The 21st century is the era of the information professional. No, not another claim from the editor of IWR after a good lunch (I should be so lucky), but a summary of the prediction of the IBM Data Governance Council.
The council is a US-based industry group whose 50 members include big names from the corporate world including American Express, Deutsche Bank, Citi and Mastercard. Formed three years ago to help the business world take a more disciplined approach to how big companies handle data, it has produced an interesting assessment of life following the credit crunch.
The council concluded that failures in data governance were at the heart of the sub-prime crisis and that a regulatory backlash will see data governance becoming a regulatory requirement in some countries, initially in the banking and financial services industries. There is nothing like imposing a regulatory requirement for hoiking an issue up the corporate agenda. But the council goes even further. It is discussing the idea that the value of data should be recognised in the financial statements and should be treated as an asset on the balance sheet. The accountancy profession has always been a bit wary of intangible assets, with fierce arguments over if and how intellectual property assets such as goodwill, brands, and human capital should be recognised. The credit crunch and the argument over the value of financial instruments has underlined how difficult it is to inform investors about the changing asset values.
In the scenario painted by the council, the quality of data will become a technical reporting metric and key IT performance indicator. New accounting and reporting practices will emerge for measuring and assessing the value of data to help organisations demonstrate how data quality fuels business performance. Crucially the council sees the role of the chief information officer changing - with reporting on data quality and data risk to the board becoming a key task. The CIO will have the mandate to govern the use of information and report on the quality of the information provided to shareholders.
For information professionals it is an exciting idea, putting them at the heart of the knowledge economy and at the centre of corporate life. It is a vision which the profession should try to turn into reality.

Posted by P. Williams | July 11, 2008 Company & Financial Information, Information Management, Professional Development | Permalink  | Comments (0)  

Knowledge management is theoretically impossible. Real knowledge sits between your ears, unseen until it is needed. As happened today. Someone mentioned Battenburg cake to me and all sorts of long forgotten knowledge about tea parties at my grandma's surfaced.

Not exactly a momentous bit of knowledge, but I joined a conversation on the subject on Facebook of all places. (The dyes in the cake are, apparently, dangerous.)

Recently, I visited a company that specialises in testing staff knowledge through questionnaires. The idea is to find out what an employee knows about their job and to determine whether there are any gaps that need filling or good results that need exploiting.

Boards of very large companies have rather taken to this system, a sort of asset register of the staff and their expected performance on the job. They can use it to correct weaknesses or develop strengths. And, should a crisis occurs in a particular department, they can quickly pull up staff information to help them figure out what went wrong.

Test results can also be measured against averaged results for other organisations in the same industry - a sort of performance benchmark.

It all sounds terrific in theory. The underpinning technology is fundamentally sound. But, as always, the acid test is in the implementation. And that involves humans.

By the time the strategy and raw information has found its way to the question designers, all intimacy with the subject matter will have been squeezed out. It's like speaking a foreign language. It doesn't matter how perfect your accent, a native will know you are a foreigner within a very short time.

I've just read a blog post by a member of staff at the receiving end of an assessment run by this particular system. Slightly tidied up and anonymised, he said, "The people who designed the questions and answers knew nothing about my line of work. The end result has been questions that don't make sense or which are so ambiguous that one needs to be a professor of English to understand them".

You can see why I've not mentioned the company name. I will return to it when I've tried the system myself and dug a little deeper into the particular circumstances around the above comment. But it seems clear that one important step was forgotten - did they try the questionnaires out on people who understood the subject before letting it out in the wild?

Posted by David Tebbutt | April 17, 2008 Professional Development | Permalink  | Comments (8)  

In our busy busy world we barely have time to think, let alone reflect and put aside enough time for learning.

As a trainer for many years, I have watched how it has become increasingly difficult to gather executives together for even half a day's training.

Deliverers.online is a company which, for the past ten years, been designing and delivering bespoke corporate communications solutions and programmes to thousands of employees of UK and international brands including AstraZeneca, Schering-Plough, Virgin and HMV.

It recognised that an opportunity exists for highly focused, short and sharp professional development packages. It set about incubating a new company now called Digital Training Videos, or DTV for short. It reckons that an eight to ten minute video can be fitted into anyone's schedule. It's not the same as a live course, with the interaction and live Q&A but it gets key point across in an effective way.

