Panning for Gold in the Data Mines
How to turn knowledge into action
Lisa Petrides, Ph.D., President and Founder
of the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education
speaks with Higher Education Digest
In the gold rush days of the 1800s, miners panned for gold, sifting through rock after rock. Forsaking the comforts of home, they laid a claim, bet their futures on the precious metal and anxiously searched, hoping beyond hope to strike it rich. Unfortunately, so many miners wound up with nothing but fool’s gold.
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The feeling of frustration—staring at mounds and mounds of rocks, knowing the lost hours and hope—must have been overwhelming. Many higher education institutions today can relate to the miners’ frustrations. With external and internal pressures demanding increased accountability, faculty, staff and administrators face reams of data and they struggle to make sense of it all. They’re producing reports for various agencies and departments. Like the miners, they hope to find riches in the data; they are banking that the right information contained in a report somewhere will result in increased funding or new strategies for improved performance.
Higher Education Digest interviews Lisa Petrides to get her perspective on how institutions can use knowledge management to make the most out of their data.
Higher Education Digest: What is knowledge management?
Petrides: Everyone has a different definition of knowledge management. We refer to it as a practice involving people, processes and technology. In the last five years, knowledge management, which has its origins in the business sector, has gained popularity in higher education.
It can be thought of as a set of practices, or a framework used to enable organizations to collect information and share what they know to improve outcomes. It is taking and building from what is known and turning it into action, whether it is a tangible outcome or process-oriented. It is not just about a piece of technology that can be used to solve organizational problems.
HED: What challenges interfere with data-based decision-making?
Petrides: Decisions are often impaired by organization-level silos and information politics.
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Information silos
At an institution, there may be certain data kept in the finance department, another set stored in student services and other records housed in enrollment. Instead of communicating and sharing this information, silos are formed preventing the integration of these data for more system-wide decision-making.
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Information politics
What often happens is that people get proprietary towards data. They block the flow of information, control the use of data for their own benefit, and in doing so, enact their own interpretation of the classic phrase, ‘information is power.’
Situations that are sustained by information politics include:
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A department’s funding being cut even though data shows the importance of a particular program, leaving the staff with no incentive to share the data in the future.
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An employee working hard to justify a project with impact data, who attends a meeting only to find out that a decision has already been made.
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Someone in a department who fears change and wants to maintain the status quo, and therefore becomes uncooperative and unwilling to share information.
HED: What are the internal and external pressures for institutions to collect and share data?
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Petrides: A great deal of external pressure for accountability comes from the public, board of trustees and state mandates. Internally, it comes from decreased funding and a desire to improve the educational outcomes of students. There is also tremendous pressure to make more cost-effective decisions. Yet, the activity of producing reports for various mandates can also provide the incentive for institutions to look inward at enrollment management, financial aid and numerous other areas.
What often happens is that external mandates require institutions to review and measure in specific areas, which aren’t always aligned with an institution’s core values. Consequently, a lot of time is spent on complying with external accountability, as opposed to focusing that effort on internal priorities that can help the organization to learn about itself. In an ideal world, the internal and external would be in alignment.
The knowledge management part is that data gathered for internal accountability could be used for better decision-making, and ultimately, for external reporting. In this way, as organizations get better at knowledge management, an increased alignment between state mandates and internal reporting could mutually produce more effective external mandates as other outcomes and areas of benefit are recognized.
HED: With increased accountability pressures, how are colleges and universities responding with data-based decision-making?
Petrides: In the 2002 study conducted by the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME) with leaders from more than 30 colleges and universities nationwide, we found that most institutions already have systems in place that allow them to use data for decision-making. Many leaders say they do not make decisions until data has been mined, studied and evaluated. However, the demand to meet external requests for information places an enormous amount of pressure on colleges and universities.
As Roger Lowe, vice president for administration and finance at Wichita State University said, 'Requests for accountability data are increasing at a time when we’ve had to eliminate positions. We simply have fewer people to respond to those requests. So we are going to be asked to do more with less.'
While most institutions have data-based information systems in place, some fail to share and use data and information effectively, which can lead to missed opportunities in planning and forecasting as well as difficulties in day-to-day decision-making.
HED: How do administrators use knowledge management as a tool?
Petrides: It can be used to make better use of assessment. In reviewing students’ poor performance in a math class, as an example, the process of turning data into knowledge would require them to not only track student performance data, but to disaggregate the data and ask why a particular group of students are not doing as well as they did five years ago.
Institutions also use knowledge management as a way to examine untapped knowledge that already exists in the organization. The opportunity costs of not using existing resources can place an undue burden on the organization. Information that is stored in paper files or in the computer files of a former employee at an institution might not be accessible, but the use of this information could enable the organization to do something in a more productive way. We often hear, ‘we are data rich but information poor.’
