Knowledge is power in new economy

More higher education institutions are starting to feel mounting pressure as more faculty and staff eagerly plan for their retirement days. Organizations have come to realize that as people leave, they take with them valuable knowledge.

We're beginning to feel that the knowledge of those long-serving faculty and staff is our most valuable asset - but. few of us have actually begun to actively manage our knowledge assets on a broad scale. There is little doubt that we have entered the knowledge economy in which organizations' knowledge is becoming more important than the traditional sources of economic power - capital, land, plant and labour.

Our private sector colleagues have long understood that corporations throughout the world are using KM to describe what they are doing to compete in the global marketplace -- manage the knowledge, or the intellectual capital, of their enterprise. With an accelerating rate of change in business environments, staff attrition, global integration, downsizing, outsourcing, mergers, acquisitions, an increase in networked organizations and the growing knowledge-intensity of goods and services, management has to keep pace with the environment more than ever.

The same concept can be applied to the academic sector where knowledge is the "fruit of learning and thinking" and is constantly transmitted and learned in the classroom, lab or virtual classroom. As the environment changes, students, faculty and staff move through the journey of acquiring different levels of knowledge, access new information from outside sources and facilitate knowledge growth through culture and incentives.

The challenge that senior administration face is ensuring appropriate protection of critical core knowledge at all levels, continuous application of existing knowledge, acquiring relevant knowledge or expertise and developing new knowledge through continuous learning that builds on internal and external experience.

The reality in this challenge is that many of us would need to capitalize oh innovative and complex applications of IT to support our institutions in gaining a significant knowledge advantage, either for competitive market positioning or for education quality and service response gains. The choice is abundant with a wide range of sophisticated enterprise-wide software on the market in customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), expert systems, knowledgebased systems, groupware, and convergence of ice, data and video processing - supported by a variety of networking technologies, communications, Internet and intranet to cultivate an organization with powerful KM opportunities.

By understanding these challenges, appreciating the capabilities of available technologies, knowing how to build virtual teaming skills, corporate knowledge and business intelligence networks, and create knowledge management strategies, academic institutions can seize this moment and dramatically increase their ability to compete into the new economy.

Lan Nguyen is CIO of Centennial College. She can be reached at 416-289-5275 or Inguyen@centenialcollege.ca.

Copyright Plesman Publications Ltd. Feb 2001
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