The videos cover topics such as personal and professional development, management, leadership, coaching, communications, customer service, sales, teamwork and sustainability. And, according to the blurb, does this in a "fresh, entertaining, accessible and affordable way". (I'm still waiting for an answer on what 'affordable' means, but the signs are promising.) The videos can provide just in time learning or form part of an employee performance support system (EPSS) for large organisations.

DTV will reveal its first 20 products on April 11th at HRD 2008 at London's ExCel centre.

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Posted by David Tebbutt | April 4, 2008 Professional Development | Permalink  | Comments (2)  

Ben Toth reveals how he keeps his information intake healthy and why blogging can be more valuable than social networks such as Facebook.

Q Who are you?
A Ben Toth, 48, domiciled on a farm in Herefordshire. I trained as a librarian at University College
London about 15 years ago. I used to be the director of the NHS National Knowledge Service when it was part of Connecting for Health. The best known service it runs is the National Library for Health (www.library.nhs.uk). Currently, I’m designing the enterprise architecture for the National Institute for Health Research (www.nihr.ac.uk). I’m also writing a book on Health 2.0, which will be published in parts later this year.

Q Where is your blog?
A You’ll find it at http://nelh.blogspot.com

Q Describe your blog and the categories on it
A It’s just a public notebook really. Its content tends to reflect what I’m working on, but it’s mostly about libraries, health and the web. I could use Microsoft Word to keep my notes. I could use del.icio.us. But a blog is more visible and more in the flow of the things I’m reading, which
are almost invariably on the web. A lot of the entries I make are just notings – highlight, right-click and
send to Blogger. I use tags but I’m not very strict about categorising things.

Q How long have you been blogging?
A Since about 2001. Eighteen months ago I lost all my entries and had to start again.

Q What started you blogging?
A I was helping my daughter set up a website as part of a Brownie project she was doing. I couldn’t use the National Electronic Library for Health servers and I didn’t want to manage Apache or pay someone to, so we used Tripod. Which worked, but it was difficult to use. And then I read about Evan Williams’ little project, which became Blogger, had a go with it, and haven’t looked back. It’s become a
habit, and I haven’t got tired of it yet.

Q What bloggers do you watch and link to, and why?
A These days I follow things through RSS if I can, so my blog-watching is mostly via a feed reader. The only blog I regularly visit is Dave Winer’s (www.scripting.com) because he’s taken blog writing to a level where the argument is developed through the day and so needs to be read on the page. I look at Techmeme (www.techmeme.com), but that’s not really a blog. I used to maintain a list of blogs
that I linked to through blogrolling, but I can’t see the point of doing that any more. The social web takes care of that sort of affiliation-showing much better.

Q Do you comment on other blogs?
A I don’t comment much. Sometimes I carp from the sidelines on e-healthinsider (www.e-health-insider.com), but I don’t think there’s much value in commenting or reading comments. That’s not to say that discussion isn’t valuable, but I’d rather read views as blog entries rather than comments on
someone else’s blog.

Q How does your organisation benefit from your blog presence?
A It’s the best way of keeping in touch with what’s going on, and keeping a blog maintains some
visibility to people.

Q How does blogging benefit your career?
A Blogging and RSS are really important for me professionally. They keep me up to date in a way
that nothing else can.

Q What good things have happened to you solely because you blog?
A Making professional contacts that I otherwise wouldn’t have and maintaining ones that might
otherwise have fallen off. In some ways blogging is more useful than LinkedIn and Facebook
as a social networking tool. But it’s really only a matter of time until traditional blogging gets divided
up between Facebook, Vlogging and Twitter.

Q Setting work aside, which blogs do you read just for fun?
A The Fake Steve Jobs blog was great (http://fakesteve.blogspot.com). And when I need a chuckle, I check out the Dilbert RSS feed (http://dwlt.net/tapestry/dilbert.rdf ).

What are the blogs in your sector that you trust?
A The reliably interesting starting points on library matters for me are:
■ www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html
■ http://orweblog.oclc.org
■ www.philbradley.typepad.com
■ http://tomroper.typepad.com
And Jon Udell is a first-class technologist who happens to like libraries (http://blog.jonudell.net)

Posted by mchillingworth | December 11, 2007 Electronic Document & Records Management, Enterprise Search, General, Information Management, Professional Development, Science, Technical, Medical | Permalink  | Comments (0)  

The IWR American Psychological Association Information Professional of the Year award has been announced and went, deservedly to Brian Kelly, UK Web Focus for the UKOLN organisation.

