A Handbook for Corporate Information Professionals 9781783300433, 9781856049689

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A Handbook for Corporate Information Professionals

edited by

Katharine Schopflin

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© This compilation: Katharine Schopflin 2015 The chapters: the contributors 2015

Published by Facet Publishing, 7 Ridgmount Street, London WC1E 7AE www.facetpublishing.co.uk

Facet Publishing is wholly owned by CILIP: the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals.

The editor and authors of the individual chapters assert their moral right to be identified as such in accordance with the terms of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Except as otherwise permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, with the prior permission of the publisher, or, in the case of reprographic reproduction, in accordance with the terms of a licence issued by The Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to Facet Publishing, 7 Ridgmount Street, London WC1E 7AE.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-85604-968-9

First published 2015

Text printed on FSC accredited material.

Typeset from editor’s files by Facet Publishing Production in 10/14 Palatino Linotype and Frutiger. Printed and made in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY.

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Contents

Contributors .....................................................................................v 1 The history and profile of the corporate information service .........................................................................................1 Katharine Schopflin 2 Managing the corporate intranet ...........................................13 James Mullan 3 Internal and external marketing by information professionals ............................................................................33 Shaunna Mireau 4 The hybrid librarian–IT expert .................................................45 Linda-Jean Schneider and Simon Barron 5 Building a corporate taxonomy ..............................................57 Helen Lippell 6 Practical knowledge management: stories from the front line ...................................................................................77 Danny Budzak 7 Successfully managing your team through change and transition ..................................................................................99 Andrew Grave

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8 Successful management of insight, intelligence and information functions in a global organization ..................115 Philip M. Weinberg 9 Working with suppliers and licensing for e-libraries ..........139 Tina Reynolds, Linda-Jean Schneider and Fiona Fogden 10 Training end-users in the workplace ....................................159 Anneli Sarkanen and Katy Stoddard Index..............................................................................................179

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Contributors

Simon Barron is currently an analyst programmer at SOAS Library in London working on an ambitious project to implement an open-source library management system. After studying for a Masters degree in Library and Information Management at Manchester Metropolitan University, he worked in a number of roles combining elements of library work and IT work. Simon has presented conference papers across the UK and written articles for publication in the Guardian, the Open Rights Group Zine, CILIP Update and other serials. Danny Budzak has been working with digital technologies for over 30 years, in fact, from the days when they were described as ‘new’. He started by building community information databases in libraries using Videotext running on Unix. This was obliterated by the world wide web, but it taught him how to organize information and that technologies do not necessarily improve in an linear way. He smartly adapted to change and became one of the UK’s first local authority web editors. He remains fascinated and infuriated in equal measure with information systems and the never ending number of devices that can be used to access them. He finds no purpose for smartphones and, having an encyclopaedic knowledge of London’s pubs, has no clear idea of what other apps might be of use. However, he is intrigued by the development of big data, smart data and the internet of things, but wonders how one opts out of them. In his spare time he reads a lot of books, always paper, with hardback covers, and has recently become involved in a project to record medieval graffiti in churches.

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Fiona Fogden is Head of Customer Relations at Linex Systems where her role is to support customers, provide training, listen to their needs, feed into product development, and be a general advocate for their products. She combines this with a career as a freelance consultant, offering training and consultancy in negotiating and a range of information skills to libraries and publishers. Fiona also helps staff in law firm libraries review the value they receive from a range of services including business intelligence and outsourcing deals. She previously worked in library, intranet and library management roles in professional services firms including Baker Tilly and Baker & McKenzie. Andrew Grave began his information career at the business support agency Business Link, in London. He then joined the UK’s sixth largest accountancy firm, BDO, where he worked for 11 years. His work there spanned competitive intelligence, vendor management and research and analysis. Andrew currently provides training and support to corporate information teams and to businesses without an information function through his company Research Counts. More details about Research Counts can be found at www.researchcounts.com. Helen Lippell is an experienced data and information professional. She started out doing text analytics at the Financial Times, and has also delivered search and metadata projects for the BBC, Nature, Directgov, Time Out and the Press Association. These have ranged from delivering a customer-facing, evidence-based taxonomy to developing a prototype of a next-generation metadata curation and management tool. She is a regular conference speaker, recently delivering papers at ISKO (International Society for Knowledge Organization) UK and DAM (Digital Asset Management) EU, both major events in the taxonomy and media asset management world. Shaunna Mireau is the Director of Knowledge Management and Process Improvement at the Field Law firm in Edmonton, Alberta. Her position includes coordinating knowledge management projects, managing the firm’s Lean Six Sigma continuous improvement projects, and close collaboration with the firm’s libraries, technology team and practice groups. She obtained her library and information management diploma from Grant MacEwan College in 1992. Shaunna is a contributing author for the text Legal Information Professionals (LexisNexis, 2012). Shaunna has been a core contributor of the blog Slaw.ca since 2008, where she writes about law, libraries and technology.

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CONTRIBUTORS VII

James Mullan joined European law firm Fieldfisher in 2009 as Knowledge Management Systems Manager. Prior to that, he was at CMS Cameron McKenna LLP where he was an information officer based in the Knowledge and Information Services Team. At Fieldfisher he is responsible for the management and development of the firm’s intranet. He is also responsible for the firm’s precedent collection (Knowledge Bank), the Knowledge Search which uses the Recommind MindServer product and the development of blogs, wikis and other social media tools. James is a regular conference speaker and has contributed articles to a number of legal and knowledge management journals. He maintains his own blog (the Running Librarian) and is an active member of the British and Irish Association of Law Librarians (BIALL). In 2009 he won the WILDY-BIALL Librarian of the year award. Tina Reynolds is a chartered librarian working for a Magic Circle law firm based in London, having previously worked in professional services firms. She has a law degree and an MA in Information and Library Management. Her areas of interest include evaluating and promoting the value of special libraries, vendor and contract management, and personal organization and productivity. She has been published in a variety of places including Performance Measurement and Metrics. She is a past committee member of CILIP’s London Member Network and a former New Professionals Support Officer for CILIP’s Career Development Group. She is currently a member of several professional bodies including CILIP (Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals), SLA (Special Libraries Association) and BIALL as well as being a committee member for CLIG (City Legal Information Group). Anneli Sarkanen is a senior information officer at the law firm Fieldfisher. She has been in the information profession for over ten years, previously working at Eversheds LLP and Macfarlanes LLP and gaining her Masters in Librarianship from the University of Sheffield. Anneli is an active member of the Special Libraries Association European chapter and holds the post of chair of the PR & Promotions Committee of the BIALL. In 2012 she was the recipient of the SLA Europe Conference award and attended the SLA Conference that year in Chicago. Linda-Jean Schneider is the Electronic Resources Manager for Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP, having joined the firm in February 2012. Previously, she spent

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more than 25 years in law firm library management at two other Philadelphiabased firms. She is an active member of the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) and the Legal Division of the Special Libraries Association. She served as 2012–2013 Chair of the Private Law Libraries Special Interest Section of AALL, and is currently a member of the AALL Legal Research Competency Special Committee. Linda-Jean has presented at several programmes at the AALL annual meeting, including those on law firm current awareness tools, the economic downturn’s impact on law firms, legal research training and assessment of associates and, most recently, digital licensing and SharePoint implementation in the law firm environment. Dr Katharine Schopflin is a corporate information professional with more than 15 years’ experience. She has worked in various sectors including media, government and non-profit, in a range of knowledge and information management and research roles. She speaks regularly on information issues, is the editor of A Handbook for Media Librarians (Facet Publishing, 2008) and publishes regularly in the library and information press. She recently completed her PhD on the nature of the encyclopedia as a form of the book at University College London’s Department of Information Studies. Katy Stoddard is a senior researcher at Guardian News and Media, answering requests from journalists and writing for the blog From the Archive. She has written for several information professional magazines and contributed a chapter to Facet’s Handbook for Media Librarians. She is on Twitter @katy_bird. Philip M. Weinberg is a Senior Manager at Partners in Performance, a fast growing global consultancy originating in Australia. He is still pursuing the themes that he enjoyed in his previous role at McKinsey & Company (an American strategy consultancy) until the end of 2014. He has held a variety of leadership roles covering research and analysis of the global telecoms, media and technology sectors. This involved building strategies, establishing, structuring and managing large knowledge teams and hubs worldwide, both onshore and offshore, and scoping and delivering great knowledge products for a very demanding clientele. In parallel, he was a core member of McKinsey's professional development community for knowledge professionals, as leader of the global learning program focused on accelerating the transition from having an operational to a strategic impact working with colleagues and clients.

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CHAPTER 1

The history and profile of the corporate information service

Katharine Schopflin

Introduction

In 1909, a number of librarians attending the American Libraries Association conference in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, voted to form a group dedicated to professionals working in business, industry and government. Under the aegis of its first president, John Cotton Dana, the newly formed Special Libraries Association’s aims were to promote the work of members and share information and resources. The Association’s founding marked the formal recognition that among professional custodians of written materials, those who served the workplace, rather than students or the general public, had specific needs and skills. Over the next century (and more), the corporate information service has evolved in line with changes in the workplace; it has often been at the sharp end of change, and its staff the first to experience the effects of political and economic developments in the wider world. In this book, the corporate information service is defined as a unit within a corporate body providing the information that staff need to carry out the work of the organization. Such service’s main purpose is not the collection or dissemination of information or published works for their own sake, but they require such information in order to fulfil their objectives as well as possible. Collections in public, national and academic libraries are often used by these corporate bodies, particularly when they concern law or business, but this book is interested in and aimed at information professionals who work inside organizations. These include law firms, consultancies, other commercial entities such as banks and insurance firms, businesses engaged in retail and manufacture, professional trade bodies (which might, in some cases, be more

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like the academic sector) and non-governmental organizations. The government sector also operates very much like the corporate sector. Some corporate sector organizations, such as the BBC, might in fact be publicly funded. The key is that their central mission is an activity other than information collection and dissemination. Corporate information services naturally reflect their parent organizations and are therefore various and heterodox. Yet across all organizations, they face a similar challenge: how does an information service prove its worth when the main function of its organization is not officially information provision or learning? As their work, however valued, will always be an adjunct for the business, rather than a profit centre, the role of the information professional in such a context is particularly interesting. This is not to say that businesses do not recognize the importance of information to what they do: financial information, and information about competitors, customers, their own staff and technology are essential tools in the running of a business, but a company does not always expect to obtain it from a dedicated information service. In a world where information is abundantly available to end-users, information professionals today must ask themselves what value their special skills add to their organization. There are many topics of importance to the workplace librarian, and this book aims to articulate many of them. Each chapter is written by a practitioner with significant experience of the area, and offers analysis and practical advice. It would be impossible to cover every issue of concern to the corporate information professional, because of their enormous variety. However, having studied recent conference programmes and online discussion forums, and consulted her own network, the author has aimed to provide background on some of the main subjects being discussed in the sector. The second part of this chapter provides an overview on themes that recur across the different chapters of the book. The first part seeks to give context to today’s corporate information world by providing a short history.

