Manchester Metropolitan University

&

Prague University of Economics

Published: June 2001

It is assumed, perhaps falsely, that universities are de-facto ‘learning organizations’. For as places of learning, Ffaculty disseminate information and develop knowledge capability in students. In our university Business School’s and departments of Information Technology, we discuss the critical significance of knowledge management and expose the value of information technology to deliver organisational, and personal benefits. Interestingly, many universities have themselves been slow to mirror their teaching with developments of their own knowledge management applications. This paper looks at two universities who have some experimentation and experience on this path and who’s students, and professors, are realising the value and potential through intranets, which is rapidly becoming the system of choice for many knowledge management endeavours. The institutions are, Prague University of Economics (PUE), Department of Informatics and StatisitcsInformation Technologies (CZ) and the Manchester Metropolitan University(MMU), Department of Business Information Technology (UK). The potential to join these two student bodies at MMU and PUE through the combination of their intranets to an effective extranet, could be an exciting follow on project. The virtual university draws ever closer in a BITWorld !

Whilst knowledge management (KM) is not a new theme, with its roots traced to the ancient Greeks, the contemporary opportunities afforded through information technology developments would seem to open many previously incomprehensible opportunities. Growth in interest in KM theory and practice is illustrated through the increasing prominence of the theme in the information systems literature particularly. In recent years KM has become a subject discipline in its own right, finding a place in both information systems and management curricula’s. Increasingly university professors see the demand from students who wish to themselves research the topic, often within an empirical setting and frequently from the perspective of a supporting systems and technology infrastructure. Additionally, the growth in conferences, products and services being offered in support of the KM endeavour is exponential (Dunn 2000) and illustrates the probability of this theme being substantial and gaining much more significance than even its current highly visible status. Within all these reported activities two things are particularly clear, firstly that information technology provides much of the essential infrastructure upon which knowledge management systems are based and secondly, the preferred system of preference is increasingly intranet profiled. Knowledge management can be said to be the policies and processes through which organizations seek to create, store and disseminate and leverage their organizational knowledge, and IT is fundamental to this endeavour. As one senior knowledge management officer of a global top-six computer company recently asserted, ”Our company wide intranet is the window on the organizations knowledge”.

Universities are instrumental in their core activity of education in monitoring, indeed pioneering many of these developments and some are beginning to build their own intranet based knowledge management systems in an effort to both optimise human resource and deliver the best education that they can to their students. Additionally, KM could be viewed a critical success factor for universities, like other organizations, must continually learn if they are to survive (DeGues 1997) and many are likely to develop strategies in support of this objective. Within these strategies it is clear that Information Technology (IT) has a leading role (Miller and Dunn 1998) for it pervades all areas of business activity. In short, IT is increasingly expected to provide the knowledge dissemination infrastructure inter and intra organizationally, so as to support learning activities.

Any comprehensive survey of the learning organization literature and practice quickly reveals the significance of knowledge management (IPD 1999) for it is through the capturing of information and sharing of knowledge that organizations can be seen to learn. The inference is clear, that to be a successful learning organization necessitates close attention to the issue of creating organizational knowledge and of its management. (Dunn 2000, Vorisek 2000) The development and application of intranet as a KM tool in universities, does no more than reflect what is happening in organisational life beyond their hallowed halls.

Three wo main principal goals of the departmental intranets at both universities were:

1. To enhance the knowledge level of our students by forming such a technological infrastructure that would enable optimal transfer of information and knowledge between teacher-student, student-student and also student - co-operating firms’ representatives
2. To teach all students (not only students specialized in informatics) the art of using new technologies for acquiring and disseminating knowledge and for new forms of communication
3. To encourage less dependency in the tutor-student relationship as the UK’s and CZ’s exponential growth in university student numbers and within that particularly, the interest within the BIT (UK) and IT (CZ) disciplines.

The DBIT Intranet at MMU was first launched in 1997 and designed to be courses based, in that it carried all the course information and literature needed by undergraduate students studying a range of undergraduate programmes, all the students were full time and based at the University. All had unlimited access to computer resources. Successive years has seen the system develop in both scale and application variety, with a key change being conceptually, in that the system has been re-designed from a courses based, to as a student based intranet. This change was in recognition that the first development phase had been one in which the intranet was perceived as principally an information dissemination tool, tutor-student. The technology provides the opportunity for dialogue between tutor-student and student-student and whilst this was recognised in phase one, the design implications necessitated a less ambitious start point. Phase two developments encapsulated the principals of demand for student-student and student-tutor dialogue. Conceptually, the difference is that the system is designed around its users, rather than the information it contains. In the MMU system links have been created to facilitate student-co-operating firms links though these are less utilized than in the PUE intranet. This ‘peoplecentric’ (Dunn 2000) approach offers a fundamental difference for perceptions of the system, by both students, and Ffaculty.

The PUE intranet was introduced in 1996 and it has undergone three phases of development. The fFirst phase took place between 1996-1998. At In that time the intranet was only replacing the course information brochure specifying information for students as well as for the public. The goal was to communicate topical information about the Ddepartment, its courses and research to a wide variety of interested persons. The papers distributed by teachers to students were not available on the departmental intranet at that stage although s. Some teachers did so by disclosing papers on their personal web sites.