The award is judged by a panel of previous winners and the IWR editorial team. As editor of IWR when I judge the award I look for an individual who is pushing the limits of information, technology and making the role of the information professional as far as possible and making it an exciting role.  When looking through the final results I could see that the other judges felt the same way and Brian was an excellent choice.

Brian's role is a national Web co-ordinator, an advisory post funded by the educational body JISC and the Museums, Library and Archives Council (MLA).

In this role Brian is looking at the web as central resource for learning and research in higher education and is looking at ways to make the web a successful resource, which is a challenging role, because the web is still very young and is constantly changing. This can be seen with the recent changes dubbed Web 2.0, therefore Brian is going to be pretty busy for some time to come.

Based at the University of Bath, I know from information professionals I have dealt with in the academic sector that he is very well respected and his thoughts are often the basis for great debate within the industry. Linked to this is his blog, which is one of the most popular blogs in the sector.

I hope all IWR readers will join me in congratulating Brian for an award very much well deserved. 

Posted by mchillingworth | December 6, 2007 Arts, Humanities & Social Science, Company & Financial Information, Electronic Document & Records Management, Enterprise Content Management, Enterprise Search, General, Information Management, Legal, Tax, Regulatory & Patent, Market Research Information, News & Reference, Professional Development, Science, Technical, Medical | Permalink  | Comments (0)  

Jimmy Wales, chairman of Wikipedia was the keynote speech of Online Information 2007 with a presentation Web 2.0 in action: Free culture & community on the move.

Starts with Britannica editor Charles van Doren 1962, who said the encyclopaedia should be radical, but Wales claims they have been anything but.

Small showing of hands for those that have edited, although Wales believes it’s a good showing, "but not as many as college kids".

I consider us to be the Red Cross of information, he says as he describes its charitable status. Have 10 full time staff and will spend about $2 to 3 million this year, which is tiny compared to the major publishers. Vast majority of the money is from small donations, which he likes because its grass routes and not dependent on advertisers.

Wales talks about the desire to extend the languages that are in use on Wikipedia, including Hindi and Afrikaans.

Wiki is free in the sense of GNU, its free to copy, modify and distribute.

Shows a video of his travels to India and how he learnt that the local communities want to use the English version, as the English language is a route out of poverty. His organisation has been out to South Africa teaching students how to edit Wikipedia. "One of the things we have learnt is that if you can get five to 10 editors working together, it can make a great difference." These groups make progress and then they look towards outreach and who they can include. Hence the organisation has set up an academy to find the founding editors. It has begun in India, with 10-20,000 articles a month being put together by academy organisations.

Wikia is his next subject, a separate organisation with 66 languages, including a 67th, Klingon. Wales goes on to demonstrate using Google search results for Muppets and how the top result is the official site, but the rest of the results are from web based conversation, ie Wikipedia pages, forums and fan sites. He demonstrates an article on the Ford motor company and how on Muppet Wiki site, there is an article on Muppet Ford ads and how this demonstrates this level of information would never have been available before.

The search engine is a political statement, in a small P sense, Wales says. The proprietary software of the main players is a mystery in that people have no control of the accountability. The Wikia search will publish its algorithm.

Wales believes that the trust of social networks and setting up trusted networks can be utilised in search. .

On the role of collaboration, he asks the audience to imagine that they are designing a restaurants, discussing the idea that we trust the people around us, we don't put people in cages in restaurants because they will be using knives.
The wiki philosophy is to allow people to do good.

Posted by mchillingworth | December 4, 2007 Arts, Humanities & Social Science, Company & Financial Information, Electronic Document & Records Management, Enterprise Content Management, Enterprise Search, General, Information Management, Legal, Tax, Regulatory & Patent, Market Research Information, News & Reference, Professional Development, Science, Technical, Medical | Permalink  | Comments (0)  

Lorcan Dempsey has worked for JISC and libraries on both sides of the Irish Sea and the Atlantic. As a member of the National Information Standards Organisation, his blog on networked information and digital libraries is well followed.

