SKM user benefit

Children

A portal for integrating operations and systems across the enterprise
A single comprehensive interface to everything you need to know - SKM as a data, systems, and resource integration portal
A single intuitive system for accessing all institutional data and systems
A vast library of shared resources to empower you decision making abilities.
Access and integrate information from all back-end systems
Access to information at any time and from any place
Advanced search enables users to find and filter results by tag, type, connector, and thought content.
Advanced search generated reports have links that open SKM content in the viewing panel which makes it easy to see where the search results reside in the concept map.
Aids with information comprehension
Aids with planning personnel transitions
Aids with teaching assignments and course scheduling
All users with a professional license can make changes to SKM and automatically receive changes made by other users
Always have access irrespective of Internet or network status. Content replication and synchronization between multiple computers provides protection against hardware failure.
An aid to finding courses and departments responsible for courses and programs. Also aids with finding courses needed to satisfy departmental requirements.
An easy way to find pre-formed surveys and questionnaires and navigate through their sections
Any type or tag can be counted and therefore used to monitor conditions such as pedagogies adopted, red traffic lights, etc.
As you enter text to create a new thought, tag, type, or connector, existing content is listed so you can choose it instead. This reduces duplication and is an easy way to connect to existing content.
Associates users with services and vice verse which makes responsibilities and support options clearer
Because concept maps emulate the way we think and links explain why thoughts are connected it is relatively easy to find content by following the map.
Benefit from the shared knowledge of experts in all aspects of higher education operations and in different contexts, systems, and countries.
Blog subscribers receive pushed information on developments with the SKM.
Build consensus about what faculty excellence is and how it should be measured
Build professional networks and get to know your colleagues and peers across the World.
Bypasses the need to have a subscription service with TheBrain but has some serious restrictions and is not recommended.
Can be used to assign metrics, responsibilities, etc., to groups of people
Can be used to specify clubs and organizations, membership and other characteristics
Can help prevent visual overload and focus the information displayed on a particular train of thoughts.
Can specify temporary work teams
Clarifies all the major components of a degree which must be satisfied for completion, their interdependence, and where choices must be made.
Clarifies and sets expectations of cooperativity between org units and roles.
Clarifies management and reporting relationships
Clarifies relationships between fields of study and credentials
Clarifies the impact that student enrollment decisions have on their paths and progress toward graduation, and on program enrollments
Clarify evaluation procedures and outcomes
Clarify next steps for the user which may not be intuitive from the displayed nodes.
Classification helps with assessing process inventory and finding processes.
Classifies courses so that they are easier to find and helps students make appropriate selections
Clearly define all roles needed within the organization and reduce HR management overhead
Clearly identifies processes that should be used to org unit members and to process creators
Clearly understand current conditions and performance using introspective analysis: The self-study process (AKA SWOT on steroids)
Collects all courses delivered by a particular department and defines their service roles for management and search purposes
Color theming makes it easier to find the appropriate sections of drop-down menus.
Colored connection lines make it easier to identify misclassified connections or interesting abberant connections in an area of the map where you would not expect them to exist.
Committees are grouped under broad roles and with an assigned scope of influence to more clearly establish and limit what they can do and to help with the search process
Community sharing in place of reinventing knowledge
Concept mapping emulates the way humans think and is therefore a natural and intuitive way to store and find information
Confidence in the validity of metrics
Confidence in the validity of provided information
Connect abstracts to real data in real time
Connect and learn from an experienced peer community
Content authors
Converting documents to notes or opening them in the content area enables creation of links to and backlinks from other thoughts in the concept map
Converts the high level strategic plan into everyday activities that employees can execute
Copies of parts or the entire database can be used to model alternatives as part of a decision making process
Create an environment of trust and confidence in institutional leadership
Create clear and effective strategic plans that drive institutional evolution
Creates an intuitive concept map interface to the contents of a file folder
Creates associations between data in course evaluations and the facility and instructor they apply to which makes it easier to determine where interventions are required.
Defines clear reporting lines including dotted line reports that may be independent of the org structure
Defines the competencies that a student should have before beginning a course in order to be successful
Demonstrates how SKM employs knowledge management methodology to make its information more useful. Used to organize, classify, and present many of SKM’s features.