The history of special libraries

There have been specialized collections of books and other materials for as long as there have been libraries. Collections of legal materials in particular have existed in private hands for centuries and were undoubtedly consulted by professionals other than their owners. In the 18th and 19th centuries, a

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number of professions (legal, financial, clerical, and so on) kept systematic collections of information to support their work, but the identification of the special librarian as a professional role did not develop until the start of the 20th century (Christianson, 1976). Similarly, the first practising law libraries were developed in the early 1900s but were managed by legal professionals themselves until the middle of the 20th century (Panella, 1991, 2). But the end of the 19th century marked a new awareness of the professional role of the librarian. John Cotton Dana’s pioneer special librarians were not the first to found an association to focus on their needs: they had been preceded by medical librarians in 1891 and law librarians in 1907. In the UK, Brophy (2000) sees the founding of the Association of Specialist Libraries and Information Bureaux (Aslib) in 1922 as key in the formation of the identity of the special library as a sector. Whereas public, academic and national libraries had a joint identity and engaged in cooperative works, special libraries were scattered around different organizations. Aslib was partly founded to survey the resources available in such organizations. Before the advent of the computer, the special library was largely identified as a collection, rather than a hub of professional activity, and included those of learned societies, museums and other institutions that we would probably consider to be closer to the academic sector today. However, as early as 1919, one business librarian described the aim of his establishment as ‘the provision of any and every kind of commercial information which may be obtained from printed matter . . . [collected, arranged and catalogued] so as to render it quickly and conveniently available for enquirers and readers’ (quoted in Smyth, 1985). Where a university might (at this time) collect materials to boost its institutional treasures, special libraries were collections gathered to support the main activity of their parent organization. Often these were one-person operations, offering press cuttings, book purchasing and loan and research using their own collections and a variety of printed bibliographies and indexes. Subject specialist collections often contained unique material, and librarians developed innovative means of cataloguing and indexing it where large general schemes were inadequate. The corporate and subject knowledge offered by such institutions were de facto sources of professional expertise, even if they were seen more as collections of materials than of experts. Technological developments in the 1960s and 1970s helped to highlight the role of the corporate information specialist as opposed to the collection

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gatekeeper (Lester, 1985). When the first online products arrived, allowing interrogation of huge databases of bibliographic material, abstracts and patent indexes, among others, the online information specialist role emerged. Such databases offered pay-as-you-go access and required subtle understanding of command language, so the work was entrusted only to those who understood their intricacies. In some workplaces this work developed separately from the library, and searches were undertaken by subject specialists rather than librarians, particularly if highly scientific or technical vocabulary was required. Some organizations even outsourced their search requirements to computer centres or information bureaux that were being set up for this purpose. But by the 1970s, it was the norm for online systems to be searched by librarians and information officers. This skilled community of practice gathered at events such as the International Online Information Meeting,1 joined groups such as Aslib, the Institute of Information Scientists and the American Society for Information Science,2 and read the journals Online and Database. Sometimes the first computers in an organization were held in the library alongside their collections of press cuttings, books and journals. Although online databases were still under the control of librarians and information specialists, there were already concerns within the profession that technology could make information available directly to the end-user. Allott (1985) noted that librarians worried that their roles as the selectors and organizers of information was threatened by providers selling databases directly to the organization without their input. Service providers were also aware that the speed and power of some databases raised expectations among users for more and more immediate information. Yet in the 1980s, most offices kept searching in the hands of a few specialists (Lester, 1985). Before the arrival of the web, the library or information office remained the main place where information could be obtained within an organization, unless it was sourced from an external bureau. And, in a prescient remark, Lester observed that if the situation were to change, there would be a continuing role for librarians as facilitators, trainers and administrators. The 1980s were however a time of upheaval and discussion about the role of libraries in the corporate sector, particularly in the light of management theories now commonly being applied to the workplace. Some observed that too few libraries were truly aligned with the strategic aims of their organization and were complacently failing to prove their value (Picken, 1985;

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Wood, 1988, 1). Many organizations underwent mergers or restructures during this time, or were privatized or deregulated. Library budgets and practices came under more scrutiny than ever before and were seen as easy targets for cuts, as their value was not always recognized as central to the work of the organization (Cropley, 1988; Gomersall, 1988). Some were incorporated into other departments, often in the hope of creating synergies and saving money. Griffiths (2007) remembers government librarians joining colleagues in IT, records management or the press office, and for the first time being forced to agree service level agreements already common in IT departments. As smaller, leaner organizations became the fashion, some outsourced a number of information functions to information bureaux, brokers or press cuttings agencies (Picken, 1985). Yet many remained unreactive. Gomersall (1988) noted a trend towards perfectionism in library practice, resulting in materials failing to be indexed or catalogued in time to meet corporate needs. The failure of some services to adapt to the new corporate climate was summed up by one despairing writer: ‘We suffer from limited horizons and are obsessed with obsolete practices and standards of perfection that are no longer appropriate or necessary’ (Wood, 1988, 1). Yet this was also a time of opportunity for libraries. The transfer of some roles to new departments enhanced librarians’ skill-sets and gave them experience of areas such as corporate communications, which brought them more recognition from senior management. Some saw libraries as key in providing better information in countries (such as the USA) that were moving from a manufacturing base to what we would now call a knowledge economy. There was a call for better organization and more joining up among business librarians to meet this need (Allott, 1985). In his introduction to one library group’s sector guide, corporate executive Michael Aldrich was still able to say, in 1986, ‘The Library is a commonplace in large commercial and industrial organizations’ and recognized the increasing importance of information in business success (LAIG, 1986, iv). This particular far-seeing executive already realized that ‘The Library is not a place. It is an activity that organizes, catalogues and makes knowledge and information readily available for the organization and provides a service of current, accurate and relevant information to its users.’ He also noted the financial advantages of employing specially qualified staff to carry out these tasks, leaving skilled practitioners to do what they excel at. Many organizations recognized the value of a coherent information service with a structured approach to managing and

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updating information resources, expertise in finding materials, subject specialist knowledge and the provision of a corporate memory. But this alone was not enough to save them if they could not otherwise prove their value to their parent organization. The next big workplace change was the arrival of the world wide web, which over the course of the late 1990s and early 2000s gave end-users access to information. Direct access to information called into question the role of the library or information centre, which in many cases was identified as a repository for hard-copy materials, regardless of the talented online researchers who worked there. Where end-user access was coupled with organizational scrutiny or restructure caused by economic problems (such as those resulting from the tech crash of 1998) or political initiatives, the corporate library had to fight for survival. The modern corporate information service is effectively a child of this era. The services that have survived have reshaped themselves to meet a world where they are not the intermediaries between staff and information. They operate in an environment where the corporate landscape is changeable, where user expectations are high and where their role is to facilitate staff access to a rich but bewilderingly large trove of information.

The corporate information professional now

Modern corporate information services have the same essential purpose as their predecessors: to use the skills of qualified professionals to find and organize information to enable staff to do their jobs. However, some aspects of the way they offer those services reflect the profound changes the profession and, indeed, the workplace have experienced in the past 15 years. A number of themes recur in the chapters of this book that indicate trends in the modern workplace and how the corporate information professional is best placed to manage them. This section outlines some of these trends.

Disintermediation

For licensing or copyright reasons, there are still services that staff might need to visit an information centre to use, but the vast majority of modern library resources are accessed by end-users at their own desktop or, increasingly, on mobile devices. The advantages for the user are obvious: instant access to high

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quality information at any time of day or night, in any time zone and potentially from any location. For the information service, managing its subscriptions, licensing, technological roll out and end-user awareness and training can be challenging and underappreciated. Users are rarely aware of the costs and complexities of supplying e-resources and are likely to say ‘I don’t use the library’, even if they access their services online. Although they would like online services to be tailored to their needs, they are reluctant to give up time to test, feed back or even be trained on them. Moreover, disintermediation distances the information service from its key users, and means they have no control over how, or whether, an expensive and valuable source is used. But with some exceptions, this is how most users are accustomed to accessing information. Providing a barrier to direct access is unlikely to bring people back inside the walls of the library, if indeed such a thing as a physical library still exists in their workplace. Chapters 9 and 10 outline the challenges available to those managing subscriptions and training staff in their use. Disintermediation in the corporate workplace also applies to internal or corporate information, and adoption of web technologies has offered new opportunities for information professionals to use their organizational skills on intranets, extranets and websites. Here, the challenge is to provide a relevant and well organized information source that leads staff across the business to the information they are seeking, even while few staff have the time or interest to contribute to the process. Chapter 2 outlines some of the strategies the intranet or web manager might take to ensure that the job is done well. The role of technology is another critical element of the modern workplace. Where it was once the sole province of the IT department, now everyone uses it. Technology is the platform on which information services are delivered, and when it fails, the information service is blamed. Thus, a key part of the modern information professional’s skill-set is the ability to communicate with technical experts. Although the technology itself is invisible to end-users, the information professional is well placed to provide a bridge between their needs and the IT department, which in many cases is measured on jobs completed, rather than services delivered. Chapter 4 examines an emerging trend in this role, the librarian who is as comfortable under the bonnet as they are discerning staff needs.

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Corporate alignment and marketing

The increasing scrutiny given to the workings of organizations since the 1980s means that information services cannot afford to be complacent. Unless their activities match the priorities of the organization, it is likely that they will be closed or restructured. This can be frustrating where organizations are subject to temporary trends or ephemeral fashions that might, for example, lead them to stop a particular indexing service, or dispose of some of the collection, only to find it is still needed when priorities change. However, it is essential for an information service to demonstrate how it adds value to its organization. A busy service might not necessarily be spared closure or restructure if its chief users are not a key part of the organizational strategy or, as happens frequently, they are using the service despite corporate policy to the contrary. Chapter 7 shares stories from four senior managers who have seen information services through change and closure, and offers advice on how to spot likely changes and ensure the service continues. Chapter 3 looks at how to market information services and make sure that people who need to use them know what they offer and why they are useful.

Information overload

The special role of the information service in today’s workplace is not to search for rare or scarce information, but rather to bring out what is useful for colleagues who often feel overloaded by what is available. The growth in the amount of available information, while centuries-old as a concern, is made particularly visible to today’s modern worker through e-mail and websites, and can feel overwhelming. This theme appears in most of the chapters in this book as it is the key to how an information service proves its value: finding and surfacing high quality, relevant information where the user can access it and at the time that they need it. Among the aspects of information overload covered in this book are the roles taken by the taxonomist in ensuring that information is arranged and described in a logical way that users understand (Chapter 5), how to ensure that accurate and timely information is delivered in a global, competitive context (Chapter 8), and how information managers can help users find what is useful from the mass of internally generated and anarchically stored internal documents held in most organizations (Chapter 6).

