Dean Joyce Feucht-Haviar
What Do You Know?
Do you know what you know?
Most people don’t.
There’s no question we each know a great many things–far more than we could ever list. Unfortunately, our minds don’t come equipped with a handy table of contents. Rather, we bring forward what we know as the occasion warrants. In the course of a day, we generally utilize a very wide range of knowledge and skills that we call into play without much effort.
With all that we know, we are able to help others in our professional and personal lives solve a great many problems. But, since we don’t really know how much we know and we lack an easy-to-access directory to the knowledge we possess, it is hard for us and our colleagues to know when we might have just the knowledge needed to solve a particular problem.
If it is hard for us as individuals to really know what we know, imagine the challenges that face an organization that is trying to figure out what it knows and how best to put that knowledge to use. An innovative high-tech firm may have hundreds or even thousands of staff members, each of whom is hard at work using bits and pieces of what he or she knows. Moreover, the firm probably has files that chart at least some of the work of former employees on past projects.
Knowing how a team of professionals approached a problem 20 years ago might be very useful to those in the organization facing a similar problem today. But how would today’s team know of the existence of information in a 20-year-old file that might point them in the right direction or warn them about possible problems? Obviously, much time and considerable resources could be saved if the organization actually knew how much knowledge it possessed and how to access it.
The potential gains from better use of an organization’s comprehensive knowledge is so significant that a growing number of public and private institutions are working to develop better knowledge-management strategies. The university and a team of exceptional faculty from across the disciplines are working with representatives from industry to develop a new master’s degree program to prepare professionals to deal with the challenge of knowledge management.
Among organizations, universities are rather remarkable in the scope and depth of what they know. The faculty, staff and students who comprise a university community possess a collective command of much of humankind’s intellectual heritage as well as new knowledge and discoveries in a wide array of disciplines – many with direct relationship to professional practice in a number of fields.
One of the delights of our work in The Tseng College is that our charge is to get to know what this university knows and then create opportunities for the faculty to make knowledge across the disciplines accessible to midcareer professionals and their employers. This mission allows us not only to foster the creation of new and exciting programs but also to be perpetual students ourselves. All in all, a pretty great gig.
Joyce Feucht-Haviar,
Dean, The Tseng College
18111 Nordhoff Street, Northridge, CA 91330-8434 / Phone: 866-873-6439 / © 2007 The Tseng College, CSUN