the time this step ends, a facilitation and planning team (including facilitator, faculty, staff and representatives from administration and students) should be in place.

Step 2. Identify KM goals and priorities

The KM planning team will hold consultations with heads of different units or schools across campus, who will inform all their constituents of upcoming retreats and encourage participation. The planning team will then schedule the time and agenda for 2-4 half-day retreats spread over a semester during times that work for the stakeholders involved. The idea is to get people together to participate in a shared process. If possible, video or audio conferencing options must be built in for those who cannot participate in person to connect remotely. People who choose not to come to the scheduled retreats are self-selecting themselves away from the process, but they should have a chance for input at various points. Thus, all stakeholders – whether faculty, staff or students must be reached out to – in the form of surveys, focus groups or email discussions, informing them of the work done in retreats and inviting comments or feedback, or their participation in subsequent retreats. Even if the majority of the work is done by faculty and staff, there could be student representatives, or separate focus groups with students.

The primary purpose of the retreats (enabled by the facilitator) must be to identify KM goals and priorities. In doing so, three sub-steps need to be addressed, which could each be the agenda for a single half-day retreat:

• A. Identify perceived crisis and/or opportunity – why do we want to manage knowledge?
• B. Align KM goals with university (or school/department) goals
• C. Identify and prioritize the critical knowledge that you need to manage (O’Dell & Hubert, 2011, pp. 23-31)

At some stage during the process, the team, the college administration and the people involved in the retreat either self-select or decide on the school or unit to involve first for a KM pilot. A unit that has a reputation for being flexible, innovative, technology-savvy, and with a thriving knowledge sharing culture, and/or a high rank in the field (as compared to other schools or units) is a good choice for a pilot site, as it can show early successes, and serve as a model for the rest of the college or university.

A. In the first retreat, the participants will consider the college need that is addressed by KM. Why do we want to manage knowledge? What do we hope to get out of it? The strategic priorities will be different for each institution, and will also be different at different times in the life of a single institution. We discussed knowledge priorities under literature review in prior works such as Geng et al. (2005) and Ahmadi (2012). Arntzen, Worasinchai, & Ribiere (2009, p. 134) list KM outcomes for higher education and map them to initiatives for their realization. Different KM researchers have identified different phases of the KM cycle (Dalkir, 2011), which might constitute the knowledge priority or knowledge outcomes for an organization. Some of these are addressed by Choo (1998) and incorporated in the SET model discussed earlier. These can be broadly classified into the three priorities listed below:

• a. Creating a conductive environment (ba) for knowledge capture and creation.
  
  • ⅰ. Knowledge acquisition or sourcing (sense making, as per Choo, 1998): Here, the internal or external environmental is continuously sensed and knowledge that is useful for the college is acquired. This includes information on new programs and degrees being launched by peer institutions, the recommendations of accreditation bodies, the opportunities provided by collaborations with other institutions, changes in the economic environment leading to more or less students entering college, etc.
  • ⅱ. Knowledge creation is one of the most important priorities for universities. As discussed above, one might want to focus on knowledge related to research output or teaching excellence or operational knowledge. Conducive environments such as working groups, meetings, collaborations, brainstorming sessions, seminars, retreats must be regularly held for knowledge creation.
  • ⅲ. Knowledge capture. The compiled knowledge must be captured in actionable forms such as faculty policy manuals, student guides, brochures, videos, audio recordings, emails, etc.
  • ⅳ. Knowledge organization and storage. Knowledge must be organized such that it is found when needed. Computer-based systems, intranets and content management systems play a major role here. Academic libraries and institutional repositories are important places to house knowledge.
• b. Making knowledge sharing a natural and defining aspect of the college
  
  • ⅴ. Knowledge sharing, transfer and access. Knowledge sharing is one of the most important purposes of KM. Connections must be built both for physical interactions (lunch time talks, meetings, conducive physical spaces, etc.), as well as physical and online interactions (working groups, communities of practice, etc.). Best practices and lessons learned must be continuously shared.
• c. Using, evaluating and applying the knowledge (decision making, as per Choo, 1998)
  
  • ⅵ. Knowledge application and use is the primary purpose of creating and sharing knowledge. If all the effort in managing knowledge does not lead to adequate use, the effort is wasted. The use would be at different levels – individual, group or team based, department based, and college- wide. The way the knowledge is stored and organized, and made available in a timely manner, will play a major part on how it is used. E.g. Course evaluations by students should be made available to faculty early enough, so that they can use the student feedback when preparing the next iteration of the course. Knowledge use would be different for faculty, staff, students, college administrators, and would be different across schools or units.