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THE HISTORY AND PROFILE OF THE CORPORATE INFORMATION SERVICE 9

Embedded working

Since the early 2000s it has become increasingly common for information professionals to work upstream, embedded in practice departments rather than based physically in a centralized information service. The userdepartment benefits in a number of ways: in particular, they are working with someone directly attuned to their needs and on the spot when they need information. Embedding also benefits information professionals, who can demonstrate the value of what they do and provide awareness of resources and simple training at the moment their users need it most. Griffiths (2007) noted the positive effect on a library’s standing when staff were seconded to research roles within government-practice departments. Rutherford (2002) recorded a similar effect in the broadcasting industry, although the embedded librarian in question also spoke of the disadvantages of being separated from colleagues and physical materials. She further noted that her role became absorbed into the daily work of the unit, without recognition of the special nature of information skills. Under these circumstances, earning a far lower salary for similar work felt unfair. There is also the possibility that a successful embedded person will become so acculturated to the user-department that they lose their identity and start to prioritize departmental information needs over those of the organization as a whole. Moreover, if the user-department is funding the embedded role, it will be the first to go when funding is threatened. However, the advantages to the organization of having an information service informed by concerns at the heart of the business far outweigh the negative aspects. A number of the chapters touch on this theme, including Chapter 8 and Chapter 10.

Knowledge management

The practice known as knowledge management concentrates on surfacing and reusing the corporate knowledge that exists within an organization, whether or not it has been articulated in a written document. The concept emerged in the business world in the 1980s, in particular in consultancies, where it was recognized that knowledge and experience acquired during largely project-based work was being lost as consultants moved on to new projects. Formal reports and statistics, and less formal activities such as diaries, first-person narratives and face-to-face events, were used as means of recording experience and providing a way to learn from it. In the early

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years, software was often seen as the solution to the knowledge problem, and organizations spent money on ‘expert systems’ software in an attempt to automatically retrieve the distilled expertise and experience of their staff. Over time, knowledge management has become seen more as a ‘socially located’ activity ‘engineering the conditions under which knowledge transfer and utilization happen’ (Brophy, 2000, 51). As the opportunities for mediated research roles began to decline, information professionals increasingly repositioned themselves as facilitators within the ‘knowledge environment’, taking on tasks such as organizing resources, offering learning opportunities, providing guidance and being the discoverers and evangelists for new tools. A much misunderstood area of work, knowledge management is an excellent use of the information professional’s ability to organize information, apply governance, think corporately and understand the needs of the users. The increasing merging of libraries and knowledge departments also helps to ensure that information needs match those provided within the library: A positive loop of feedback from knowledge managers working directly with those in the business informs library policy. Chapter 6 uses the experiences of a veteran knowledge and information manager to show how well knowledge management can work.

Evidence-based practice and data management

An emerging role for information professionals (particularly, but not exclusively, in the health sector) is to ensure that corporate or practitioner decisions are made on the basis of sound evidence (Brophy, 2000, 50). They do this through providing better or more reliable search tools, expert evaluation of relevant literature, additional information on sources provided and background information such as statistics. Increasingly, information professionals are working with data scientists and statisticians to find and verify data for use in the complex analytical activities that make up key information sources in the modern workplace. This work calls on traditional library skills of research and evaluation, and in a world where librarians are no longer the gatekeepers to information it is logical that they can become the interpreters and organizers, and a form of quality control. Outside the health sector, this type of work is fairly new in the corporate sector, but understanding data is likely to become an increasing requirement for many information professionals. This trend is mentioned only in Chapter 8 by the

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contributors to this book, but as ‘big data’ has become a buzz phrase in the mainstream media, its application in the workplace is something the corporate information professional cannot afford to ignore. This book demonstrates that the corporate information world is thriving. In many ways, organizations have a better understanding now of the importance of authoritative, timely and accurate information than when enquiries were relayed to libraries or information centres. Naturally there are challenges, and no corporate information service, from a lone worker in a small organization to a multi-site global operation, can afford to be complacent. But as a profession, we benefit from sharing our experiences and learning from each other. It is to be hoped that the collective experience offered in the following chapters will help readers carry out their day-to-day work, and ensure healthy information provision in the future.

References

Allott, A. (1985) Information for Business: the pattern of business information provision in the late twentieth century. In Campbell, M. J. (ed.), Manual of

Business Library Practice, 2nd edn, Clive Bingley, 1–22.

Brophy, P. (2000) The Library in the Twenty-First Century, Library Association Publishing.

Christianson, E. B. (1976) Special Libraries: putting knowledge to work, Library Trends, 25 (1), 399–416.

Cropley, J. (1988) Budgeting. In Wood, L. (ed.), Resource Allocation in Industrial and Commercial Libraries, Taylor Graham, 53–9.

Gomersall, A. (1988) Librarianship as it is Practised: are we failing ourselves and our users? In Wood, L. (ed.), Resource Allocation in Industrial and Commercial Libraries,

Taylor Graham, 3–13.

Griffiths, P. (2007) Government Libraries. In Bowman, J. (ed.), British Librarianship and Information Work 2001–2005, Ashgate, 110–20.

Lester, R. (1985) The Impact of Information Technology. In Campbell, M. J. (ed.), Manual of Business Library Practice, 2nd edn, Clive Bingley, 164–200.

Library Association Industrial Group (1986) Industrial and Commercial Libraries: an introductory guide, Library Association Publishing.

Panella, D. S. (1991) The Basics of Law Librarianship, Haworth Press.

Picken, D. (1985) Special Considerations of Company Libraries. In Campbell, M. J. (ed.), Manual of Business Library Practice, 2nd edn, Clive Bingley, 51–6.

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12 SCHOPFLIN Rutherford, K. (2002) Meeting Review: AUKML (Association of UK Media Librarians) meeting in Glasgow, Deadline, December.

Smyth, A. L. (1985) Organization and Administration: objectives, planning and

staffing. In Campbell, M. J. (ed.), Manual of Business Library Practice, 2nd edn, Clive Bingley, 23–39.

Wood, L. (1988) Resource Allocation in Industrial and Commercial Libraries, Taylor Graham.

Notes

1 www.infotoday.eu/Articles/Editorial/Featured-Articles/Back-to-the-future—Online-Information-and-Internet-Librarian-International-98013.aspx.

2 http://faculty.libsci.sc.edu/bob/istchron/ISCNET/ISC1930.HTM.

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CHAPTER 2

Managing the corporate intranet

James Mullan

Introduction A good corporate intranet should operate as an organization’s invisible underpinning, providing the information which enables staff to carry out their daily work without having to think about it. At its best, it is an online world replacing the staff handbook, noticeboard, coffee machine conversation, induction pack and hundreds of individual transactions which once used to take place face to face. However, as organizations are imperfect, so often are their intranets. Too frequently organizations leave their intranet management to individuals or teams in IT, human resources (HR) or the press office, who have other priorities; or add its management to the work of those running the website, to which it always takes second place. The result is out-of-date pages which staff rarely consult, an abundance of copies of corporate policies stored locally, and a daily e-mail correspondence between staff looking for information and provider departments, if indeed, the employee is lucky enough to know whom to consult. Information professionals, skilled as they are in organizing information, and accustomed to providing the link between the work of the organization and the knowledge it needs, often make good intranet managers. In many cases, they are the only people with a ‘helicopter’ view of their entire organization and able to see informational needs beyond immediate business priorities. However, the intranet manager faces numerous challenges, ranging from inadequate technology to corporate politics, from a legacy of poor content to staff timidity or apathy. They have to balance the needs of different departments with different agendas and levels of

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influence within the business at the same time as obeying Ranganathan’s fundamental law to ‘save the time of the reader’. This chapter’s author has years of experience tackling such issues for a large law firm. However, his advice should be relevant to information professionals taking on the management of intranets of all sizes, in organizations of all types.

The corporate intranet

Many corporate information professionals are involved with the management and development of their organization’s intranet. Far from being an easy undertaking, it is one of the most challenging roles within an organization. This is because intranets are used across organizations by individuals with different roles, different requirements and potentially different ways of accessing content and tools. Intranet managers therefore need to have a good understanding of how the organization works. They need to create a valuable and effective business tool for the organization and a strategic asset supporting key business processes, improvements in efficiency as well as greater staff and customer satisfaction. But in order to achieve this the intranet needs to be well designed and managed, so that it can support the activities undertaken by the organization and enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of these activities. The intranet should also reflect the brand, culture, structure, processes, staff and resources of the organization that it serves. This is why the intranet manager role is so important and also challenging. In this chapter I will look at some of the key challenges for intranet managers, including content management, governance, effective navigation, searching and the idea of social intranets and how effective they can be in encouraging better collaboration and communication within organizations.

The purpose of the intranet

If you have just joined an organization and have been tasked with looking after an intranet then it is worth thinking about the purpose it serves within your organization. This is especially important if you are new to managing intranets. Understanding an intranet’s purpose can help you understand why individuals use it. An intranet serves four very specific purposes. The first is to be a place

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where content is created and managed. Most corporate intranets fulfil this purpose. Time and resources have been spent ensuring that key resources and information are available. Intranet managers often spend a considerable amount of time maintaining the content on their intranet. Although many people think this only includes creating and editing content, in reality content management incorporates many other tasks. These include choosing and implementing content management systems, ensuring adequate governance is in place, and establishing content author policies and guidelines. This is a significant area of work and we will cover some aspects of it later in this chapter. Another purpose of the corporate intranet should be to act as a communication channel. Most intranets include some sort of news section on the home page, communicating items of interest to staff, such as: • • • •

messages from the CEO or a senior member of staff reports of the company’s activities updates that are important to staff information on policies that have been updated (for example, a new dress code policy) • changes to intranet pages. Although it is important for this information to be on the intranet, reading a piece of news is unlikely to be the primary reason why someone visits it, so it is crucial to address the following questions when displaying pieces of news content: • Can users easily distinguish between the different news stories? • Does each news item have a date? • Do you need to categorize news content (organizational news, local news, social news and so on)? If you take all these concerns into account users will find accessing and disseminating news much easier. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, you should ensure that the news you publish to your intranet does not dominate the entire intranet homepage, because individuals only read the news that interests them and are likely to ignore everything else. The third purpose of an intranet, which many would argue is a more

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important purpose than content and communication, is to be a place where users carry out tasks. These could be anything from searching for content and people to completing forms. We will look at content and people searching in more detail later in this chapter. While forms are perhaps not the most exciting content an intranet manager can publish, they are a great way to drive users to intranet pages and content. A corporate intranet should also incorporate links to other applications and tools, so for example if someone needs to use corporate systems, for example to book a holiday or process an invoice, they should do it via the intranet. The intranet can act like a layer of glue holding together all the resources and applications that are available within an organization. Any internet-related activities which are essential for intranet users in their daily lives should be provided on the intranet to ensure users use it above and beyond reading news stories. The fourth and final purpose of an intranet is for collaboration. Traditionally intranets have focused on content and communication but in recent years there has been a shift towards intranets providing more activities (getting things done) and collaboration. You might think collaboration means being social, and it does to some extent, in the sense of allowing users to interact with, rather than just consume, content, but collaboration means more than this. For an intranet to be collaborative, at the bare minimum it needs to enable its content to be enriched collaboratively by users. Collaboration on intranets is a growing area, which we will look at in more detail later on in this chapter. Having covered the four main purposes of corporate intranets, it is now time for us to look at what the specific goals of your intranet might be.