Demonstrates the hierarchical relationship between data and wisdom
Develop a community understanding of what is needed to manage an institution effectively
Distinguishes between committees within the institution and outside
Divides courses into their service categories to aid with management and selection
Documents the type of authorization permission required to access a resource
Easily find areas of the concept map that require maintenance or additional work
Effective use of resources - work smarter not harder
Effectively manage people/groups and what they are expected to accomplish
Empower faculty in the classroom, align facilities with need, and invest to maximize the utility of instructional infrastructure
Enable decision makers to find, understand, evaluate, and select the best data to invest in
Enable students to choose the right major and navigate its requirements effectively and efficiently based on their personal strengths and circumstances
Enables a backward design approach to the strategic planning process
Enables a user to navigate through the structure and type of units that make up the organization
Enables and encourages establishment of mentoring relationships
Enables assignment of resources and responsibilities to line numbers which are independent of personnel changes and therefore do not have to be reconfigured with each transition.
Enables classification of the thought into a primary category
Enables curriculum planners to identify where particular skill requirements can be satisfied by courses and enables students to select courses that are based on skills they wish to improve or for which they have a strength.
Enables data to be collected on, and student to select courses sections based on their delivery mode, the style of teaching employed, and the duration of the term.
Enables discussion of issues and challenges among restricted access communities of users.
Enables institution to benchmark against groups of other institutions
Enables inventory of services. Makes it easier to prioritize and flag performance of services, etc.
Enables org unit to select the most appropriate metrics to add to its metric dashboard
Enables scheduling of strategic plan components
Enables SKM integration with any browser accessible back end system
Enables sorting/finding documents by functional categories
Enables the institution to share the metric set that it has chosen to prioritize and invest resources in.
Enables the user to correlate planned changes with the affected facilities.
Enables user to list all of the features of SKM
Enables user to return to marked points in the map at any time.
Enables users to assess the completeness of their institution’s business capabilities and to flag and track their development
Enables users to find and list courses that are approved for use in special programs.
Enables users to find, identify, and sort accreditors by their regions/ fields of responsibility, the metrics they require, their standards, and example self-study documents
Enables users to follow up with and evaluate the reliability of a metric based on its originator.
Enables users to gain a very clear understanding of what they will learn from any particular degree program.
Enables users to identify the nature of a provider institution and therefore the relevance of resources in that context.
Enables users to quickly and easily move to areas of the concept map that they use frequently without having to drill down to them.
Enables users to take alternative approaches to finding information by using connectors to follow results back to analysis, answers back to questions, groups back to applied surveys, etc.
Ensures employees and committees are clear about expectations and how they will be evaluated
Ensures processes receive the CQI they deserve and that there is a champion and go-to person for each process.
Ensures that committees are composed of the right experts and representatives
Ensures that employee activity is focused on and shaped by the job description and the strategic plan.
Ensures that SKM design is driven to address peoples' needs.
Ensures that the mission and vision of the institution drives all that it does in a very planned way.
Ensures that the nominating group is aware of its responsibilities and helps those administering the award to seek nominations.
Ensures that users are aware of any special scheduling relationships between courses
Establishes a standards based mechanism to classify and compare institutions
Execute the plan to drive positive results
Expandable to reveal additional related information about the element while reducing the risk of information overload
Explains why two thoughts are connected
Explore options as you model your organization’s administrative and committee structure
Find community recommended vendors and consultants that match your project needs
Flag potential changes to the institution for consideration by and input from stakeholders
Focus effort, increase impact, and curb costs by limiting the number of metrics adopted
Formalizes cooperative relationships and role of dotted line supervisors in setting expectations and in the evaluation process
Free access to make initial assessment of SKM - committed users are encouraged to use the dedicated client.
Gain a greater understanding of who you are (and are not), what makes you distinctive, and your role in the higher education ecosystem before you plan
Get to know what you don't know about your institution - An inventory of inventories
Groups courses into sets that make curricular requirements easier to identify and illustrates how programs are built
Grow a culture of knowledge informed decision making
Grow peoples understanding of information and its accessibility
Grow your organization's and employees' capabilities
Guides the design of SKM so that it addresses the needs of its user community
Help people understand their roles in the organization and what is expected of them
Helps an institution identify which accreditor provides them with service and the metrics they would have to provide for accreditation
Helps institutions determine which accreditations to pursue
Helps the community understand how the institution is classified and what is required to achieve or change a classification.
Helps the institution understand how it is being rated and which metrics to enhance to improve rankings.
Helps to analyze and distribute areas of focus for strategic plan components to ensure that no area is neglected
Helps to clearly define program and course learning expectations and their correlation with the course level.
Helps to identify and distinguish a thought type from other types and tie type to its related tags. May supersede colors associated with type.
Helps user find sources from an alphabetized list of people or organizations, usually with a web link for contact information
Helps user get an overall picture of the org structure and find units easily
Helps user plan timing and spacing of data collection and correlate with major events such as self-studies.