B. Once there is some clarity on the need to manage knowledge and some areas of focus, the second retreat can concentrate on aligning KM goals with the goals of the university (or the goals of a specific school or department, if KM implementation is to be limited to that unit). Most colleges and universities have explicitly stated longer term vision statements, and more specific mission statements listed on their websites. These are stated goals of the university – the reason for its existence. Many colleges would include learning or knowledge as part of these statements. Along with these, there would be immediate (applicable for 1-5 years) priorities for the college. It could be in the area of research as it is often linked to the reputation of a school or college – increasing research output by getting faculty to publish more; or raising the quality of research output; or providing greater access and dissemination of published articles by building or sustaining an in-house institutional repository to provide open access. It could be to provide greater support for teaching strategies, approach or classroom research. It could be to identify areas of growth for the college e.g. at the moment, there are growing areas like digital humanities, big data and information visualization or health informatics. It could be to survive and grow in an increasingly difficult economic climate by increasing student enrollment, preventing dropout rates, or looking for areas of additional revenue such as online education, new programs, degrees or certificates, or use of physical spaces such as buildings, parking or labs for revenue.

Many of these needs might co-exist. A college or university would need to prioritize them for the shorter term or longer term, and map the KM goals accordingly to it. These priorities would be different for different types of sizes of colleges or universities. They would also be different for a given institution at different times in its life and history. The participants of the retreat must seek such an alignment of KM priorities with college priorities.

C. Depending on the degree of progress in previous retreats, the participants in the third or fourth retreat could work to identify and prioritize the critical knowledge that it needs to manage. They need to identify and discuss what is meant by knowledge, as it is impossible to manage something that is not understood (Fahey & Prusak, 1998; Blackman & Kennedy, 2009). See the earlier discussion under the literature review on identifying the type of knowledge that we’re seeking to manage. The focus here is to identify that critical knowledge that will serve the strategic goals of the university. For example, if student retention is a strategic goal, what knowledge is critical to ensure this? “Building KM capabilities that connect employees and capture and share information is important, but being able to articulate specifically what knowledge needs those activities and approaches will address will lead to a clear call to action and more meaningful results. KM creates value only when it enables the creation and flow of the truly critical knowledge.” (O’Dell & Hubert, 2011, p. 23). At a higher level, the knowledge identified can be one of two types – operational versus scholarly (Geng et al., 2005), but could be further sub-divided based on feedback from participants. The role of tacit versus explicit knowledge must also be discussed. The identification of knowledge should help in developing the right KM strategy in the setting of KM goals and priority for the short term and the long term. For example, the tacit knowledge of faculty can be tapped by connecting people together for knowledge sharing. Explicit knowledge in the form of resources and answered questions can be made available via technology.

This process must end with an identification of members volunteering to take on or participating in further parts of the work, which must include the technology folks as well.

• • Mechanism: Thus, the second step of the KM process is enabled by a series of retreats involving various stakeholders.
• • Outcome: An outcome of this process is the identification of need, priority areas (e.g. student retention, research output, etc.) and the critical knowledge that the university is seeking to manage. A pilot site (such as a school or department within the university) should also be identified for KM implementation. At this stage, the planning team must give way to a KM design team. It could consist of either the same members who had facilitated the retreats, or new members could be roped in from retreat participants (or those with experience in KM design). The design team must have representatives from the university-wide Technology team, as technology (along with non-technology tools) will form a crucial backbone in enabling KM.

Step 3. Determine your current state in the priority areas identified (capability/readiness assessment)

The design team that is formed will now begin the task of assessing if the enabling context or “ba” (Nonaka & Konno, 1998) exists and to what extent i.e. the degree of readiness or capability of the college or university to implement KM. You want to plant a seed. You need to assess if the soil is fertile, if there is the right temperature, if there is light, etc. Thus, it is the process of trying to understand your current state before you can move ahead with filling the gaps in your knowledge or knowledge flows. To do this, the team can employ a number of mechanisms – primarily surveys, interviews and focus groups. The focus of these must be to answer questions related to four areas primarily – people, culture, processes and information technology. For instance, questions based on degree of agreement using a Likert scale can be developed where faculty and staff can be asked questions pertaining to the following:

