What is knowledge management?
"Knowledge management (KM) is the process of identifying, organizing, storing and disseminating information within an organization."
- IBM
Institutional information guides why and how we do our jobs, as well as how we communicate information to our teammates and our New School community more broadly. Guru sums up the types of institutional knowledge as:
- Explicit: Knowledge that is easy to write down and share
- Implicit: Applied knowledge
- Tacit: Knowledge gained from personal experience
- Declarative: Static knowledge that is specific to a topic
- Procedural: Knowledge that focuses on the 'how'
- A Posteriori: Subjective knowledge gained from individual experience
- A Priori: Knowledge gained independent from evidence
As indicated in the image above, institutional knowledge includes everything from our university culture (tacit knowledge) to understanding who to go to for advice or expertise (implicit knowledge) to specific steps for how we onboard and train an individual (explicit knowledge) and beyond.
The Need for Knowledge Management
The need for knowledge management at The New School was identified in the 2018 CoRe Project and echoed again in the 2021 Needs Assessment Survey. Most recently, this need was emphasized in our 2025 Summer Working Group Reports and Recommendations.
Consider for a moment the last time you found out a process had changed after the fact, or discovered that another department was referencing an old version of your instructions. Trying to find an answer to the simplest questions sometimes involves searching multiple websites, file storage systems, email and chat history, and still may result in asking an individual for help. Some of The New School's most topical KM-related issues include:
- Knowledge Attrition: Individuals leaving the university with integral undocumented knowledge.
- Siloed Information: University information only known within a specific school, department, or even team; lack of knowledge sharing.
- Duplication & Accuracy: Similar information is maintained in multiple places; individuals do not know which source is current or correct; lack of versioning; broken links to web pages or Google Docs.
- Lack of Dedicated Owner: Inability to determine who to contact with questions or comments; ownership of info inconsistently transferred to new hires (especially ownership of documents).
- Security: Information shared via public websites, limiting privacy permissions.
- Accessibility & Inefficiency: Inconsistent information storage and little understanding of where to look; need to ask for view permissions; inconsistency of formatting; reports of task switching dating back to the CoRe Report.
Knowledge Management Strategy
We began to implement knowledge management at the university in earnest in 2021. The New School's approach to knowledge management consists of knowledge stewardship, the people and processes, in conjunction with a formal knowledge base, or system of record. Our goals are to:
- Create and support a culture of knowledge stewardship that assures university information is accurate and current.
- Use one system instance that is centrally managed to achieve a single source of truth or record.
- Improve the accessibility of information, making it easier to locate and utilize knowledge.
Enter Guru!
Guru is our knowledge management tool used to organize institutional knowledge in customized collections by unit, department, and college so you have the verified information you need anytime, anywhere.
We selected this platform or a multitude of reasons, including:
- Native process for verifying content for accuracy and currency at least once per year
- Automatic version history
- Breadcrumbs which help you understand your content's reach and how it is being used by others
- Privacy controls including Single Sign On (SSO) and departmental provisioning
All faculty and staff are automatically provisioned with Guru accounts. Students and student workers do not have access. Guru can be accessed using the web application, Google Chrome browser extension, or mobile app after registering with your New School SSO credentials.
Please review our Guru Launch Information & Resources and contact Sam Gravity if you have any questions!