Intranet goals

If you are wondering if there is a difference between an intranet’s purpose and its goals then the answer is a resounding ‘yes’. Goals are specific to your organization, although they may be similar to others’, while the purpose of its intranet (content, communication, tasks, collaboration) are generic to most organizations. To ensure organizational goals and the function of the intranet match, setting goals or business objectives is often the first step you will take when planning a new intranet. Effective intranet goals should be focused on an organization’s objectives

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and, where possible, be tied to its strategy. For example, if your organization’s strategy is to improve collaboration between staff then the intranet should support this effort. Having business-focused goals will help ensure that the intranet is valuable to the organization. There are several ways that you can identify what the goals of your intranet should be. The easiest is to look at the strategy documentation produced by your organization to see which goals could be achieved with help from the intranet. Useful places to look are: • • • •

mission statements, vision statements, values statements long-term strategic plans annual business plans departmental business plans.

Although these documents will provide a good overview of your organization’s objectives and strategy, they may not entirely reflect what individuals want to achieve when using the intranet. So a more effective way to identify goals is to speak to users directly. Doing this will ensure your intranet goals reflect the needs of your users as well as those of the organization. Your goals should underpin the design and development of your intranet and will form the basis for the internal marketing and communications activities as well as outline the strategic direction for the intranet into the future. These are some examples of goals: • • • • • • • • • •

All employees receive important company communications. Staff can find information and documents needed to do daily tasks. Staff are engaged with the activities of the organization. Employees are able to access information and documents from home and mobile. Dispersed teams collaborate on projects or documents. New staff find it easy to learn company procedures. Staff spend less time reading and answering e-mail. Intranet technical issues like slow speed and broken search are easy to fix. Staff have improved efficiency, productivity and satisfaction. Organizational decision-making is made easier.

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• Staff know where to find accurate and consistent advice in dealing with external users and customers. • Internal communications and collaboration are facilitated. • Costs and duplication of effort is reduced. • Corporate identity is established and shared. • Staff have a good understanding of their role in corporate governance. If you have successfully identified the purpose and goals of your intranet the next step should be to think about how you are going to manage the content that is being published to your intranet: content management.

Content management – deciding on the best approach

Content management is essentially the means by which content is created, accessed, stored and reused. One of the primary purposes of any intranet is to deliver accurate information to staff. This goes beyond delivering news stories and corporate policies and procedures to helping departments deliver key information to the rest of the organization. Managing this content is not easy, especially with the advent of social intranets where individual users have the ability to create their own content. Intranet managers need to carefully consider their content management procedures, policies and guidance. While content management consists of several different elements, one of the first things you need to think about as an intranet manager is the authoring model you are going to choose. This depends very much on cultural and technological factors, as well as the size and sector of your organization. There are four main models to choose from, as illustrated in Table 2.1. Each of the models has strengths and weaknesses, and it is acceptable to mix and match the models you use within your organization until you find the one that works best for you. In any content model: • there should be an owner for all content on the intranet • content owners should be engaged, and understand their responsibilities • content should be well written

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Table 2.1 Models of intranet content authorship Model

Strengths

Weaknesses

Centralized content creation • Pages are of a consistent • and management; the quality • intranet team is responsible • Publishing process is for all content published to simple the intranet • There is a consistent resource available for • updates •

Can create bottlenecks Little engagement with the organization as content is just forwarded to the team Can result in large amounts of content Heavy workload for intranet team

Decentralized content creation; authors dispersed across the organization are responsible for publishing and managing content to specific sections of the intranet

•

Pages are not of a consistent quality Content can become chaotic unless managed carefully Needs good technology to support the efforts of multiple authors

Moderated content publishing and management; individuals can create content but it is reviewed by the intranet team before being published

•

End-user contributions and publishing; users across the organization publish content directly to the intranet – ‘user-generated content’

•

Can mean more up-to• date content is published • Puts the onus on the • business as whole not just a single team • Scales better for larger • organizations

Improves consistency and • Can create bottlenecks quality • The publishing process is • Content is doubleslower checked before it is • Requires the published involvement of two • The intranet team has an teams in the publishing overview of what process content is being created

Information is published instantly • Many more users across the organization are involved • Simple publishing process

•

Content can become out of control very quickly • Quality may be poor • May expose the business to risks, dependent on what type of content is being published

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• content management procedures should be effective and sustainable • content authors and owners should be comfortable using publishing tools • information should be kept up to date • information should be deleted or archived when no longer needed. Once you have your content publishing model in place you can then begin to think about the guidelines and policies you need to put into place to support it. Such documents help support the publishing model by outlining roles, responsibilities, organizational processes and rules that intranet editors need to follow. An example document might be called ‘Best practice when creating intranet content’. This would outline best practice when creating content and in particular the use of headings, metadata, images, hyperlinks and so on, as well as telling contributors where in your structure they should add their content. Having an effective content management plan in place will help support strong information architecture and ensure that effective, timely and relevant content is available for employees. It also ensures that content can be easily found by users, which is especially important within larger organizations. Content on intranets, as with websites, can quickly become ‘stale’ so processes to review all intranet content regularly are necessary to ensure that it is still up to date and accurate. Some content may require more frequent review than other content. Review processes should be automated where possible, something provided through alerts in some content management systems.

Content management – keeping authors engaged

You might think that most of the work intranet managers do is technical, but in reality their focus is working with individuals and departments to ensure their content is up to date and relevant, and building trust with these individuals and departments. There are usually two different types of groups you are likely to work with: intranet content owners and communication champions. Intranet content owners are individuals who are explicitly responsible for publishing and managing content within a particular part of the intranet, for

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example related to HR (for employee information), finance (for information about pay and expenses) or marketing (for use of branding or advice on dealing with external enquiries). These individuals are your key contact for that section of the intranet. However, updating the intranet may just be something they have been asked to do when they have some spare time and it is rarely likely to be in their priority list. As a result intranet managers need to engage continually with departmental representatives to ensure they continue to contribute content. In some organizations, such departments may resent your intrusion and fear a loss of power when information is delivered directly to the end-user via the intranet. In any case, it is important to remember their busy times (for example, year end for finance departments, organizational restructures for HR departments) and fit your requests around them. Communication champions are individuals who have been given responsibility for feeding content about their department or team to ensure it is reported on the intranet. These individuals do not add content to the intranet, but are important as they can be used to generate content and consider ideas about intranet developments or changes. Users on the ground may be glad to have the opportunity to have their voice heard and communicate with the organization as a whole. If you are building a new intranet you will need to engage both of these groups early in the process, among other stakeholders. Make sure you invite them to or involve them in activities such as: • • • • • •

requirements workshops vendor reviews and software demos homepage design reviews card-sorting exercises training pilots.

Actively engaging with these two groups early in an intranet project will be beneficial because your new intranet needs to reflect their requirements and engaging with them early may encourage them to publish more content. Once your intranet is in place, it may be more difficult to keep these users engaged as some of their initial enthusiasm may have worn off. The key here is to establish regular recurring meetings. Once a month should be often

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enough to ensure people feel that you are continuing to engage with them and that their opinions and ideas about the intranet are being taken on board. This does not mean that you cannot or will not be speaking to individuals outside your regular meetings, even if this is just a quick call to ensure they are happy with the intranet, or to answer any question they may have. This is a good way to build up a strong network of intranet contributors who will remain engaged and continue to add content regularly. Finally, you should create a space somewhere on your intranet where intranet editors can share ideas, learn useful tips and connect with each other. This will enable you to promote some of the features of your intranet and allow these individuals to feel they have a voice. With all the effort required around intranet content management and technical infrastructure, it can be easy to forget about the people who are actually publishing content to the intranet. Remember that the intranet is for people and by people. Establishing and maintaining relationships with these two key groups will ensure your intranet content is regularly updated and content owners are engaged.

Navigation and intranet design

I hope that having read the preceding sections, you will see how important it is to understand your intranet’s purpose and goals. Although intranet navigation may seem fundamental, it will be far easier to formulate once you have these in place and are talking to your intranet editors regularly. Naturally there are several schools of thought when it comes to how content on your intranet should be navigated. Let us start with the most important page on your intranet, the homepage. Traditional intranet homepages consist of three columns, of which the central column is usually used to publish organizational news stories, the right-hand column usually contains links to other resources, and the left-hand column contains navigation options. Additionally, there is often a global navigation bar across the top of the page, possibly including a people or content search. While there is nothing wrong with this sort of layout on an intranet homepage, most of the content is unlikely to be used by most staff so it is important to take a user-centred approach, focusing on usability, making the design as intuitive as possible and involving stakeholders (including users) throughout the design process. By engaging your users and content owners

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with the techniques and challenges in creating a good design you also help them respect the task and more actively support your efforts. Historically many intranets were structured to replicate the structure of the organization. Each department, business unit and group had its own section on the intranet and team members were responsible for publishing content. Although this type of structure has proved popular, it can make it difficult for staff to find the information they need, as it requires a good understanding of the structure of the organization and departmental responsibilities. Users should not have to know which business unit, function or team owns the information they need. Another problem is that when an organization restructures, the intranet must be restructured accordingly. Organizing an intranet to mimic an organization’s structure also invites unhelpful discussions about the hierarchy of departments and teams. Your navigation should not be dictated by the needs of those who can shout the loudest. A better way to structure your intranet is according to task and subjects. If someone wants to make an overtime claim, it may require the involvement of several different areas of the business, such as finance and HR. A structure based around tasks makes the intranet navigation applicable to everyone and can be extended as the organization grows and more tasks need to be added. Another way to organize intranets is around subjects. For example a subject like training could include everything a user need to knows about the training they have undertaken, what training is available to them and any mandatory training they need to undertake. A useful subject page might be one containing information for new staff, who might need employment information from HR, finance, payroll, IT and marketing, without having the knowledge of who is responsible for what. A trend that has been widely used by many organizations in the last ten years has been the use of the ‘My’ prefix, for example ‘My HR’ or ‘My Benefits’. Personally I don’t think the term ‘My’ is particularly useful as it would seem to indicate that whatever lies behind the link is 100% specifically meant for the user. This is not the case for most intranets and in fact ‘My’ links usually lead to generic HR information. However, there are cases where it can be used, for example ‘My Activity Stream’ or ‘My Tasks’ where an intranet offers personalization options to the user. Designing a good information architecture is hard. With a huge volume of content, and widely varying staff needs, it can often feel that you are not making any progress towards a site structure that keeps everyone happy. But

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ultimately an intranet’s usefulness is determined by its users, which is why a user-centred design is the best approach. There may well be corporate requirements to satisfy, but you need to base the navigation around the questions that users ask of the intranet every day.