• A. People – faculty, staff, administration (awareness of KM, what it means and what it can bring to them; individual intention to be involved in the KM process; expectancy – motivation, performance and effort i.e. how much effort am I willing to put into this - Razi and Karim, (2011); top management openness and support/resources for new ideas).
• B. Culture (the university encourages and facilities knowledge sharing; a climate of openness and trust permeates the university; student value creation (or research output, or another priority area) is acknowledged as the major objective of KM; flexibility and desire to innovate drives the learning process; faculty, staff and administration take responsibility for their own learning – adapted from O’Dell & Grayson, 1998, p. 229). Omerzel, Biloslavo, & Trnavcevic (2011) define organizational culture as a set of explicit and implicit rules of what is and is not acceptable behavior in an organization, influenced by core values, norms and underlying assumptions. Values and beliefs of university stakeholders i.e. administrators, faculty, staff, students and trustees are thought to greatly influence decision-making proceses, and shape individual and organizational behaviors at universities (Bartell, 2003; Omerzel, Biloslavo & Trnavcevic, 2011). The Competing Values Framework (CVF) by Quinn and Rohrbaugh (1981) identifies 4 types of organizational culture - 1) hierarchy (well-structured and formal organization with formalized rules and prcedures), 2) market (goal-oriented organization that operates by market rules), 3) clan (tightly connected organization that values teamwork, and people take care of each other; mentorship plays an important role) and 4) adhocracy (creative and dynamic organization that enables innovations, growth and gaining of new resources). Empirical studies have found a positive correlation between the various types of organizational culture and KM processes (Omerzel, Biloslavo, & Trnavcevic, 2011). The design team would need to identify the type of culture the university (or the pilot site in question) exhibits, and align its KM approach accordingly. The team should also determine if the university (or site) has a pro-sharing or an anti-sharing culture, or one in between.
• C. Processes – questions to determine if any prior KM implementation is in place or to identify the areas that the university needs to work on (a sophisticated and ethical intelligence gathering mechanism has been developed; knowledge gaps are systematically identified and well-defined processes are used to close them; all faculty and staff are involved in looking for ideas in traditional and non-traditional places; the university has formalized the process of transferring best practices, including documentations and lessons-learnt; tacit knowledge i.e. what employees know how to do but cannot express is valued and transferred across the university – O’Dell and Grayson (1998, pp. 227-228)).
• D. Information technology (technology links all members of the university to one another and to all relevant external public; technology creates an institutional memory that is accessible to the university as a whole; technology brings the university closer to its students; the university fosters the development of human-centered IT; technology that supports collaboration is rapidly placed in the hands of faculty and staff; available information systems are real time, integrated and smart – O’Dell and Grayson (1999, pp. 229-230)).

APQC has also developed a KM capability and assessment tool for organizations to validate and target their programs’ issues, gaps and strengths (O’Dell & Hubert, 2011, p. 37) which can be applied to colleges and universities. Other instruments (e.g. by Moffett & McAdam, 2006; Al-Bastaki and Shajera, 2012) are targeted to the university context.

• • Mechanism: A readiness assessment can be achieved through a survey, interview or focus groups to determine the KM capabilities relating to people, culture, processes and technology, etc. The design team will design, pre-test, pilot and then send out the survey to all faculty and staff in the site chosen for the pilot.
• • Outcome: The outcome will be a relative rating for each priority area, and an overall assessment of the state of KM readiness of the pilot site.

Step 4. Determine approach to align with culture and capability to enable knowledge flow

The categories of approaches vary by how much they focus on explicit and tacit knowledge and how much human interaction or facilitation is involved (O’Dell & Hubert, 2011). The university will likely need a combination of KM approaches. “There is continuous tension and balancing act between the need for IT and the need to focus on people. We believe it is best in this balancing act to lean to the people side.” (O’Dell & Hubert, 2011, p. 48).

Figure 4 shows the categories of KM approaches that a university can adopt, depending on how much it wants to focus on explicit versus tacit knowledge, or lower versus higher human interaction, as determined by the outcome of the readiness assessment exercise. A college or unit with a higher knowledge sharing culture would want to focus on higher human interaction and tacit knowledge, as opposed to one with a lower sharing culture (that might limit itself to explicit knowledge or lower human interaction, until the college is ready for greater knowledge sharing).

Self-service is a technology-focused approach that allows users to self-serve information and to locate knowledge. These tools can vary from intranet or knowledge portals to emails/discussion boards, etc. (O’Dell & Hubert, 2011). See Agarwal and Islam (2014) for a complete listing of currently available IT tools (including social media and Web 2.0 tools) that can be applied.

