The connection between the knowledge that a university makes and distributes easily links with the ideas of knowledge management in technical communication. University organizations are often large and decentralized; campus departments make rich case studies for the technical communication researcher to study the university organization with regard to managing knowledge. Of particular interest is how the administrative functions of the university, situated in a knowledge environment, manage their own knowledge individually, organizationally, and structurally.
A Smidgen of Knowledge History
The invention of the assembly line in the early 1900s revolutionized the way that people worked. Workers who used to be individual craftsmen became groups of factory workers, and people transitioned from making individual products to working as a part of a large organization to produce products in large quantities. Knowledge in the Industrial Age was held by the factory owners who understood the big picture of the many tasks while the workers understood their specific job. The Industrial Age moved to the service, or information, economy after World War II. Again, workers transitioned, this time from making products to delivering services. One illustrative example about the transition to the service economy is described in Central Works in Technical Communication, edited by Johnson-Eilola and Selber. It used to be that to bake a cake the baker would purchase the raw ingredients and bake the cake using the knowledge of how to measure and combine the ingredients to make a cake. Once manufacturing began, consumers could buy a cake in a box, follow a few directions without knowing the whole process, and bake a cake. In the service economy, the consumer can go to the grocery store or a bakery and purchase a cake, remaining unaware of the cake-making process. Managing the knowledge in today's organizations can give organizations a competitive edge in providing goods and services to their customers.
Knowledge Management in the Student-as-consumer Environment
In this service economy, also known as the Information Age, students expect value for their money. They want excellence in their education. They want services for their tuition dollars. They want jobs after graduation because they pay “your salary.” How is this intangible service, the transfer of knowledge, measured? Colleges and universities struggle with this idea in a customer-centered environment and define their missions using meaningless words, like excellence. Bill Readings points out in University in Ruins that, “As an integrating principle, excellence has the singular advantage of being entirely meaningless, or to put it more precisely, non-referential” (p. 22). The standard of excellence is not able to be defined consistently; it is not quantifiable in a standard way, yet all of the departments in a university must manage to keep customers, students, happy. In the field of technical communication, this user-centered focus is a goal much like the goal to keep students happy as consumers; after all, either a student or a user of a website, product, or service can take their dollars elsewhere. But as in design and usability work for technical communicators, administrators in colleges and universities face similar tensions between what the customer wants and what the customer needs. What the user says might not be what is best for the user. The same is true for the student.
Students enter formative years of development when they enter college. The experience at colleges and universities are transformative for students, whether they are traditionally aged or adult students. While the developmental needs may differ based on a number of factors, including the age of the student, developmental needs are still there, just the same. The response of a university professional versed in student developmental theories cannot always align with what the student-as-consumer may want.
Student Services Professionals and Knowledge Management
Universities are places where knowledge management is particularly important since higher education is a knowledge factory, of sorts. Universities deal in the creation, production, and distribution of knowledge to students in classrooms, through research, and using co-curricular opportunities for learning outside of tradition academic spaces. It is in these co-curricular spaces, outside of the classroom, where knowledge management is examined. The knowledge work of student services professionals, applying student development theory to practice, is like that of knowledge management in technical communication. Contextual action using information is applied, communicated, shaped, and understood. Toward the goal of holistically educating the student to become knowledgeable in their disciplines and contribute as good citizens to campus and society, student service professionals can investigate knowledge management as a leadership strategy to deliver quality services to students.
Defining Knowledge Management in the Student Services Organizations
With decentralized structures, universities can use knowledge management strategies to deliver seamless services to students. A second benefit to applying knowledge management strategies to student services information is that with student leaders in place and young professionals in front-line positions in organizations, codified information that is well documented and made explicit will preserve the progress that a department has made in serving students. In a student services organization, there are three places where information lives: with the individual, in the department, and in the structure of the organization.
Individual Knowledge
Individual knowledge resides with an individual staff member in a student services organization and is the least stable type of information. If the staff member leaves the organization, knowledge leaves with that person if it not shared with other staff members or written down. Without distributed knowledge in practice or in writing, the staff member’s departure leaves an information gap in the organization. Knowledge management strategies for capturing information from that staff member’s experiences benefits students, remaining staff members, and the university as a whole.
Departmental Knowledge
Situated between individual knowledge and structural knowledge, departmental knowledge is more stable than individual, but less so than structural. Departmental knowledge is shared knowledge that exists in practice. Strong team relationships on the student services staff or in student organizations allow for the transmission of knowledge among the group members. This social sharing of information can be replicated in the event that a staff member or student leaves the organization. Organizational practices survive because the group knows some or most of the knowledge that the departing staff member possessed.
Organizational Knowledge
This is the most stable of the types of knowledge. Organizational knowledge lives in the systems, tools, and artifacts of a student services staffs functions. Documented information made explicit for anyone to use or read characterizes this type of knowledge. In Hughes’ article, “Moving from Information Transfer to Knowledge Creation: A New Value Proposition for Technical Communications,” the author describes system-level knowledge:
Organizational knowledge is knowledge that resides at the enterprise level. It is the knowledge that is embedded in the processes, practices, tools, and repositories within the enterprise. As such, it is the most durable, being the least dependent on the persistence of persons and personalities (p. 279).
These levels of knowledge management should be considered further in a student services organizational setting. Using ethnographic methods that support a genre-tracing methodology, knowledge management in student services can be investigated at the individual, departmental, and organizational levels to better understand how student services staffs improve services and operations using knowledge management theories and practices.