Intranet governance

Intranet governance is the background information which helps you and your contributors make decisions about what is and is not appropriate in the course of writing and editing content. Preparing a governance framework can be challenging if you have never undertaken this before and if you do not receive further guidance from your organization. Essentially, intranet governance is about having a framework in place that enables effective decision-making and planning processes. It also provides support for the intranet team and helps with the smooth running of the intranet. While there is no one-size-fits-all approach to governance, it tends to cover a suite of documents ranging from high level policies to practical guides for daily use. Some options are included in Table 2.2. Needs vary. Other documents that you may wish to include may cover Table 2.2 Typical intranet governance documents Item

Reason it needs to be included

Intranet strategy document – a one-page document which explains what the intranet aims to achieve

The intranet strategy will demonstrate to management that there is a plan in relation to the intranet and that it is aligned with the organization’s overall strategy

Ownership document – a list of owners of intranet sections

An ownership document ensures that if any issues with an intranet page arise, they can be escalated to the right individual

Roles and responsibilities – a list of individuals who manage the intranet or have some responsibility for it

This document ensures that everyone in the organization knows who is responsible for what

Policies and guidelines

Documents providing policies on acceptable use of the intranet and guidelines on creating and publishing content

Support

Details of how the intranet is supported internally and externally if appropriate

Training

Training materials for users and content editors

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guidelines on writing, house styles and branding, checklists for accessibility and in-depth training for systems administrators or aimed at specific groups, such as new users. Developing a clear set of policies and guidelines for the intranet will support good practice, avoid confusion and ensure consistency of approach when publishing content. You need to bear in mind your organizational culture and how much control is required. For example if you work in a government department, governance issues may be taken more seriously than in some private sector organizations. Some parts of your intranet may need tighter control than others, for example where you are publishing confidential material, or content that only selected individuals are supposed to see and other parts need less. Your intranet home page definitely needs to be tightly controlled with a detailed policy outlining who can and cannot publish content to it and who makes decisions around what links and other resources are published to it. In my mind the best way to start writing governance documents is to break the governance framework down into topic areas aimed at particular user groups, for example, content (issues around homepage and publishing policies and content-writing guidelines) or training (again broken down by different groups, such as systems administrators, content editors, end-users and so on). Breaking governance down into topics like this will make it easy to write and also easy for the person reading the document to digest. You could potentially produce huge numbers of governance documents and it can be tempting to make them overly complicated, to cover every possible eventuality. Try and be practical and not spend too much time writing documents nobody will read; remember your audience and avoid the use of jargon and abbreviations. Writing governance documents might seem like an arduous task, but once written they will help build on the work you have done developing the intranet and help to settle issues arising in content production and management.

People and content searching

One of the most important tasks of an intranet is to enable users to find people and content. Personally I consider a staff directory to be a ‘killer application’ in that it is something all staff need at some time or another and so it makes

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the intranet a place to go to. As a result it is worth spending some time thinking about how you are going to make your people search as useful as possible. In my experience the most useful tools combine an open search field, which offers suggestions as the user types, with a fast response when a user types in a search term. Once a search has been undertaken, the following minimum information should be displayed about people: • • • • •

full name photo job title e-mail address, as a hyperlink link telephone number, potentially integrated with online telecommunications systems such as Lync • department or team information • a biography of some description.

In addition, the following are great to have: • • • •

links to social media accounts information about line managers and reportees names of the person’s secretaries or assistants information unrelated to the job, for example, if the person is a first aider or fire marshal • a list of the content the person has created or edited on the intranet (aka an activity stream). This provides the user searching the people directory with the information that they are looking for so they do not have to search the intranet further. In addition to enabling basic searches for people’s names, intranets in large organizations should allow searchers to sort the results. So you might want to think about providing an option to sort results by job title or department. Ultimately you need to speak to your users to determine what options are going to be most useful for them. A frequent request by organizations of their intranet manager is to make searching ‘more like Google’. On the face of it, it is an interesting idea and one that has probably gained traction in a number of organizations. After all,

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if it works for Google, why would it not work inside an organization? The problem is twofold. First, Google spends huge amounts of money and hours of developer time on making its search as good as it can possibly be. The same resource simply is not available within organizations. Second, searching is only one way to find information. While many users know exactly what they are looking for others need a context to find what they need. The search option only provides users with a blank field, it does not give them any clues about what to type into it. This is why you need to provide users with different options for finding content. In this situation a user needs to be able to navigate to the content they are interested in. Navigation is always useful, but it is especially useful when users are looking for new information. It also surfaces content, providing users with a clear indication of where it can be found. Good intranets should therefore offer navigation options alongside search and intranet managers should work on both, recognizing that it is not possible to deliver a great search without having a well structured intranet behind it.

The lure of social intranets

Something I am often asked is ‘What’s the difference between a “traditional intranet” and a “social intranet”?’ While this might seem like a straightforward question, the rapid evolution of social software and social intranets means that it can be hard to answer. Enterprise social and collaboration tools are sweeping through organizations often under the hood of a ‘social intranet’. Some organizations are seeking out new tools and capabilities, while others find themselves in possession of new functionality as a by-product of moving to a new intranet technology platform. Regardless of where your organization is on the social intranet route, a social intranet is a place for: • • • •

social networking collaboration document collaboration ideation creation.

Your current intranet might support one or more of these capabilities as part

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of your existing content management system or where you have experimented with a free-to-use social networking or collaboration tool. Put together within the context of a (social) intranet these tools can provide a mix of very valuable functionality, and we will look at these separate elements now. At its most basic level, social networking is about interacting with other users on your intranet through the use of status updates, comments, likes and follows. These are the essence of social intranets. The benefit of having social networking features available on an intranet is that individuals can uncover opportunities for collaborating and sharing content or knowledge with colleagues they were not previously aware of. Social intranets have collaboration spaces. These are online spaces which help staff work together, whether as part of a project team or within a department. They are often used to publish and share documents, calendars, task lists, galleries, forums and all sorts of other content, which make them much more appealing than a static page on another application. Collaboration spaces can also be used for more light-hearted topics like managing the organization’s sports teams or social groups. An interesting aspect of social intranets is where they can be used to facilitate document collaboration. This can be particularly useful as a means of avoiding sending documents as attachments to e-mails, engendering multiple copies of documents in different versions and filling up users’ inboxes. Document collaboration enables users to make multiple changes to a document in a single location. It also provides access to documents from anywhere, not just from Outlook or the e-mail client your organization uses. There are many examples of commercial products which enable document collaboration, including Google Drive, Microsoft’s web apps and, to some extent, Yammer. Implemented correctly, document collaboration within a social intranet can be a compelling reason for individuals to use your intranet as a place to get work done. Social intranets are increasingly used to provide a platform for individuals to raise questions and make suggestions. Traditionally these were called forums and they are still used extensively on intranets. However, some have now developed to incorporate solutions for ideation creation, as a means of originating new ideas by involving staff. They provide a new take on traditional suggestion boxes by typically providing ratings, voting options and often the opportunity for senior management engagement. When well

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thought out, such tools can be a great way to develop new policies, directions and strategies within an organization. This option works best in organizations that support an open culture and reward information sharing. A more recent challenge is to make social intranets work on different devices. This can be harder where the full range of interactivity is not available on smart phones or tablets. However many intranets are now designed to act responsively when accessed from a mobile device. These ‘mobile intranets’ allow users to share immediately a link, file or photo, or to update their status wherever they are. The lure of social intranets is obvious and they are becoming more and common, however simply turning on a social intranet and expecting staff to use it might not be successful. For a social intranet to be successful it needs to have a clear purpose and strategy. To be successful it must be used to solve specific business problems rather than just rolled out because somebody thinks it would be great to ‘encourage collaboration’ or because ‘everybody uses Facebook’. A successful social intranet requires good management at a content and community level and a great intranet management team, constantly looking at how to develop new technology tools. If you are working alone, it is essential to have a good relationship with relevant members of your IT department who can help you achieve your aims with the right technology. Not every organization is ready for social tools and there can be a huge difference between how willing different groups of users are to adopt them. It is important to speak to the whole organization to get an idea of how much resistance social intranet developments are likely to receive from different groups. In some cases, senior leaders may love the idea of a social intranet, but junior managers may fear their staff being distracted by it. In others, the senior management may resist. If staff feel they may be penalized for contributing to or interacting with an intranet, they will avoid doing it and the end result is likely to be poor adoption. This is why any intranet manager thinking about rolling out a social tool or deploying a social intranet needs to: • talk to people in the organization to understand how people feel about social tools • make the social intranet resolve real business problems, not general issues

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• start small rather than rolling out a whole suite of tools, which might confuse people • focus on people, and the benefits they will receive from social tools, rather than technology. By concentrating on the right reasons to deploy a social intranet or tool intranet managers can expect to reap their benefits for their users and the organization as a whole.

Choosing a content management system

Your intranet’s content management system is the means by which content is added, edited, published and linked to other content. It is at the heart of any great intranet and it is worth discussing this briefly. A great content management system can support the ongoing development and maintenance of (especially large) intranets. The deployment of a content management system also supports the use of a decentralized authoring model should you choose to use it. If a content management system has been implemented for your organization’s external website, it may be possible to use it for the intranet, though this is best avoided, as the functionality incorporated within intranets and websites is very different, one supporting internal communication and information, the other making contact with user groups and customers. The intranet manager needs to consider carefully the specific business requirements for the intranet before taking the difficult decision to choose from the huge number of content management systems that are currently available. Many factors influence the decision including cost, functionality, scalability and the company providing the solution. However, long before discussing them with a software vendor, it is necessary to develop a plan for choosing an intranet solution supported by a proven methodology. Determining your organization’s business requirements is only half the process. The other half is determining whether the technology can do what it says it can do. Knowing this, the value of a technology-neutral approach to picking the right platform becomes much more important and an unbiased assessment of a content management system’s strengths and weaknesses is essential to helping staff choose the right tool to support their intranet.

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Conclusion

Having read this chapter you should have a better understanding of some of the issues intranet managers face. The intranet manager role is challenging and any individual who undertakes it needs to have a number of key skills and abilities, including: • technical aptitude, and the ability to talk to technologists • written and verbal communication skills • the ability to understand the business and to talk to staff at all levels and in all functions • leadership skills and the ability to take decisions without being intimidated • the ability to build effective relationships with users and content editors • the ability to provide solutions regularly as most intranets are organic in nature and require constant development • the ability to be focused on delivering solutions that meet the requirements of the business even if they do not use every technological tool available to them. Although the role of an intranet manager is challenging, it can be very rewarding. If anyone is thinking about this as a new career I would most definitely recommend it. The difference between a good intranet and a bad one can be the making of an organization. A good intranet can ease working life for everyone in the business and see it through its most difficult times.

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CHAPTER 3

Internal and external marketing by information professionals

Shaunna Mireau

Introduction Before the advent of direct access to information for end-users, the library provided the only, or main, access to information resources in most organizations. Where staff had heavy research or information needs, it could be taken for granted that an information service was necessary. Today, libraries need to demonstrate the value they add above and beyond providing access to resources. The special skills that information professionals offer by connecting staff with the knowledge they need go far beyond managing a collection (although judicious acquisition and documentation is also essential). With good marketing, the library service will be heavily used and appreciated as an essential part of the organization’s success. This chapter, by an experienced law librarian, gives a number of examples of how promotion in a range of contexts has helped to enhance her service’s position within her firm, and be recognized as a source of revenue rather than as an overhead. There are more examples of promotional initiatives a library can embark on in Chapters 2, 7 and 10.