Lessons learned is a systematic approach using tools that help faculty and staff capture experience- based knowledge, share them, and then reapply them to relevant situations (O’Dell & Hubert, 2011).

Communities of practice and networks consist of faculty and staff who come together face-to-face and virtually around an issue, discipline, or body of knowledge to share and learn from one another. They tend to be formal, have a common goal and a desire to share experiences, insights and best practices. (O’Dell & Hubert, 2011). Most universities have thriving committees that carry out the major work of governance. These can be further strengthened to make them open and transparent (e.g. by allowing interested non-members to connect remotely and having access and a voice on documents produced by the committees even before they are formalized and shared). Communities of practices can be used to enhance research and teaching across discipline boundaries by promoting faculty from different schools to come together and possibly collaborate on areas of interest.

The facilitated transfer of best practices (O’Dell & Hubert, 2011) involves sharing and transferring successfully demonstrated practices and processes between units across the campus.

Agarwal and Islam (2014) have put together a complete listing of tools that apply to different stages of the KM process – knowledge capture and/or creation; knowledge sharing and dissemination; and knowledge application and reuse. A college or university implementing KM can pick and choose among the suite of approaches and tools that best apply to it based on its readiness assessment. Along with tools, the design of open and collaborative physical spaces should also be an important consideration in enabling natural environments for faculty and staff across the university to connect and share knowledge in informal ways.

Figure 5 above shows an alignment of KM approaches (O’Dell & Hubert, 2011) to IT and non-IT based tools (Agarwal & Islam, 2014) to the continuum of knowledge sharing culture prevalent in the college or university.

• • Mechanism: This work of aligning KM readiness and culture to KM approaches and tools will be carried out by the design team, in consultation with all stakeholders of the pilot site. The process of aligning would enable higher acceptance and adoption, as it will be in tune with the prevalent culture.
• • Outcome: The outcome will be the approaches and tools that the faculty and the staff at the pilot site vote to adopt based on the assessment of alignment.

Step 5. Develop measures of success

“A measurement system provides a framework to present a common understanding of the current situation, what needs to be done to improve, and how progress is going to be measured and rewarded.” (O’Dell & Hubert, 2011, p. 152). Now that the approaches and tools are agreed upon, the stakeholders in the pilot unit (assisted by the KM design team) need to brainstorm and agree on how they would measure success. The involvement of all faculty and staff is crucial in this process, as they are best enabled to determine what success would mean to them and the school. These measures must be aligned to the KM goals that were determined in Step 2.

The portfolio of KM measures can be divided into three basic categories (O’Dell & Hubert, 2011, p. 145): activity measures, process efficiency measures, and university performance measures and outputs. The activity measures are measures of involvement and the degree to which the faculty and staff use and participate in KM. The process efficiency measures determine if critical knowledge is flowing where it needs to for it drive the strategic goals of the university or school. The university performance measures and outputs evaluates the performance of the pilot site’s operations and activities. They will provide the link from the KM program efforts to the organizational results (O’Dell & Hubert, 2011). Both formative (measure as you go) and summative (outcome) measures need to be developed, ensuring that intangible measures such as social cohesion, job satisfaction, work-life balance, happiness, etc. also find a place, along with more tangible measures such as student retention, research productivity, increased enrollment, etc.

A list of measures alone won’t do the university any good. It will “need processes and accountability for collecting, organizing, reporting, and acting on the measures to improve the KM program, as well as to provide the basis for funding” (O’Dell & Hubert, 2011, p. 152). These must be incorporated in the action plan (Step 6).

• • Mechanism: The design team and the faculty/staff of the pilot site must come up with these measures in one or more half-day retreats.
• • Outcome: The outcome of this step is a listing of measures.

Step 6. Create action plan and get faculty/admin buy-in and resources

Once the pilot unit (helped by the KM design team) has agreed on approaches, tools to adopt, and the measures of success, an action plan and timeline needs to be developed and proposed to the Dean and the university Administration for budget and resources. The action plan must include the following: 1) key phases/steps/timeline; 2) the people involved in each implementation phase; 3) the plan for the continuation of communication and interaction with all stakeholders; 4) resources, technology infrastructure and budget; 5) success measures and timeline for measurement; and 6) the owner (someone who is responsible) for each major component or deliverable from the design phase.

