Since the mid-1990s HigherEd.org's Founder and President, John Milam, Ph.D. has been extensively involved in helping the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) improve and redesign its IPEDS (Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System) data collection. He has held faculty, administrative, and institutional research positions at the University of Houston, West Virginia University (WVU), George Mason University (GMU), and the University of Virginia (UVa), where he worked as a Research Associate Professor before founding HigherEd.org, Inc. in 2002. He designed and built the GMU Data Warehouse, which housed extensive faculty and staff data, including faculty workload, salaries, and assignments. From 1995 to 2005, he provided the Web site Internet Resources for Institutional Research, which is now maintained by Association for Institutional Research (AIR) for the Institutional Research (IR) community.

Dr. Milam has written on numerous topics, including knowledge management (KM) using national datasets for faculty studies, using concept maps, virtual university models, assessing online education, and organizational learning. His research has also focused on faculty supply and demand models and affirmative action availability/utilization statistics for faculty hiring.

Our lives and institutions are inextricably linked with changes in the economy, the financial sector, unemployment, declining tax revenues, and state and local budget cutbacks. As a result, we are waiting with the rest of the country to see whether the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act will make things better and how it effects us personally.

Promoted as key to this massive and unprecedented level of funding are the shared values of accountability and transparency. While not new to higher education, there is an implied commitment and responsibility written into the stimulus package that goes far beyond the public stewardship of institutional effectiveness in place today. The initiatives and strategies of the stimulus package must make a difference in communities across the country. The public benefits must be reported clearly, accurately, and in a timely manner. There must be no unnecessary delays or cost overruns on projects. All programs must meet specific goals and targets and contribute to improved performance on broad economic indicators.

Dr. Milam will discuss the critical and unique role and place in history that participants in the Higher Education Data Warehouse Forum are called upon to play in using knowledge management in colleges and universities to meet this extraordinary challenge. It is only through the strategies, best practices, and decision support of KM that the vision and possibilities of this New Deal for America can be realized.

To proceed, we must do more than focus on new report structures and data types and ways to describe and display what we already do. The solution is not necessarily more assessment, more institutional research, more data warehouses, and more digital dashboards; though these may be part of an integrated response. We must start by admitting that there are fundamental tensions and disconnects in our work and how it is used at institutions and in state and system agencies; that we have made mistakes out of passion and self-interest and saturation; that we must see the radically different nature of what Siemens and Tittenberger (2009) term information fragmentation and coherence.

We know that information is not being used effectively in decision-making, that much of our efforts to leverage data and technology go in vein, that we find ourselves too often burnt out, dispirited, and unappreciated in our efforts to bring about change. Nothing in the stimulus bill will change this. Only we have the power to make this happen, because the real change has come within us. Critical points for transformational change are highlighted in this address, using KM lessons gleaned for higher education. These include mundane topics such as the dissemination and utilization of national and state data; research using longitudinal unit record data for student tracking; developing taxonomies such as CIP, Perkins IV learning pathways, and education-specific metadata; SCORM-compliant use of online learning tools, including learning objects tied to competencies; the use of aggregators and mash-ups; activity-based and responsibility-centered cost studies; short-term, non-credit, and workforce development training with undifferentiated course structures; data mining for student typologies; data-sharing friendly interpretations of FERPA; P-20 perspectives; and a host of new technologies for social networking, ubiquitous learning, and contextual, participatory sensemaking.

While interesting in and of themselves, these KM strategies and tools must be viewed within the lens of larger insights into what Milam (2007) has called “Welcoming the Uncomfortable Now.” This involves challenging our assumptions and becoming more authentic in our relationships to each other and to organizational life. If we are to hear the call that is contained in the Stimulus Package and actually give ourselves permission to be engaged with change, the true meaning of knowledge management must be understood and acted on. This is more than a technology, profession, forum, strategy, or learning tool. It is almost at the level of a meditation.

Senge et al (2005, p. 220) explain how we can "become aware of 'a future seeking to emerge.'" This involves the process of presencing, “when the highest possible future that wants to emerge is beginning to flow into the now” (Scharmer, 2002, p. 2). This is all the stimulus we need.

Milam, John. (2007). “Welcoming the Uncomfortable Now: Transforming Strategies for KM.” Stephens City, VA: HigherEd.org. http://highered.org/docs/milam-africa.pdf.
Scharmer, C.O. (2002). “Presencing: Illuminating the Blind Spot of Leadership: Foundations for a Social Technology of Freedom.” Presencing Institute. http://www.presencing.com/research-publications/articles.shtml
Senge, Peter et al. (2005). Presence: Exploring Profound Change in People, Organizations, and Society. London: Nicholas Brealy Publishing. http://www.presencing.com/.br Siemens, George and Peter Tittenberger. (2009). Handbook of Emerging Technologies for Learning. University of Manitoba, Learning Technologies Centre. http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/wikis/etl/index.php/ Handbook_of_Emerging_Technologies_for_Learning.