Helps user to select metrics to adopt for accreditation purposes and then deliver evidence to support claims in the self-study
Helps user track progress on process improvement
Helps users find metrics by classifying them in multiple dimensions.
Helps users plan and track changes to committee structure
Helps users understand and use SKM
Helps with adoption decisions for external vendors, confidence in rigor, and with sources of further information
Helps with finding locations and with management of space assignments.
Helps with planning and tracking of changes to IT systems
Helps with resource management and ensures the strategic planning process is tied to resource allocations.
Helps with scheduling course delivery and with student course schedule planning.
Helps with space inventory and scheduling access.
Hierarchically structures the strategic planning process and helps to identify and find components
Identifies all of the major demographic groups who have investment in the institution and its success
Identifies committees major function and provides link to bylaws for more details
Identifies connector category which can help identify incorrect coding or unusual relationships
Identifies metrics that are required of an institution by government bodies
Identifies opportunities for employee group development and reduces management overhead
Identifies the standing and dynamic charges that are assigned to the committee so the group knows what it needs to be working on
Illustrates how SWOT components are being addressed and provides justification for objectives and tactics
Implicit assumed information is made explicit and clear
Important metrics for a groups operations are aggregated.
Improve communication and stakeholder engagement
Improve the view from the balcony
In a multi location institution helps users find where courses are offered.
In-context information
Increase confidence in metrics and their reliability
Increase employee and committee effectiveness using responsibility centered management
Increase survey response rates within target populations by planning data collection frequency and interspacing
Indicates subject matter about which stakeholders should receive regular updates and/or should be reviewed with and modified by stakeholder input.
Indicates that the thought is an organizational container and not a member of a schema / semantic structure
Indicates the subject matter in which faculty member can teach making it easier to find faculty when needs arise.
Indicates to users the library resources (metrics, accreditors, etc.) that have been adopted for institutional use
Information about an additional characteristic of the thought which can then be used to display and filter thought lists
Information fields displayed next to each other make it easier to establish and understand relationships, provide in-context explanations, display further information, and find information.
Information pushed to users
Keep your finger on the pulse of your institution
Knowledge sharing, best practices, consolidation across org units
Leverage other’s work by using shared files to start your project
Leverage SKM’s framework and embedded strategic plan components to create a highly structured, rigorous, balanced and effective strategic plan
Make committees more effective and productive
Make institutional assessment and classification work for you
Make it easier to compare different information sets and create connections between areas of the concept map that are not closely related.
Make it easier to use SKM effectively
Make it easy to see available options and choose the most appropriate item from related sets.
Make strategic committee assignments
Makes accounting for release time simpler and easier to track
Makes it easier to explore academic opportunities without the need to understand how they are classified into degrees. Exposes options without the need to understand the disciplines.
Makes it easier to find out why an arrangement or process is in place
Makes it easier to find supporting documents
Makes it easier to find the weakest points in a chain of dependent metrics
Makes it easier to identify metrics targeted at specific groups and to monitor their performance/satisfaction
Makes it easy to find files associated with a process
Makes it easy to find files associated with the strategic planning process
Makes it easy to identify experts and assigns responsibility for improvement
Makes it easy to identify group members and target very specific groups with responsibilities, assignments, and data.
Makes it easy to identify groups and assign data and tasks
Makes it easy to identify which organizations accredit the institution and find information about the organization and its standards.
Makes it easy to see if any groups are being neglected in the motivation and recognition processes.
Makes it easy to see what awards and recognitions are officially endorsed and find the details for each.
Makes it easy to sort and find concept map elements by their performance level
Makes the concept map easier to read and interpret
Maximize student learning outcome achievement in your programs
Model and manage change
Motivate stakeholders and clarify institutional mission through an exploration of the value-add provided to society by higher education
Multiple different layouts and quantities of information that suit a variety of concepts.
Negates the need to have a year specific version of every tag
Nesting enables broad assignments to large groups and very specific assignments to small groups or individuals
Optimize operational effectiveness and efficiency
Optimize your reading and web site exploration time by following member suggestions
Planning and managing curriculum and the delivery of instruction
Promotes a better understanding of the institution and its academic programs
Provide easy access to critical metrics which should be monitored by an org unit on a regular basis. Simplifies management as org unit members automatically get assigned to the access group. Clarifies for admins the access that is required.
Provides a complete list of all IT service categories and associated systems that can be used to identify needs, track responsibilities, etc.
Provides a direct point of integration between the courses offered and the instructional capabilities of the faculty or potential faculty (CIP codes)
Provides a framework to ensure all aspects of the planning process are addressed and enables linking into shared metrics and tactics
Provides a library of survey response scales that can be applied to any survey question
Provides a summary that is reinforced by the icon or information in the image. May supersede image associated with type.