• • Mechanism: The mechanism to achieve this step will be meetings of the design team with administration; update to schools.
• • Outcome: The outcome will be the actual action plan including budget, owners and timeline. This step must end with the constituting of a KM implementation team (which should have faculty and staff that were involved in design, along with representatives from the university administration, as well as technology folks).

Step 7. Launch a pilot and provide support within a school a department

Once the implementation team is in place, it understands the action plan, and has the requisite budget and resources, it can begin the work of KM implementation. A pilot implementation of one or more phases of the action plan can then be launched in the pilot site. E.g. If the approach is to build a community of practice, the role of the implementation team will be to help participants set objectives, learn to communicate, learn from each other, and so on – everything that will lead to an increased in knowledge sharing. “This learning-to-learn process is the most critical part of implementing a network-oriented effort.” (O’Dell & Grayson, 1998, p. 201). In the next phase, the team will also work towards open spaces and technology infrastructure that can help greater interaction between faculty and staff of the pilot site and beyond. All these will be launched in a phased manner by the implementation team, in consultation with the stakeholders of the school or department chosen as the pilot site for KM implementation. Throughout, the implementation team will provide support, observe, measure and learn.

In this launch process at the pilot site, it is important to do everything possible to achieve early visible results – within at most six months (O’Dell & Grayson, 1998). This will help transfer the enthusiasm about KM in other schools and units on campus.

• • Mechanism: This is achieved through launching the KM program and providing support.
• • Outcome: The outcome is the early results, and measures of success.

Step 8. Capture success stories and publicize early results

Based on the measures of success, the implementation team (supported by faculty and staff of the pilot site) needs to capture the success stories. If the KM launch has gone well, the enthusiasm will quickly spread across the campus. However, there has to be a systematic process of capturing best practices and lessons learned, codifying (converting from tacit to explicit) the first set of good experiences – in the form of text or videos, and using the participants and star performers as missionaries and coaches for future scale-ups of the KM project either in the same unit, or in other units across the campus (O’Dell & Grayson, 1998).

The KM implementation team must organize their learnings from the pilot, use the lessons learned to create an expansion and scale-up strategy, identify an entity that will guide, support, and monitor KM on a university-wide scale (O’Dell & Grayson, 1998).

• • Mechanism: The mechanism for best practice capture includes interviews, surveys, videos, storytelling, etc. The dissemination mechanisms might include newsletters, talks, presentations, storytelling, etc.
• • Outcome: The outcome is a documentation of learnings from the pilot, and publicity, and the plan to continue, stop or expand KM. If the plan is to expand, the contours of a university-wide KM team (which should include members of the pilot implementation team, but enlist other stakeholders across the college or in other schools/departments) need to be put in place.

Step 9. Use knowledge gained to realign strategy with university objectives

The university-wide KM team will now revisit the initial KM goals (in alignment with the university goals), and develop general college-wide guidelines for KM implementation. Based on the guidelines, each school or unit implementing KM would need to develop their unit-specific implementation, depending on their specific needs or differences.

• • Mechanism: This is achieved in meetings of the university-wide KM team with higher administration, and other stakeholders from different schools and units on campus. Different schools will need to vote and approve the college-wide guidelines.
• • Outcome: The outcome is college-wide guidelines, and templates for department-specific KM initiatives (based on the success of the pilot).

Step 10. Scale up to other units and repeat

It is now time to figure out how to harness the engine of KM to turbo-power (O’Dell and Grayson, 1998) the entire university. With a successful pilot, university-wide guidelines and a KM team and infrastructure, the success of KM in one unit can be replicated to other units in a phased manner. One thing to note is that the culture and capability in other units may vary from unit-to-unit or from school-to-school, and might be different from that of the pilot site. The KM approaches and tools need to be chosen accordingly.

• • Mechanism: Go back to Step 2.
• • Outcome: The outcome is the need, priority and team(s) of the sites for the next expansion of the university-wide college plan.

Once KM has been implemented across the university, and becomes embedded in the processes and culture of the university, the university could work on ways to expand the benefits of KM to interfacing with or between students, and across other entities outside the university such as alumni, government, funding agencies, and other partner universities. Ranga and Etzkowitz (2013), in a recent work, introduce the concept of Triple Helix Systems of Innovations as an analytical framework that synthesizes the key features of university-industry-government (Triple Helix) interactions into an ‘innovation system’ format. The entrepreneural university is central to Triple Helix that takes a pro-active stance in putting knowledge to use and in creating new knowledge (Stanford University, 2013).