The second version of the PUE intranet was operated between 1999-2000. The intranet was divided into four parts: viz, for students of separate subject, for all students of PUE, for potential applicants and for the public. The student part was enriched by new functions: e.g. decision support system for facultyative courses selection, courses and exams registration, transfer of materials from students to teachers, and opinion polls about the quality of courses.

The third development phase washas been introduced by the beginning of 2001. It is targeted at:

• Even more detailed content specialisation according to the users’ types (students, potential applicants and public)
• Standardisation of information structures (in order to increase user friendliness of communication)
• Personalisation of information content in students‘ part
• Communication facilitation of student teams via intranet (e.g. during team assignments)
• Linkage of department internal information system based on Lotus Notes with intranet (dedicated parts of internal information system are automatically transformed into the intranet)
• Linkage of intranet with the e-business applications on Internet (e.g. electronic purchase of course literature)
• Exact definition of responsibilities for information content in individual parts of intranet

As both the MMU and PUE systems have developed, we can see that the intention has been to broaden the application base to support broader connectivity within a multiple stakeholder grouping. Interestingly a cultural difference is observed between the two countries in that a perhaps slightly more liberal view of the UK attempts to place the tacit knowledge of people at the conceptual centre of these systems rather than the explict knowledge, of their product (CZ). The following slide (fig 1) encapsulates the intranet design intentions, which fundamentally are centred around improving the quality and availability of knowledge, both explicit and tacit, and thus improving the level and experience of student participation in their studies.

(fig 1)

That the intranet offers an effective knowledge dissemination infrastructure is self evident, however, the extent to which such systems might be allowed to become the principal route through which this is achieved does not vary greatly between the two universities reported here.

Within the MMU system design, was an explicit objective to make student less reliant on face to face tutor-student contact, effectively giving students the potential to be increasingly self reliant. The UK co-author has frequently described this as students taking responsibility for their own learning and this is in line with UK national trends toward ‘Learning and Teaching’ initiatives, where previously the discussion was always couched within the term ‘teaching and learning’. The change in emphasis has become much more than merely symbolic, it is more readily achievable with the design and implementation of intranet technologies, and other knowledge management systems.

A similarThe same trend is evident Iin PUE intranet developments. To illustrate this we can give the following example. As the number of professions in the IT field is steadily growing and the desired knowledge base for these professions is different, less and less subjects are compulsory in the course curriculum. Instead the intranet describes:

• professions that could be studied at PUE
• the knowledge and abilities required by each profession
• subjects taught by department and the knowledge they deliver?.

The students responsibility is to choose the profession(s) he/she wants to persuestudy, to decide what knowledge he/she needs,misses and accordingly to that to choose the appropriateproper subject set required in those studies. This approach alsoIt reflects also the fact that the subjects are not the only source of the student knowledge. Links from the PUE and MMU sites provide supporting evidence to professional bodies or careers services that can help prospective students in their choice.

 Within the UKboth countries, there is broad recognition that the majority of students are also in employment at some points and that they study and work simultaneously. The value of this type of intranet technology is that it can support remote access, pre and post registration to knowledge for those students not always available to attend university open days, or indeed, lectures. Whilst not promoted as a substitute for tutor-student contact, the Intranet systems do non-the-less provide some level of response to a growing UK problem of student non-attendance. Within this, the cognitive styles and student preferences can be accommodated without compromise to the integrity of the knowledge content or, to the contravention of the legal constraints in force within and between national boundaries. In PUE ?

Findings reported through a comparison of the experiences of the MMU and PUE projects

Findings: The evidence we present in this section is based upon our observations within the two academic departments, via discussion with academic colleagues, the evaluation of student feedback, student performance data, and numerous evaluations and investigations of the MMU and PUE intranet’s, not least by students themselves, undertaking research studies as part of their programmes. (at MMU ???????; at PUE?????)We present these findings under the pillars of Teams; Technology; and Learning (Dunn & Hackney 2000) (figs 2 & 3) viewed in context with what we believe to be fundamental tenants and tools of a knowledge management community which we define simply as, a connection of people supported through technology, willing and able to create and share knowledge. (Dunn 2000) Those tenants (fig 2) are:-

Trust: Essential within any knowledge sharing community as is a willingness to be open with peers. See (Auckland 1999, Burgoyne & Pedlar 1991, Miller & Dunn 1997)

Conflict: Which can be prevalent given the competitive nature of students, particularly prevalent in the case in those undertaking business related programmes.

Dialogue: Between the stakeholders within the knowledge management community, tutor-student, tutor-tutor, student-student, student –co-operating firm.

Meetings: Virtual and physical and not constrained to the universities sites or within university working days.

E-Practice: Developing the minimum skills base within stakeholder participants necessary to engage within the system and encouraging more advanced levels.

Technology Teams: In essence that participants start to view themselves differently and perform differently as a consequence, with potential for both positive and negative effect.

