Redefining the Role of K-12 IT Execs

Despite the advancement of technology and its utilization in schools, the information technology leader’s role in the K-12 education vertical market has stagnated over the last two decades. Conversely, the role of information technology (IT) executives in other vertical markets — such as health care, legal and financial — has changed dramatically.

The health care and legal industries have progressed tremendously in standardizing data elements and organizing content repositories. And although the availability of digital content and other learning resources have exploded on the Web, K-12 IT leaders have struggled with harvesting the knowledge within unstructured data formats, such as Word documents and PDFs. These unstructured data formats contain vast amounts of K-12 intellectual property relative to best practices, yet they remain dormant in individual school districts, as well as in regional, state and national educational repositories. The bottom line is that schools are limited in their ability to capitalize on existing, readily available, free resources already tailored toward education.

To address this challenge, schools should consider evolving the role of their IT executives to include knowledge management. A K-12 Chief Knowledge Officer would address not only IT and access challenges, but also the acquisition and distribution of strategic content aimed at improving individualized student learning.

Consider this: Several effective systems are in place to help identify student level deficiencies, yet no efficient means of pushing appropriate resources and/or intervention strategies directly back to the student exist. This inefficiency requires educators to spend vast amounts of time harvesting these resources to create new — or recreate existing — intervention strategies rather than coaching the learning process, thus taking time away from direct instructional minutes with their students.

A Chief Knowledge Officer would manage all stages of the knowledge processes, while simultaneously designing solutions that encourage people to disseminate and use knowledge. 

Managing the knowledge process looks like this:

1. identify new, old and existing knowledge;
2. identify knowledge relevant to the organization;
3. verify the selected knowledge;
4. capture and organize knowledge;
5. disseminate and use knowledge; and
6. combine new knowledge and re-evaluate assumptions to create knowledge.¹

A solution that most other vertical industries have aggressively pursued is to use a categorical search engine to harvest and deploy knowledge elements  found in various resources and best practices.

This model has been deployed across the health care enterprise to help with patients’ physical health, and can make a difference for every student while utilizing existing resources. With a K-12 Chief Knowledge Officer’s leadership, we should be just as aggressive implementing such a knowledge model in our schools.
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1 Sunassee, Nakkiran N. and David A Sewry, “A Theoretical Framework for Knowledge Management Implementation.” ACM International Conference Proceeding Series; Vol. 30. Proceedings of the 2002 annual research conference of the South African institute of computer scientists and information technologists on Enablement through technology, Port Elizabeth, South Africa, p. 235 – 245.