Q Who are you?
A I work in Dublin, Ohio, was born in Dublin, Ireland, and spent a long time in between in the UK. I am lucky to have what I believe to be one of the most interesting jobs in the library world. I am responsible for the programmes and research area within OCLC (Online Computer Library Center). I also help shape OCLC strategic direction.

Q Where can we find your blog?
A http://orweblog.oclc.org

Q Describe your blog?
A I say that it is about “libraries, networks and services”. I suppose that over time it has become more general. At first it had more of a technical slant; now it ranges more widely. I tend to talk about how networks are reconfiguring library services and I have some recurrent threads. These include:

Making data work harder.
We invest a lot in bibliographic data and need to use it more imaginatively in our systems and services.
Moving to the network level.
No single website is the sole focus of a user’s attention. The network is the focus of attention. And a major part of our network use revolves around significant network-level services ­ Amazon, Google, IMDB, and so on. These match supply and demand in efficient ways. The real message of Web 2.0 is the emergence of this pattern of service: data hubs with strong gravitational pull generated through network effects.
Being in the flow.
The focus of attention has shifted from website to workflow. The network is not so much about finding things as getting things done, and we have increasingly rich support for “networkflow”. We may construct our personal digital identities around services in the browser or on the network (RSS aggregators, social networking sites, bookmarks, etc), and we use prefabricated workflows (course management system, customer relationship management system, and so on).

Q How long have you been blogging?
A Almost four years.

Q What started you blogging?
A After I arrived in OCLC I tended to send out a lot of emails. A colleague suggested that a blog might be a better model.

Q Do you comment on other blogs and what is the value of it?
A The comments on some blogs seem more important than on others.

Q What are the blogs in your sector that you trust?
A I keep a wide range of feeds in my aggregator and will focus on different ones from time to time. Again, I tend to be more interested in “voice” or those from whom I can learn something. From a library point of view, I look at Caveat Lector (http://cavlec.yarinareth.net) and ACRLog (www.acrlblog.org).

Alma Swan’s new blog, OptimalScholarship (http://optimalscholarship.blogspot.com) and eFoundations (http://efoundations.typepad.com) from Andy Powell and Pete Johnston, are informative and provocative. I find PlanetCode4Lib (http://planet.code4lib.org) an efficient and useful way of keeping up with a range of stuff.

Q What good things have happened to you that could only have happened because of your blogging?
A I have always contributed to the professional literature. But I find that blogging is quite liberating: it is much easier to write blog entries than longer pieces. It has made me write more quickly and to think about short communications.

Q Which blogs do you read just for fun?
A I look at John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 (http://memex.naughtons.org) and William Gibson’s blog (www.williamgibsonbooks.com/blog/blog.asp), and the pictures in YarnStorm (http://yarnstorm.blogs.com) make me smile.

Posted by mchillingworth | November 15, 2007 Arts, Humanities & Social Science, Enterprise Content Management, Enterprise Search, General, Information Management, Professional Development | Permalink  | Comments (0)  

Dear Mariella,

Enjoyed the repeat of your Open Book programme today. I'd sneaked away from the computer for a bit and up you popped on the radio. It was interesting to get your take on the world of social computing. Like many people who aren't involved, your incomprehension was quite a treat. Afterwards I wondered if you were doing it on purpose to wind up two of your guests,  Victoria Barnsley, boss of Harper Collins,and David Freeman, founder of Meet The Author.

Since I write for information professionals who are interested in both books and technology, I thought it might be interesting to get a conversation going on the value, or otherwise, of the internet to book authors.

Of course, this blog post could just languish, like most do, or it might trigger some interesting feedback. That's the nature of the web. People take a look at stuff and, in moments, decide whether to linger or move on.

The note below is to put my readers in the picture. Feel free to join in.

All the best,

David

The programme involved two websites: Authonomy, from Harper Collins, which will give authors a place to upload 10,000 of their words so that visitors can decide whether it's any good; while Meet The Author plays recordings of authors talking about their work.

Mariella suggested to Victoria that Authonomy was "just a cynical way to get the general public to do the work for you" and "ultimately it's a way of you getting your paws onto new work and creating a degree of ownership  over it before you've had to commit to it financially in any way." Ouch.