A key aspect administrators look at is whether or not the organization’s mission and goals are supported by the data they collect. This brings up questions like: How can the institution make better use of the data in order to support knowledge management initiatives? How can the organization improve outcomes that are supported by data? And what might these measurements look like?
For example, the curriculum development process is one area that has been examined. At one college, it took nearly three years to develop a new curriculum. As a result, changes in that particular field were not reflected in the current curriculum. Through cross-functional examination, the organization may be able to meet some of the needs by locating courses offered in other departments.
Additionally, let’s say an institution wants to increase the amount of grants that are awarded. Questions could be asked about ways to write grants more effectively, get more approved and involve the necessary people and departments to streamline this process. It becomes a matter of improving the grant development process by linking data, people and resources for goal setting and improvement.
HED: What are some strategies for implementing a knowledge management program?
Petrides: As mentioned in the report Turning Data into Decision-Making prepared by the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education, some of these strategies include:
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Identifying data and information strategies. This includes identifying the problems that information can help resolve, determining what and how much additional data might be required to solve a problem, and then planning the collection of additional data to support a cycle of continuous learning within the organization.
For example, in the case of enrollment planning, administrators access real-time daily head counts by class section. They then work with faculty to offer additional sections as needed. Later, academic officers could meet with faculty and deans to discuss long-term enrollment trends and the availability of courses to meet the changing needs of their students.
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Assess how information is controlled on campus by exploring how information is provided, understood and made use of; how, and if, people are rewarded for sharing information; and what type of subtle information sabotage might be taking place. The latter could take the form of databases that aren’t regularly maintained, corrections that aren’t entered into systems when reported or duplicate paper versions of information that are maintained in addition to campus-wide information systems.
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Take steps to ensure that the campus culture communicates the value of data and data sharing and that leaders carefully examine the politics of information within the institution that may prevent it from making full use of the data at hand.
HED: By using knowledge management, are you creating a culture of inquiry?
Petrides: Yes. Knowledge management as a practice enables people to ask better questions. It is a qualifying tool that practitioners can employ. The key is using data to ask more sophisticated questions that address real needs within the organization. Key to this success is giving staff, administrators and faculty the support they need to do so.
One particular community college, which our organization recently examined, had a strong culture of inquiry. At meetings they demonstrated passion about the success of students, their backgrounds and demographics. They asked good questions, but lacked the infrastructure to get the answers.
Conversely, another college had the opposite problem. They had a sophisticated infrastructure for data collecting and sharing, but after eight months, their system was no longer being used. The reason being, they didn’t have a strong culture of inquiry.
HED: How do you know if you’ve on the data-information-knowledge track?
Petrides: Start with an information audit, see how data is shared throughout the organization, look at satisfaction surveys, look at work-flow processes and examine how they change, and review how long something takes to get implemented.
When an organization employs knowledge management, the strategy is often to implement these practices on a project by project basis. In doing so, the institution gets familiar with the process and it becomes easier to launch each successive initiative once people have come to trust the processes in place.
By utilizing knowledge management, organizations can examine available resources and find the data riches, the chunks of gold the institution didn’t know existed. They don't blindly sift for gold in hopes luck pays off. Knowledge management ensures the institution continuously reaches for the pot of gold with a solid strategy in place.
Dr. Lisa Petrides is president of the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education. A former professor at Columbia University, Teachers College, she is the author and co-author of several books and articles on the use of data, information and institutional knowledge in higher education, including the recently released Knowledge Management in Education: Defining the Landscape and the forthcoming Turning Knowledge into Action: What’s Data Got to Do With It?
Her publications include, “The Challenges of Using External Accountability Mandates to Create Internal Change,” in Planning for Higher Education; “Strategic Planning and Information Use: The Role of Institutional Leadership in the Community College,” in On the Horizon; “What Schools Have to Teach the Corporate World,” in KM Review; Knowledge Management in Education: Defining the Landscape, a monograph produced by ISKME; “Knowledge Management for School Leaders: An Ecological Framework for Thinking Schools,” in Teachers College Record; and “Organizational Learning and the Case for Knowledge-Based Systems,” in New Directions for Institutional Research.
Her research and teaching interests are in the areas of information technology, knowledge management, information and decision-making, and issues of access and equity in education. While at Columbia, Petrides was coordinator of the joint degree program in Education Leadership and Management (EdD-MBA) offered by the Educational Administration Program and the Columbia Business School. She has worked with a wide array of Internet-based technologies for classroom teaching. She received a Ph.D. in Education from Stanford University and an MBA from Sonoma State University, and was a postdoctoral fellow in Educational Policy Research Division at Educational Testing Service.