The corporate librarian as a trusted internal adviser

I am a legal information specialist. Having worked in law firm libraries for the last couple of decades I have observed some interesting trends in my work places that I believe apply to all types of private libraries. The most promising trend that I have observed is that when information professionals are able to market themselves as trusted advisers within the organization, the services,

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space, collections and people that make up the library are valued. Internal and external marketing is a necessary part of a corporate information professional’s work. It can be lived as a philosophy for service delivery. It is a group of strategies that can be embedded into daily processes. Marketing by information professionals is the key to building and growing a dynamic and sustainable library department within an organization. The overarching philosophy that I adopted early in my career as an information professional had defined my approach to library marketing. When written as a statement it seems disingenuous: ‘An information specialist works every day to make herself completely dispensable to her organization.’ Adopting and practising this philosophy has been the touchstone of all my career choices and decisions and has led to opportunities for promotion, tripled the staff complement at my current organization’s library, and created a law firm library that is seen as essential by its stakeholders. Being dispensable means documenting processes and sharing that documentation in a completely transparent way so that the organization knows what you are capable of. It requires stepping outside the comfort zone of the library to build a reputation as someone to be consulted. It means creating tools and methods that will help you evaluate when to take risks and offer new services. It means ensuring that your work product is consistent and shared. Above all it means delivering value to the organization by transparently providing the services and information goods that it needs. Being dispensable does not feel safe and it absolutely requires an information specialist to be visible in the organization. It means that when you do something well you shout it from the rooftops. It means that when you don’t do something well, you document it and learn from it. It means that you embed the concept of marketing – both client retention and business development – into your daily work life. The odd and wonderful and fulfilling beauty that flows from making yourself dispensable is that by doing so, you become indispensable.

Building a supporter network

In a law firm, like in other corporate structures, the daily users of the library are not necessarily the leaders of the organization. How does an information specialist build a supporter network that reaches to the decision-maker level when decision-makers are not daily research service users?

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People support what gives them satisfaction. They also support what others tell them is worth supporting. Build a personal network within your organization by leveraging services to your key users and giving them stories which demonstrate your value. During my first few months at my current firm, one of the articling students was engaged in working as the junior person on a large litigation file. The case was at trial and was very complex. The student spent the bulk of the day at court and then spent evenings and mornings in the library doing additional research to support briefs that the judge had asked for on specific points for the case. It was stress-inducing for the student and was the most important activity in his work life at the time. My interactions with that student could have been limited to showing him how to do what he needed to do and leaving him to do it – the basic requirements of my job as his law librarian. Instead, my interactions with him were as a partner in his work. I would show him how to do what he needed to do and then also help him do it. I gathered research material for him to analyse, I let him clarify his analysis by discussing it with me, I encouraged and supported him and provided reassurance, advice and assistance rather than just information. I embodied the role of trusted adviser by my actions and behaviour. During that student’s bar admission thank you he included me by name along with his principal lawyers and senior members of the firm who had assisted him during his articling year. Having that student in my personal network raised my profile in the firm. That student is now a partner in the firm, a decision-maker who remains a supporter of the library. I also consider him a friend. Though his work has changed with his 15 years of seniority, he will still tell the story of how key the library was to surviving his articles.

Building a reputation

Henry Ford said ‘You can’t build a reputation on what you are going to do.’ The key to building a reputation is to know what you want to be recognized for. Do you want to be considered as someone who is knowledgeable or approachable; friendly or competent; capable of finding anything or expert in a niche area; expert in applying technology or a creative strategist; a tough negotiator of source contracts or someone who synthesizes research materials

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so they can be easily used? Thankfully characteristics that make up the components of an information professional’s reputation are not exclusive. You should consider which parts of information professional work you find most satisfying and work towards building your reputation so that those are the elements you are best known for. Law librarians, like other corporate information professionals, are often called on to provide training for how to use information sources. One of the things I enjoy is giving training sessions. I worked to perfect my training methods by engaging in learning opportunities at conferences, observing others who were providing training, taking advantage of vendor ‘train the trainer’ sessions, and reading and researching adult learning. Because it is an activity I enjoy, learners enjoyed my training sessions. I gained such a positive reputation in my firm for training that when training is offered from a librarian, lawyers attend, but when the trainer is a vendor, the lawyers are often ‘too busy’ and do not attend. Handling training for research services requires a corporate librarian to know exactly how to use the tools to their best advantage and what content is included in the resource. By training others to use these resources the information professional is working to make herself dispensable. She is also building a reputation each time she shares knowledge that she knows what she is doing and has capabilities that can benefit the trainee and the organization.

Calculating risk and reward

You may ask how internal marketing and calculating risk and reward are related. Each decision that requires the support of others (increased budget or staffing, more space, a large software expense) requires a business case. A well crafted business case, whether by document or presentation, is itself a marketing moment. Arguments used to make the case must be presented using the language inherent to the business. In law firm libraries, this may be a calculation of time, a factor of overhead, a metric of expense per partner. Consider the following, when crafting decision requests: • Ensure you understand your optimal scenario and present it with your strongest arguments.

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• • • •

Have a second option you can live with when possible. Use the language common to your organization to relay the request. Always include the cost of not making the decision. Try to understand the motivations of those you are asking to decide (business drivers). • Be strategic about what you measure (statistics). Building a supporter network and a reputation are important aspects of creating the idea of corporate librarian as trusted adviser. The reason for acquiring a reputation for knowledge and the support of decision-makers is so that can be leveraged when there are opportunities for the information department. When the information professional presents a business case for acquiring a new product or delivering a new service, they are also leveraging their reputation and often using their supporters to sell the idea. When a decision made goes awry, do your best to maintain your status as trusted adviser by getting out in front of the problem. Not every action will pay off, but facing the failures early, transparently, and with a mitigation plan will maintain your reputation.

Measuring and delivering value

Value, though objectively measurable, can also be subjective in a knowledgebased organization. With a consistent internal marketing message, an information profession can choose the value points that the organization will look for. Decide what the business drivers are that align most effectively with the mandate of your department and consider using those motivators as themes for your communications. Apart from the excellent, consistent work product that you offer daily, one way to deliver value is to have the right information to show that you are delivering it. This requires some thought and purpose to collecting statistics about how the department is being used and viewed (see Table 3.1). Measuring points of value takes time and should when possible be embedded into the normal workflow. Law firms are traditionally organized so that the billable hour is a common measurement. In 2006, after attending a conference that sparked the idea, I received permission to set up a library ‘non-billable client’ in our firm’s accounting system. Librarians already accounted for all of their research time

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Table 3.1 Measurements that will prove your value Measure

Don’t measure

Engagement with users (by time and volume)

Visits to the library

Use of new acquisitions

Number of titles added to the collection

Librarian time as a factor of saving other Librarian time cataloguing (unless that is professionals’ time (librarian business relevant to your organization’s business development research time, time spent model) researching or in preparation of papers and seminars that another professional will submit or deliver . . . time created for someone else)

Current awareness service subscribers

Time spent circulating current awareness material

on client files using the accounting system and were in the habit of entering their billable time. This ‘client’ acted as a placeholder for librarian time statistics, which could easily be embedded into the library staff workflow. We decided to break up our hypothetical library client into ‘matters’ that would describe a task. Each matter was used to enter the daily amount of time spent on those tasks, which until then had not been logged in the firm accounting system by library staff. The library team committed to entering all of our billable and non-billable time into the legal accounting software, just as the partners, associates and law students did. This activity took some getting accustomed to, but gave us an appreciation of how lawyers handled the business, made us better timekeepers for our billable work, and reinforced our need to ask lawyers for client references and matter numbers when performing research for them. We chose our matters so that we would be able to create reports of how the library team was spending their time – time being the element that was a common theme in our business. They included: • • • • •

business development research research that cannot appear on a client’s bill research for a seminar or paper general interest research legislative monitoring

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• • • • • •

searcher mentoring clerical work technical services tasks knowledge management loose-leaf filing payroll (one library staff member was part-time in both library and payroll).

Being able to report using these statistics and adding new matters when we undertake major or new initiatives has been extremely helpful. Reporting operational work to lawyers in hourly units resonates with them. They are accustomed to the idea that time is a representation of value. Aligning a supporter network, building a reputation, using those to help calculate risk and reward, and showing the value you deliver using language and methods common in your organization are reasonable strategies to demonstrate that you, the information professional in the library department, are a trusted adviser to the business of your organization. Once you are established internally, it is a natural progression to become part of the value proposition shared with clients of your organization.

Corporate librarian as external value delivery

When an information professional is valued and trusted in an organization, it is a natural progression for the organization to leverage the internal success externally. Whether it is by offering the corporate librarian as an adviser to a client for a specific project, engaging the librarian to attend meetings with clients or suppliers as a client service team member, or simply by encouraging the librarian to be a visible member of the community representing the organization, these demonstrations of trust in the information professional are opportunities to expand the scope of the information professional’s role. Though I myself am an outgoing introvert and it is not uncomfortable for me to participate in the business of our firm as a public face, I recognize that may not be the case for many individuals drawn to work as an information professional. To those readers who would rather not be ‘out front’ I would advise this: you can get over it. Practise your game face, work on public speaking, listen carefully, and speak when you have an opportunity to do so. Pretend you are delivering research training. There are many opportunities

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for personal growth and leadership. Use them to polish your public face. If opportunities don’t come your way, seek training from Toastmasters or other sources of learning to prepare yourself for delivering value to the clients of your organization. These skills will be helpful internally as well. Some of the ways that my organization has leveraged the library department and team for external value are by strategic sharing, leveraging library partnerships, and supporting community engagement and the visibility of librarians.

Strategic sharing

Strategic sharing may sound like a buzz term, but it actually relates to surfacing content activated by information professionals for use by clients. This is a wonderful way for the information professional to demonstrate value. Every day corporate information professionals package content for their internal clients. This content could be current awareness materials that are snipped and annotated, it could be a pathfinder or checklist that is used to enhance search results or it could be a piece of information that is gathered on a schedule or on demand. Much of this packaged content could also be valued by external clients. The library team in my firm has offered a legislation monitoring service on demand since long before I joined the firm. Keeping lawyers abreast of legislative changes that impact their client groups is very common in a law firm library – we were not doing anything unique. One morning a senior partner e-mailed me a request for proposal (RFP) – a means by which potential or existing law firm clients choose their external legal services – from an existing client on behalf of a new group and asked for my thoughts. The RFP was requesting a legislative monitoring service specific to an industry sector that would be offered as a subscription and annotated with descriptions so that individuals with different perspectives could be aware of legislation for their compliance programmes. The RFP contained a lengthy list of legislation to monitor changes to. I immediately called up the client and matter records that my team used to track our internal legislation monitoring, to see how much time our team spent on this activity, and our legislation tracking spreadsheet to have an idea of the volume of material we tracked. The RFP had some minimum requirements of what the potential client was looking for. Within a few

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minutes, I went to the partner’s office for a discussion of the project. The partner had scheduled a meeting that morning with the new client group – two individuals whom I had met at previous firm functions – and we discussed the project scope and requirements. The partner and I had brief initial discussions about what we considered we would be capable of providing and how this piece of work would open the door to further work from other sector clients. The firm responded to the RFP stating that library staff would have primary responsibility for the tasks related to creating a legislative monitoring service. The partner was extremely pleased that the library team was enthused about engaging in client-facing work and that we had some metrics to help us price the service. We knew how much time would be required, that we could automate some lesser value work to create the bandwidth to manage the workload, and that we were prepared to serve external as well as internal clients. This project has helped the firm to grow our market share in the niche sector that legislative monitoring services are provided to.