Tenants in (fig 3) are:

Virtual Teaming: Where the technology negates the need for physical proximity

Networks: Both ICT based and human networks of stakeholder groups.

Groupware: As the generic software type upon which both the MMU and PUE Intranets were based.

Collaboration: To develop and utilise team skills, surface tacit knowledge and encourage shared visions.

Team Learning: Holism, the collective learning being greater than the sum of each of the individuals.

Knowledge: Developing organizational knowledge through second order learning which when codified, is available as information for the universities and later student co-horts.

 (fig 2)

 Pillar One: Student Teams

We have found that team building, not surprisingly, needs to have sufficient attention at the outset for the projects to be successful. However, this is not restricted to student teams but also to academic teams who are of course an essential part of the system. A group of tutors might typically share responsibility for a particular subject discipline within the course or research study. Consistency of their involvement, availability to respond to knowledge requests and to make informed knowledge interventions are critical to success of any knowledge management system. Student teams have quickly developed trust within the team itself, though the competitiveness between teams is often re-enforced, even within an intranet environment.

Human nature, it would seem, might be conditioned by technological solutions, though not necessarily changed fundamentally. Our animal instinct to compete remains to a greater or lesser extent. However, within the team we found that the intranet structure and process provided a positive early catalyst for team formation and bonding. Relationships were quickly established and re-enforced via the technology to an extent in which mixing team talents could be the principal consideration in student team composition and, consideration of the mix of personalities is less prominent.

To an extent it could be that the intranet provides a protective veneer against strong personalities that might otherwise dominate in an exclusively physical team environment. (Hodgson 199?). The team itself was often seen to work out the acceptable levels of core competency necessary to facilitate effective interaction between themselves and with other intranet stakeholder groups. Inevitably any team will have its stronger and weaker members though technology promotes the opportunity for more frequent meetings, perhaps shorter and of more intensity, leading to a greater sense of productivity and developing shared vision (Senge 199?) essential in a knowledge sharing environment.

The concept of E-Learning at team level is supported through business simulation modelling (MMU) and through student- co-operating firm (PUE), in each case the scenarios are similar to real work-place experiences, as is the technology itself under deployment. The effect created is virtual teaming (fig 3) when real life skills and collectively new team skills provide enhanced learning levels and experiences, including the opportunity to co-opt other team members or complete teams themselves whilst shared knowledge might be mutually beneficial amongst different teams. Thus networks are created and have the potential to be constantly reformed. Groupware products are particularly apposite for building co-operative relationships for effective knowledge creation and distribution. When team members are consistently in pursuit of shared objectives over time, then the concentration of their shared knowledge resource seems to accelerate solution possibilities and create valuable future knowledge, double-loop learning, (Argyris 198?) available within the team and beyond for future problem solving.

Pillar Two : Technology

This paper does not concentrate on technology per sae, for the technology supporting the Intranets at MMU and PUE, whilst essential to the point that without it such systems cannot exist at all, is non-the-less, transient and provides only the infrastructure upon which knowledge management systems are constructed (Dunn 1999). The specific hardware and software platforms and configurations are less significant than the potential for information and knowledge sharing that they offer.

New technological advances will have extended the possibilities of these intranet systems reported here, even by the time that this article appears in print. What the technology affords is open and accessible information (in computer based systems) and knowledge (in people). IT is increasingly expected to provide the knowledge dissemination infrastructure inter and intra organizationally, so as to support learning activities

There appears considerable confusion, both in the literature and in organisational practice, between knowledge management and information management. The two are often considered to be the same thing though it is clear that on more precise scrutiny they are not. If knowledge were the same as information then we would not need a different name in language to define it. Information and the data from which it is derived can be captured, stored and disseminated with relative ease and through commonly accepted practice. In effect, information is history, codified and managed through information technology infrastructures i.e. the intranets.

Conversely knowledge focuses not on history but on future. Knowledge creation is an outcome of human cognition that is unique to the individual and therefore inevitably influenced by phenomenology. Knowledge provides the capacity for individuals to take action, it is the ‘know how’ to information’s ‘know what’. Knowledge therefore cannot be captured in the same way as information nor managed accordingly. Indeed, knowledge might not be manageable at all, which makes the term knowledge management is a misnomer.

Understanding organisational knowledge might mean to understand how to bridge the gap between these two domains. This ‘continuum gap’ between organizational information and organizational knowledge appears previously to have received little discernable attention but in fact intranet technology is ideally positioned to bridge the gap given its focus on connecting people and database with common applications. With a focus upon open and instant communications the intranets have been seen to provide an effective infrastructure for working with conflict, providing a higher order of communication between stakeholder groups and within student teams. The opportunity for meetings both synchronous and asynchronously provides enhanced efficiency through achieved economies in time, and each meeting reinforces the team without the necessity for face to face contact. The technologies deployed at MMU and PUE afforded instant access to information and better access to knowledge, which is a significant advantage in problem or conflict resolution. The ability to provide immediate and continuous dialogue and work sharing whilst apart is perhaps the greatest productivity gain that information and communication technology (ICT) gives the stakeholder groups.