Universities are ‘Knowledge Institutions’ and deliver education to an ever increasing Knowledge Society so it is odd, perhaps, to find that few of these institutions have a Knowledge Management strategy that they are able to effectively implement.
This is at odds with funding and initiatives from the funding councils where there is a major emphasis on content repositories, information architectures and the use of information standards to enable information sharing to happen within, or outside of, an institution. JISC, for example, promote activities in the following areas:
- Digital repository development for universities and colleges;
- Digital preservation – to develop distributed environments for digital preservation, with well-defined services, roles and responsibilities;
- ‘Discovery to delivery’ – providing searching service across repositories using agreed standards and interoperability;
- The development and piloting of innovative approaches to repository use and digital preservation;
- Shared infrastructure services such as user profiling services, digital rights management, registries, identifier services, terminology and preservation services.
The implication for any institution is that there must be merit in adopting some, at least, of the approaches and disciplines that accompany these types of activity. JISC expects this to result in a range of benefits for universities and colleges, including better access to and management of their intellectual outputs, increased capability within the sector to manage these assets for education and research, and an infrastructure that will support the sector into the future. In more practical terms, good quality ‘information assets’ will support activities such as distance learning, will provide students with a better base of learning materials and it will help bring about a culture of developing assets and IPR.
It will also act as a mechanism for introducing an improved quality infrastructure, including for management and administration. When any institution adds up its cost of managing information (e.g. for the corporate web site) it comes to a substantial amount. Changes in structure, design ideas and delivery options add to this, even though the underlying content may not change. Having a strategy for this information, its use and its reuse, offers many advantages. In support of Learning and Teaching this advantage can be significant in terms of the overall student experience, but also in terms of options for flexible delivery, corporate customer branding and student support.
Does it work in practice? I think it is significant that those universities that have adopted institutional information strategies look to be both efficient and enjoying third stream incomes. The classic example is Heriot-Watt University where the MBA and the undergraduate management programmes are the products of their information strategy, which ensures that any information of value (from a text book down to a humble multiple choice question) has a structure and is checked into the formal repository. There is great use and re-use of learning materials in that institution. Over the lifetime of this strategy the quality of information has been enhanced significantly, as have the many business processes (e.g. in administration) that support the use of these assets.
In sum, formal information architectures present great opportunities for institutions, ranging from addressing quality improvement issues, to cutting cost through efficiency, and to developing new outlets for their education. The lead could come from the XML related technologies, and the aims of the semantic web, but the goal must be to carry the institution on an implementable knowledge management strategy.