Partnerships

Partnerships are critical for corporate information professionals. There is no entity that can possibly cover the cost for a complete collection of resources in a given area. Consider the term inter-library loan and how that applies in the corporate library setting.

Leveraging your network

Whenever you are asked to locate information that is not in the collection of material your organization owns or owns access to, think of this as a marketing opportunity. The language you use to borrow material for your organization is as important as your willingness to share back: Though we have many resources that we can share internally and externally, we

are looking for X to serve a client.

I hope that you are able to share X from your collection. We will certainly

welcome opportunities to return the favour with our resources.

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Consider also the language that you use with your internal clients. You can demonstrate how being part of your professional network helps you meet your organization’s needs: It shouldn’t be a problem to acquire X in your timeline. I will reach out to my

network.

I met so-and-so at a conference the firm sent me to a few years ago. They

likely have that item and may share.

These sample statements share an obvious purpose. The trick is to embed into such statements the language that will help you into your daily tasks.

Community engagement and visibility

A related aspect of partnerships for external marketing by information professionals is being engaged and visible in the community. The community you choose may be related to the business of your organization or it may be actively participating in a library association. Either or both of these options yield positive results. Perhaps social media is your natural environment. Building a strong social media presence, in line with your organization’s policy requirements or with special dispensation, is an excellent way to be seen as a positive value element for your organization. Writing or presenting information for consumption by clients or potential clients of your organization, whether via web or more traditional forums, is a natural fit for many information professionals. My law firm values giving something back to the legal community. One of our former partners was the initiator of the Alberta Law Foundation, another was the founder of the Alberta Legal Education Society, and some partners were involved in directing the Legal Aid Society. These values were in my mind when a call went out to the local law library community for a new regular contributor of a column on the intersection of the internet and legal information for a public legal education magazine. I offered my services and for eight years had a regular column with a byline that included my firm’s name. This was an excellent low cost method of regular exposure for our organization to the subscribers – an excellent opportunity to sharpen my writing skills, which had the added benefit of enhancing my personal brand and visibility. A little visibility goes a long way. Because my name reputation was associated

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with some expertise in online legal research through my writing, people outside my organization were aware of me. My internal clients were also aware that I was comfortable with speaking and training because of the library’s activities inside the firm. These factors have resulted in speaking opportunities. Every time someone has asked me to speak at a conference, seminar event, training session, practice group meeting, client webinar and so on, I have said yes. Often with reservations, but never with regrets. Consequently, I have presented many topics to many groups and could fill a CV page with speaking engagements. Speaking engagement opportunities can come from many directions: • • • •

active involvement in library associations blogging and other social media activity partnering with colleagues on business development presentations involvement with activities related to your organization’s business (in my case, lawyer groups) • advertising that you have presented for another group on your social media profiles • advertising that you have presented (on anything, for anyone) within your organization. Each of these helps promote the work that you and your organization does, and helps you develop a clear and articulate way to express your professional value.

The value of internal and external marketing by information professionals

The value of internal and external marketing by information professionals can be summed up with some lists. These are some tasks related to internal marketing: • • • • •

Build your brand inside the organization. By being dispensable, become completely indispensable. Achieve job satisfaction from being a trusted adviser. Gain decision-maker trust so that you get what you ask for. Become perceived as a valued resource.

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These are some tasks related to external marketing: • Build your brand outside the organization. • Give your organization a value advantage through information professional networking. • Achieve job satisfaction from being on client-facing teams. • Gain decision-maker trust so that you are given more opportunities. • Be perceived as a valued resource. • Create job opportunities for you and others.

How has marketing helped me?

I have two examples of how embedding library marketing into my everyday professional life has had a positive impact on my career. One of the attendees of a webinar that I once delivered to a client group years later became part of the legislative monitoring service RFP client team. It is pretty hard to negate the value of a trusted adviser who walks blind into a meeting and is greeted as an old friend by a potential client. And it demonstrates the importance of reaching out to the legal sector and making contacts. Being perceived as a valued trusted adviser based on daily marketing grew my law firm library position from a solo librarian responsible for one office to a firm-wide shared service department with three full-time library staff. It has had a positive impact on my career evidenced by my current role in the firm. When looking to fill a position in process improvement – managing change and using LEAN and Six Sigma methodology to find value through efficiency – our executive committee chose to promote their trusted adviser rather than hire someone from outside the organization. I think that says a lot about the value my firm sees in an information professional. I hope this chapter has shown that marketing your information service can take many different forms, and is not simply a matter of producing posters and news items. The value that you demonstrate by the quality of your work, and how it aligns to business need, is part of your marketing strategy. So too is demonstrating that you are part of a profession offering support, resources and advice. And if you can add writing and speaking engagements to your activities, then you increase awareness of your firm’s activities, as well as raising your own profile internally and externally.

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CHAPTER 4

The hybrid librarian–IT expert

Linda-Jean Schneider and Simon Barron

Introduction Information technology (IT) is no longer the exclusive domain of engineers operating out of basement server rooms. It is part of every worker’s daily life and the invisible platform on which they perform. Although the role of the systems librarian emerged when librarians first moved from card catalogues to online public access catalogues (OPACs) there has traditionally been a firm division between the library or information service and the IT department. The one provides information, the other behind-the-scenes back-up and development. Yet, as the name might suggest, the information relies on the technology and, as far as the end-user is concerned, they provide the same product or service. There is every advantage in having a good relationship between an information service and an IT department to make sure that the two work together seamlessly. A more recent development is the information professional with strong IT skills who takes on a hybrid role, whether formally, as part of their job description, or simply as a practical means of delivering information services. The authors of this chapter both define themselves as information professionals, but have used their technical skills to inhabit or create hybrid IT roles combining elements of ‘info pro’ and ‘IT pro’. They draw on their experience and that of an increasing network of similar hybrids to share the advantages and possible approaches to working with technology as an information professional.

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The rise of the cyborgs

‘Technology is everywhere.’ How often have you heard this phrase, which evokes such an immediate affirmation from those with whom you communicate? We are surrounded by technology and we want to take it with us everywhere, with increasing use of mobile devices and wearable computing contributing to this trend. The ultimate purpose of all of that technology, especially mobile technology, is to bring information and knowledge to users on demand. More informally, increasing numbers of information professionals are people whose lives are integrated with and supplemented by the technologies they use every day. The growth in the adoption of ever-present devices like smart phones and tablets, and the development of fully ubiquitous computing, sometimes called ‘everyware’ (Greenfield, 2006) like Apple’s iWatch or augmented reality products like Google Glass, will lead to further technological and informational integration. According to a presentation given by one of the authors, entitled ‘Rise of the Cyborgs: The growth of librarian–IT hybrids’ (Barron, 2013) for the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) Umbrella 2013 conference, ‘digital information has overtaken our information landscape on a monumental scale’ and ‘libraries are near the centre of this tsunami of data’. The recent evolution of a digital systems (or hybrid) librarian is a logical response to those ever-present demands.

The ‘typical place’ of information and IT functions

Libraries, archives and museums used to ‘contain’ information in the same way a cage contains a prisoner: the user went to where the information was kept, and where the indexing systems were available. Most organizations required that precise relevant information be codified and indexed in such a way to be readily available, a task carried out by librarians when they were not otherwise searching for items on user request. Even once online systems began to be adopted, or large-scale digitization projects were undertaken of hard-copy resources, technology was not seen as the domain of the library. Into the late 20th century, entities ranging from government agencies, academic institutions and corporations to private law firms and non-profit organizations created separate departments to house the functions of automation, computerization and, in the 21st century, digitization. While the

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initial impulse was to isolate that group, the pervasiveness of their work product meant IT was seen as the lifeblood of the organization, as all of the data required to run its operations were eventually available in digital form. But it often remained separate from the library, sometimes endangering their future as libraries became associated exclusively with hard-copy information. The legacy of this development persists in organizational structures across all sectors. In public libraries in the UK and the Americas IT support usually comes from the governing local authority’s IT department, which has the needs of a range of services to consider, including an increasing number of self-service systems. Libraries working in other organizations, such as commercial for-profit libraries, generally receive IT provision from the organization’s IT department. In higher education libraries, the IT department often belongs to the entire university: university libraries may have a few dedicated IT staff or a systems librarian overseeing library software and systems. Research libraries or larger libraries may have a dedicated IT team. However, such teams are explicitly distinguished from library staff. In most legal practice firms, the arrival of online legal research products propelled technological changes and impacted the way legal practice developed. Online research was the first direct contact many practitioners had with the digital world, when they had always maintained a distance from so-called ‘automated activities’. Law firms began to create IT services departments to deal with ‘back-end’ operations, including those managing finances and client files. However, firms attempted to train library or information professionals to use online research systems and guide staff in searching them themselves. Balancing the capability of technology to manage information and the overwhelming need to identify quickly the relevant information to run the organization requires a melding of two diverse functions. There should no longer be a major divide between the library and information functions and the technology that permits that access. An organization’s knowledge base should be coded and readily accessible, no matter where it resides. The overlap between the formerly separate departments is obvious, and has led to the rise of the hybrid librarian. Lynn Watson, writing in Practice Innovations (Watson, 2014), offers another example of the impact of the pervasiveness of technology in US-based law firms:

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48 SCHNEIDER AND BARRON Many of us (in law firms) know IT as an untouchable department wielding great

powers, dictating what you, as a user, can see and do. IT controls which websites

you can visit, what data you can see, and which applications you can install. IT

determines which computer you can use and which devices you can choose.

However, as Watson goes on to warn: IT no longer has a stranglehold on technology. An attorney or administrative

department can easily contract with a vendor to host the latest and greatest

system. This is no less than a major opportunity for the library, research or

information department to expand and enhance its role in the general firm

operation . . . Who is in the best position to ask the right questions to mine the

vast amounts of data for information that is truly meaningful to the business? In

most cases, the answer is not the IT Department. While IT may be able to

formulate queries, those with a true understanding of the underlying business

are in the best position to quantify and analyze the data and to ask the pertinent questions that could ultimately lead to that competitive advantage that we’re all so desperately seeking.

Thus, the best use of technology and data resides in those areas which are managing the needs of those at the heart of the organization – research, business intelligence, competitive intelligence and other knowledge-based departments. Identifying how ‘information’ and ‘technology’ departments align, and ensuring there are individuals qualified to support both of those functionalities, is essential to the survival of the firm. Because of the pervasiveness of technology on every desktop and in every organizational pursuit, there is a need to develop IT skills and technological awareness informally for all information workers. While not as frequent as might be supposed, a number of libraries have formalized this development by embarking on joint recruitment initiatives with IT departments. One of the co-authors of this chapter has worked in two specifically joint library–IT positions: both were the first of their kind at the institution in question; both were in higher education institutions; both were jointly funded by the library and the university IT department. One US law firm information professional, who established the firm’s original intranet because of her skills in the technical arena, told us, ‘The Library works in tandem with the IS [Information Systems] department to

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provide information resources to our users.’ Increasingly, the departmental boundaries are blurred. In many legal and other professional services firms, departments have been replaced by teams or groups working in particular practice areas or on specific projects. Formerly separated functions are brought together in pursuit of common goals for the success of the organization in a competitive environment. Law firm clients are also demanding increased efficiencies from service providers, and it often takes a joint effort to ensure those results. As a result, organizational structures are no longer as siloed as they once were.