Provides a teaching history which, particularly for adjuncts, provides a source of instructors for courses.
Provides access to rich data about individuals through the concept map interface
Provides an alternative structured method of exploring and finding academic programs and a way of quantifying the breadth of programs offered by the institution
Provides an integrated view of all aspects of a job position
Provides an intuitive visual interface to help find documents in the library
Provides clarity of purpose and identification of stakeholders who should be involved in the CQI process.
Provides clear information on the variety of credentials available, how credentials are nested, and the degree components which must be completed for the award.
Provides concrete examples of how other institutions have addressed accreditor expectations.
Provides critical information on the impact and implications of adopting a metric which makes for a more fully informed adoption decision.
Provides easy to find and easily accessible supportive documents
Provides fundamental information about how the course is designed for data collection and to aid students with choice
Provides great detail and clarity about the learning expectations of progams and courses
Provides key information about the nature of the thought which can then be used to display a connected thought list.
Provides mechanisms for members of the SKM developer community to work as teams on the next version.
Provides mechanisms that enable institutions to update their local instances of SKM as newer versions are developed
Quick search for text anywhere in any thought
Receive independent and unbiased reviews of products and services used by other institutions.
Reduce resistance to and increase community ownership of evolution and change
Reinforces the reason the thoughts are connected and helps the user to follow a train of similar connections
Reinforces visual distinction between tags
Research roles identify expertise within departments, targets for recruitment, and role based assignments related to the teaching, advising and service responsibilities of a faculty position
Save time and increase compliance by streamlining, clarifying, and making institutional processes more effective
See a variety of perspectives that thought leaders are using to analyze their institutions.
See how other institutions have used SKM's framework
Set expectations based on peer comparisons
Set realistic and stretch goals for the institution using comparative analysis: Peer and aspirant institutions
Shell user accounts that enable coordination between SKM and other systems with people information
Shows internal stakeholders and accreditation team members how standards are being met and the expectations on the institution.
Shows results analysis directly on the concept map for in-context perspective.
Shows user where decisions must be made in a concept map and what the choice parameters are
Simplifies personnel budget management and succession planning
Simplifies the mentoring management process
SKM content can be accessed and edited from multiple workstations (even simultaneously) and is kept in sync between them all
SKM project developers
SKM system managers
SKM's task management and reminder system
Stifle rumors before they get stared – SKM as a conversational centerpiece
Supports and encourages the use of SMART objectives
Supports coordination of effort and ensures institution and all its components are working toward the same overall goals
Supports inventorying and assessment of capabilities
Supports planning a course schedule
Supports planning and tracking of curricular change
Supports sharing of practices across the organization, consolidations, and capability improvements.
Supports tracking and planning for the academic program review process
Surveys as an abundant source of good metrics
Tap other institutions’ experiences with their use of metrics and tactics in self-studies and strategic plans
The concept map becomes an intuitive user interface to data and data is easier to interpret and apply when seen in context.
The information you need when you need it at the level of detail that you need
Thoughts can be sorted within the concept map by name, type, and dates to provide additional mechanisms for viewing and finding information
Ties committee expectations to performance metrics
Ties the self-study and strategic planning processes together
Understand the factors and adoption consequences that should be considered when selecting the best metrics to monitor your environment
Universal model can be adopted as the starting point for a customized model of a specific institution
Use facility demand to determine investment priorities
Use groups and roles to simplify data and task assignments
Use predictive analytics to proactively identify at-risk students
Use SKM’s practice model to plan and execute a strategic planning process that engages your stakeholders
Used to indicate that the connector has associated content, usually about the nature of the connection.
Used to keep track of work that needs to be completed on the concept map
Used to mark and easily return to thoughts that have a special interest
Used to plan and manage HR transitions
Used to plan and track changes to the organizational structure
Useful for users browsing metrics, tactics, etc. to prioritize items of interest for potential institutional adoption.
Using themed colors makes it easier to visually filter and focus on related thoughts within a complex view.
Very bright color helps users follow the chain of connections even in a very busy map.
Visually connects information with a schedule
Visually distinguishes tags from each other and aligns sets of tags with sets of types for easy correlation
Visually identifies thought type and distinguishes from other types. This enables pattern recognition and visual filtering.
Visually reinforces type and may contain additional information.
When clicked. each thought type or tag lists all thoughts to which it is applied providing two alternative maps through which to access content. Essentially there are three layers to SKM, the thought layer, tag layer, and type layer.
When students are looking for one course to fill their schedule this can help them find courses that are stand alone

Jumps

Type: SKM user benefit 100%

Made with TheBrain