The answer is, of course, that people have a chance to make an impression and get picked up for consideration by Harper Collins or, indeed, any other agent or publisher who happens by.

Mariella found it hard to believe that that Harper Collins would not be "upset" if another publisher snitched talent from the Authonomy site. Victoria suggested that this would prove that the site was a huge success. Mariella retorted with, "but isn't it just like a talent show for authors. Like something you'd expect to see on ITV?" She threw the same accusation at David Freeman.

Not surprisingly, both speakers more or less agreed with her. Victoria noted that tens of thousands of authors might get read who otherwise would have been ignored. David suggested that if publishers and agents liked the author's pitch, they might ask to see their work.

In the end, good writing is essential to being published. But these two sites offer much needed visibility and promotion for unknown authors, a way to emerge from the fog that surrounds agents and commissioning editors.

But in publishing, as in the rest of life, the democracy inherent in the internet is a bit hard to get to grips with. It may be a little threatening to people in conventional positions of power.

Would anyone care to comment?

PS I just checked out the 'Meet The Author' site and it operates on vanity publishing lines rather than YouTube. Authors pay for the privilege. I suspect this will not be the case with Authonomy.

Posted by David Tebbutt | October 25, 2007 Arts, Humanities & Social Science, General, Information Management, Professional Development | Permalink  | Comments (0)  

At a major international publishing event like the Frankfurt Book Fair the bright lights of trade publishing and all its household star names could easily drown out the academic and scientific publishers. But this has not been the case.

Talk at the event, in all circles, is about books and technology, in particular search and eBook readers. On both subjects the specialist publishers are leading the way and the trade publishers salute them.

Amazon and Sony were expected to steal the show with their eBook readers, they are instead conspiquous in their absence, but that has not stopped publishers and technology providers from talking about the devices and their potential.

I was particularly interested in a conversation I had with sceintific, technical and medical publishers WIley where they hinted that they and other specialists may get involved in driving the adoption of eBook readers. Could we see the eBook reader adopt a similar model to the mobile phone where users sign up to a subscription service, content of a particular kind in this case, and in return they get a sleek and sexy device? Its certainly worked for the mobile industry, which now resembled the car world with its emphasis on styling and marketing.

But such a move could also be a blind alley, as one expert said to me, these devices don't support the interlinking and interactivity that content users are currently enjoying with the web.

During the fair Google, Ingram Digital Group and Amazon have all used the scientific and academic publishers as case study beacons for just what can be done with books on the web.

Geographically the Far East is the leading adopter as its markets radically develop according to Mark Carden, Ingram senior vp.

Perhaps Amazon spread rumours of a possible launch to see if there was real interest, well if the level of conversation we've heard is anything to go by, the eBook reader is in demand.

Posted by mchillingworth | October 11, 2007 Arts, Humanities & Social Science, Company & Financial Information, Electronic Document & Records Management, Enterprise Content Management, Enterprise Search, General, Information Management, Legal, Tax, Regulatory & Patent, Market Research Information, News & Reference, Professional Development, Science, Technical, Medical | Permalink  | Comments (0)  

Are you an outstanding information professional? Do you know one, or does a member of your team deserve the highest accolade?

If the answer is yes, then nominate yourself or your colleague for the IWR Information Professional of the Year Award 2007. The award, which has been presented by this title for the last seven years, offers recognition for the individual who has made the most outstanding contribution to the
profession in the last 12 months.

Your nomination could be for a colleague who has demonstrated best practice, led a project or developed a new information resource for your organisation, and its users and clients. Past winners have demonstrated how an information division can collaborate with a myriad of departments across the company or even between different companies and organisations.

The winner of the 2007 IWR Information Professional of the Year Award will find themselves in excellent company. Past winners include Rachel Kolsky of global insurance group AIG; Neil Infield, now at the British Library; and Roddy McLeod at Heriot-Watt University.

IWR will select the winner after close consultation with a panel of previous winners. The trophy will be presented at the Online Information Conference on 4 December 2007 and, as part of the award, the lucky winner will pick up a free delegate place to this year’s conference.

To enter yourself or a member of your team for this prestigious award, email the editor of IWR, Mark Chillingworth – mark.chillingworth@incisivemedia.com – detailing the achievements of your nominee.

Posted by mchillingworth | October 8, 2007 Professional Development | Permalink  | Comments (0)