By Thomas Menkhoff
Ask any University President what keeps her or him awake at night and you may hear answers ranging from: “I don’t know whether the jobs that we are preparing our students for will still be there when they graduate” to “How do I know that the research at my university is making an impact on society?”. Chances are they will not say, “I need to improve the quality of knowledge management (KM) in my organisation.”
While disruptive challenges like “Massive Open On-Line Courses” or creating an “entrepreneurial university” (which requires academic instructors who are also successful in business and entrepreneurship) are discussed by many leaders of higher education institutions (HEIs), KM arguably hasn’t quite made it into their strategic vocabulary even though the popular use of the KM term is more than two decades old. That is a pity because KM is such a powerful tool to combat the ivory tower mentality.
Knowledge management refers to the totality of strategies that organisations can use to locate, capture, share and create new organisational knowledge assets aimed at enhancing organisational performance. Singapore is home to various award-winning, KM-enabled organisations such as Singapore Airlines (SIA) with its internationally-acclaimed customer service excellence built on rigorous data collection and analytics linked to business goals. Singapore’s Inland Revenue Authority (IRAS) achieved quantum leaps in organisational excellence through KM. Both organisations have a strong business case for making KM work: unrivalled customer service (SIA) and hassle-free tax payment/collection (IRAS). What about HEIs?
While the positive impact of KM practices in large organisations is well documented, KM in (knowledge-centric) universities is akin to a black box. Many HEIs are loosely-coupled systems comprising various partially connected, often separate units eager to maintain their autonomy despite ‘shared’ values and grand vision statements. Issues include emphasis on solo-authored articles which deters collaboration, ignorance pertaining ongoing research works across campus, duplication of effort (e.g. developing ‘good’ assessment rubrics) or lack of ‘really nice’ places where faculty, administrators, staff and students can jointly share informal knowledge and assist each other.
A review of recent journal articles on KM for HEIs matters suggest that most university leaders should be familiar with the term “KM”. In fact, most university staff we communicate with have an innate sense of what it means — everybody manages knowledge, but it’s a matter of knowing why and what (identifying pain points, KM goals and priorities), how (determining the ‘right’ management approach and suitable KM tools), how much (effort intensity / pilot project), where (gap analysis/knowledge audit), how well (degree of KM readiness / impact measurement), and scaling up.
How to make KM work in HEIs?
1. To get started, it is imperative that the KM team has the support of a KM Champion at the top. What follows is usually a discussion about strategic KM opportunities and the definition of visionary goals, e.g. the identification of new areas of growth (and revenues) by translating relevant mega trends into attractive new programme offerings. Other strategic KM goals may include maintaining and enhancing organisational quality systems (Lean-Six Sigma), enterprise risk management, securing financial sustainability, employability of graduates or ‘breakthrough’ innovations.
2. Once the overall strategic knowledge area is determined and aligned with the sponsor’s needs and aspirations, the KM team needs to design the ‘right’ KM intervention by determining the most effective KM approach, e.g. by comparing actual vs. target performance in priority knowledge areas. One outcome of this step could be the identification of knowledge gaps such as blocked knowledge flows that prevent internal collaborations between organisational units (who could otherwise co-create a novel, multi-disciplinary teaching & learning initiative by connecting ‘deep smarts’ across several units) or closer university-industry collaboration on the basis of new cooperative work-study programmes.
Another result might be the initiation of a pilot crowdsourcing project to apply existing knowledge of faculty and graduate students to problems in underserved communities. Ideally, strategic KM aspirations, project initiatives and expected outcomes are codified in a knowledge management strategy plan aligned with the overall vision and business drivers. Rather than pursuing reactive, piecemeal KM solutions to immediate challenges faced, a strategic, future-oriented KM approach will ensure better outcomes.
3. After the broad strategic KM direction has been established and there is initial buy-in, a pilot initiative can be rolled out to demonstrate the value added of the proposed KM strategy. This could entail licensing internally generated intellectual property to a company or nurturing greater collaboration between staff across discipline boundaries to enhance teaching and research on the basis of a newly formed and well-funded community of practice (e.g. comprising colleagues passionate about climate change mitigation).
4. Once the KM initiative has demonstrated its impact, it can be scaled up to other units, business lines or client segments. To be successful, KM practices must be driven by a well-governed KM system with effective KM processes. To locate and capture strategic knowledge such as lessons learned, some universities utilise social media tools such as digital story-telling.
Others use “Yellow Pages” type of applications, enabling employees to quickly find staff with particular competencies, or create knowledge maps to visualise hidden internal knowledge assets, including information bottlenecks and knowledge brokers. A popular technical KM tool is the knowledge portal, a web-based computer program that enables a single point of access to (hopefully) actionable organizational knowledge, strategic knowledge repositories, expert directories and collaboration tools. After action reviews can enhance collaboration between teams to capture and share important know how to avoid making the same mistake twice or to repeat success.
Key for the effective sharing of tacit and explicit knowledge (e.g. to turn experience-based knowledge such as lessons learned into a database/intranet with adequate use) is a collaborative innovation culture with room for experimentation, real learning and risk-taking. One of the HEIs we spoke to had built up a very spirited team culture with open and transparent ‘committees’ that encouraged real-time communication via a digital feedback gathering application and a voice for interested non-members so that outputs created by committee members could be shared.
Through knowledge sharing (‘even’ with competitors), valuable information can be obtained. In some organisations, such coopetition (defined as collaboration between business competitors, in the hope of mutually beneficial results) is well institutionalised. To encourage knowledge sharing, leaders need to consider KM holistically by aligning the organisation’s performance measurements and KM enablers such as strategic plans of action and a culture of sharing based on effective form of recognition and suitable KM tools.
An important knowledge process is new knowledge creation. Imagine what might happen if innovative ideas (e.g. for new-growth efforts) that bubble up within the organization do not get sufficient attention by senior management. What if internal (staff, students, faculty) and external (employers, suppliers, alumni etc.) stakeholders are ignored as sources of innovative ideas? Important KM and innovation process steps include idea generation, evaluating innovative ideas, pilot testing ‘good’ ideas, prototyping, roll-out etc. If nobody takes charge of this process, the organization will forego value creation benefits.
To keep an eye on relevant knowledge matters, leaders of HEIs are well advised to develop KM-infused dashboards to organise and monitor critical performance metrics/KPIs into a single, real-time, at-a-glance control panel. A customised dashboard displays key strategic data points about the ‘health’ of organisational units and key performance areas such as the quality of research outputs, alumni engagement sessions, teaching outcomes, student satisfaction, placement success, innovation intensity etc. Dashboards help to manage strategic risks (e.g. with regard to the need to maintain high academic standards in research and teaching), operational risks (e.g. importance of students complying with rules of conduct), financial risks (e.g. significance of having sufficient funds for long-term operations) and legal & compliance risks (e.g. compliance with personal data protection legislation).
University Provosts are often considered to be the Chief Knowledge Officers of HEIs. In the daily hustle and bustle of running a university, some leaders may be hard-pressed to find time to plan and execute a KM strategy. However, without a proper strategy to leverage internal and external knowledge by converting innovative know how ideas into practical applications or by seizing open innovation opportunities, they could be missing out on game-changing innovation opportunities. Universities would do well to explore how the KM toolkit can help them to avoid becoming victims of disruptive innovation.
Thomas Menkhoff is Professor of Organisational Behaviour & Human Resources (Education) at the SMU Lee Kong Chian School of Business.
Follow us on Twitter (@sgsmuperspectiv) or like us on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/PerspectivesAtSMU)
Last updated on 30 Sep 2020 .
