“I Need to Know More About This”
Becoming Knowledge-driven in Financial Management

by Kate Riley

You probably know that the web is changing the way work gets done in Financial Management. More and more transactions are being done by our customers—they are entering the data that our staff used to be responsible for. If the transactions are being done by our customers, what does that leave for our staff to do?

This question has been at the heart of the Lead Team’s work for the past year. How do we move from being transaction-driven to being knowledge-driven? What would we need to do differently to become knowledge-driven? What does “knowledge-driven” mean anyway?

To answer these questions, the Lead Team had to create some knowledge for itself. To better understand the emerging field of “Knowledge Management,” we explored many sources. We reviewed books; yes, there is even a Complete Idiot’s Guide to Knowledge Management. We asked colleagues in Financial Management what being knowledge-driven meant to them. We read management papers to see what experts were advising. To learn more yourself, a helpful web site for information on this topic is destinationkm.com.

Out of this work emerged a realization for the Lead Team that being knowledge-driven involved two basic steps: 1) the ability to create knowledge; and, 2) the capacity to share it. Being knowledge-driven, then, is the process of constantly learning from our on-going work to better understand what our customers need and what is required to make our processes more efficient. Creating new knowledge is not enough. We must also be able to share the new learning among ourselves and with campus.

With this two-step model for being knowledge-driven, our team was able to develop activities to ensure that we could achieve these goals. Our first step was to make a presentation to the EIT about our work, the model, and our plans for realizing it. With the go-ahead from our sponsor, V’Ella Warren, and support from the EIT, we are focusing initially on identifying those policies and procedures which are non-standardized, confusing, and where knowledge by our staff is less than complete. We are inviting campus administrators to participate in identifying these areas through a series of focus groups. From these discussions, we are anticipating that we will learn a lot about how we can better create and share knowledge in some of our key processes. Look for more developments on this strategic initiative later this summer.