Changing skill-set

Formally and informally, librarian–IT hybrids are becoming more common as technology changes the information world. These individuals with these roles face unique challenges and require skills different from those of traditional librarians or traditional IT support. Customer service, organizational skills and teamwork remain important in library work but a whole range of other skills are required by librarian–IT hybrids. Significant overlaps are developing between the roles of information workers (info pros) and IT workers (IT pros). In her introduction to the new publication Law Librarianship in the Digital Age (O’Grady, 2014, xii), law firm library director Jean O’Grady invokes a new breed of information professional, a ‘digital cartographer’: The word ‘librarian’ hardly covers the breadth of our universe. We are strategic

leaders, research analysts, taxonomists, teachers, digital pioneers, app developers,

knowledge managers, information literacy evangelists, and competitive

intelligence gurus. In short, we are both educators and digital cartographers who

build the bridges and help researchers chart the course between knowledge from

the past and data that will become knowledge of the future.

More than half of what she identifies as requisite for future info pros is the skill-set traditionally held by IT pros, in some cases, skills which were their exclusive domain. Another professional interviewed for this chapter sees ‘Info pros . . . becoming more technically adept, keeping websites updated, managing email distribution lists, responding to and identifying website errors, and

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trouble-shooting general technical issues.’ In the July 2002 report Beyond The Boundaries (AALL, 2002, 4), the Committee of the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) noted the evolution of the for-profit legal practice information centre into ‘the law firm electronic library’ or ‘knowledge management center’. The report commented, ‘As law libraries operate in an increasingly virtual world, the notion of physical boundaries changes dramatically . . . [info pros] will change in other ways as well: in assuming new roles, providing new and different services, partnering with other units in our organizations, collaborating with external entities.’ Facilitation is at the centre of the skills-set for the hybrid professional and an emerging one for all info pros, especially those working in knowledge management. As noted in a recent post by Nick Milton (2014) in Knoco Stories, ‘The most valuable skill for the Knowledge Management professional is the skill of facilitation. This is one of the first things a new knowledge management team must learn.’ Although collaboration is often among the innate skills of library professionals who are accustomed to leveraging their networking expertise in the course of work, this can be a challenge for some information professionals. Some struggle with the requirements of dynamic and articulate communication beyond their own colleagues and familiar customer base, but the same has also been true for traditional IT professionals. Clearly, collaboration and effective communication are essential in the digital world and are an increasing part of all information roles. This is perhaps reflected at a recruitment level. In a 2009 study, Mathews and Pardue (2009) performed a content analysis of randomly selected job advertisements from the American Library Association (ALA)’s online JobList over a five-month period. Their analysis confirms the observations and insights set out above. They discovered there was a ‘significant intersection between the skill sets of librarians and the skill sets of IT professionals’ (Mathews and Pardue, 2009, 256). Nearly three-quarters (72%) of the job ads contained at least one IT skill and more than half (57%) of the advertisements requiring one IT skill asked for at least one more in addition. Skills in web development, project management, systems development and systems applications were in particular demand. Mathews and Pardue identified four types of skills, which seem to encompass the ideal skill-set of the hybrid professional: traditional library skills, ‘crunch tech skills’, personal skills and community and relationship management. These can perhaps be characterized as follows:

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• Traditional library skills: Among those mentioned were cataloguing skills, understanding of library licences, software licences, copyright and so on, and understanding of technical library services such as inter-library loan. • ‘Crunch tech skills’ (Rogers, 2013): These range from the ability to troubleshoot users’ computer problems to programming skills. At one end of the spectrum, librarians can be called on to help users set up e-mail accounts, configure tablets to connect to mobile networks, and search large-scale databases like Westlaw, Lexis, or other tech-related everyday tasks to help users. At the more advanced end, Goddard (2003) identifies the following ‘high-demand skills’ for systems librarians: ‘networking protocols (TCP/IP, HTTP, telnet, ftp and Z39.50), UNIX and Windows/NT operating systems, hardware trouble-shooting, database design and administration, Web design and development, and programming in SQL, PERL, C/C++.’ Of particular focus – especially for US librarians in the higher education sector – is coding. • Personal skills and personality traits: These are characteristics that help one succeed in an environment that combines the library and IT function. These include: research skills and the ability to analytically extract information from sources; curiosity and a willingness to learn; a strong interest in learning new things and an enquiring mind. The ability to self-teach is a necessary skill for the particular challenges faced in this role. • Communication and relationship management: This is a fundamental part of the special role taken by librarian–IT hybrids. As another author commented on a smaller-scale study, ‘Every respondent in the study mentioned challenges related to communication and/or relationship management . . . As in all areas of library and information science the ability to communicate with people is imperative. Librarian–IT hybrids need to be able to talk to people clearly, explain technical concepts, and manage relationships between groups of stakeholders’ (Barron, 2013). Mathews and Pardue conclude that ‘as technology has changed, so too have the skill sets required of librarians’ (Mathews and Pardue, 2009, 257). This changing role requires an appropriate title to designate its capabilities and responsibilities. It may sound superficial, but in many organizations a job title indicates the status and influence of the postholder. Private law firm librarians have struggled for years with this issue, in response to the co-opting

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of the word ‘information’, by the technology departments. The Private Law Libraries Special Interest Section of the AALL has been pursuing various rebranding efforts, to expand the recognition and value of information professionals who find the term ‘librarian’ anachronistic, particularly when they work in areas such as electronic resource management. This can even affect salaries and position in the firm hierarchy, drastically impacting the perception of the department. No real solution has been found for this problem, but perhaps as library and IT staff increasingly work together and merge their skill-sets, the term ‘information professional’ might one day apply to both.

How the info pro can help IT

According to one librarian the authors spoke to, the info pro is defined by knowing where to go to find results. They know how to search and identify relevant taxonomies and have an insight into user habits. IT pros know ‘the hardware, capabilities, compatibilities, software/databases in existing systems’. But there is much to learn from each other and increasingly technically minded graduates sometimes arrive in the workplace to be frustrated by traditional divisions of responsibility. As another librarian posits: ‘Often info pros are not given access to tools that would enable them to manage some of the more traditional IT tasks, even though some of those tasks are not technically complicated’ (for example, adding users to an e-mail distribution list). In most cases, a tech-savvy presence in the information department is a key means of ensuring continuity of service. They provide a go-to person for user issues, and should be a primary contact for the IT helpdesk team, even after hours. The information service can provide essential information to help IT implement initiatives without damaging the work of the organization. Recently, a major firm blocked instant messaging sites because members of the IT department decided that legal professionals no longer needed them, as they were mostly used for personal messages, and texting (SMS) now carried out that function. However, the library research team alerted them to several research sites using online chat, which would have been blocked. A process to provide for exceptions was put into place to ensure legal researchers could still access these sites. Similarly, when upgrading their spam filter to one with many advantages over the previous one, one firm relied on the library to

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identify research sites that should be white-listed. The technology team did not have the requisite knowledge. Information professionals’ contract negotiation skills can also be an essential part of bringing a new system into an organization. Since hardware and software often involve large amounts of money, these kinds of skills in negotiating and communicating with vendors are essential. Info pros can bring their experience of purchasing new research products, with their often complex multi-page (and multi-source) agreements, to provide key insight to inform the negotiation process. As many previously standalone providers merge (or, in the legal sector, are acquired by major legal industry corporations) there is more cross-over among providers who previously would only have been bought in either the ‘technology’ or ‘library’ domains. In some cases, the info pros may have already established relationships with content providers and can facilitate successful connections between the organization and the vendor. This is particularly the case when they have a good ongoing relationship with the vendor, and the traditional stance of the IT department or management has been antagonistic in pursuit of a better deal.

Working together

Whether working with IT on day-to-day problem solving or on a project, the similarities between IT and the information service are reflected in their frequent and strategic interaction with other professionals in the organization. These might be in marketing and client relations, internal database management, and those areas looking to develop business or new products. Both IT pros and info pros must be skilled in designing, planning, testing, theory, cost, metrics, collaboration and innovation. Therefore it makes sense for them to work together. Many info pros sit on internal technology committees or liaison groups, which enables them to find out about upcoming projects and opportunities for involvement, as well as feed back their own needs. Info pros provide feedback to IT pros daily, identify problems and offer suggestions, particularly in regard to updating new systems and databases. A frequently expressed issue with IT departments in many organizations is the lack of communication of basic system changes or network projects that can impact user accessibility to information resources. For the user, it is irrelevant whether the issue is the responsibility of the IT department or the

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information service. A good communications system between the library, the supplier and the IT department is essential, or the end-user may find they cannot access a resource because of changes in IP addresses or upgrades to browsers. Those firms with savvy IT groups notify the information services of imminent changes in order to anticipate any problems. In fact, they often include information staff in testing of new systems, in order to identify potential disruptions to online searching. Hybrid librarians play a key role in this process. They can anticipate and resolve access issues, provide training, and seek modification of rights and permissions when appropriate. The library staff can work with IT on individual projects, testing, monitoring research habits and sources, and working on taxonomies for specific areas of legal practice, and are instrumental in roll-outs, via implementation and drafting announcements. Collaborative software provides good opportunities to track progress on a project and of the different teams’ contribution. Sometimes this is in the form of a wiki on the firm’s intranet, but some IT departments and information services even share request-tracking databases for day-to-day work. One useful area of collaboration between IT and the library is user experience studies to enhance the development and testing of library systems. The information team can analyse metrics from their catalogue and intranet site daily to identify their information-seeking and evaluation strategies. Such an analysis will also help librarians better advise users on ways to improve their search and evaluation practices. For longer-term projects or redesigns, usability testing on such systems is essential. Augustine and Greene (2002) noted that this involves observing members of targeted user groups as they perform a series of tasks

intended to address specific functions or portions of a Web site. Observers look

for repeated patterns of use to determine strengths and problems with the site.

This systematic process of analysis provides information that can lead to a user-

centred design as well as reveals information about how patrons search.

In a private law firm, where the IT department is often tasked with designing a user-friendly intranet, collaboration with library and research staff can help to inform the process. IT and information services should also work together to develop good governance for the use of systems. A common concern can be the need to meet

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users’ expectations to carry out work using their own or other mobile devices, while having due concern for good information security. If information is lost or otherwise passed to those who should not see it, organizations of all types face legal, regulatory and reputational risks, and in some cases large fines. A consistently and jointly implemented policy is essential. IT and the information service should develop the governance together, ensure that both teams provide the same messages to users, and support each other where there are conflicts within the organization. Again, a professional with a foot in both camps can anticipate risks, advise on best practice and communicate the issues to users and IT pros.

Conclusion

For the modern information professional, being familiar with information technology is taken for granted. Programming and database design are studied at library school and librarians are often committed lifelong learners, devoting their spare time to studying manuals and learning new technological skills, in order to better deliver information services. Yet the workplace is often not structured to support that. Too often, IT departments and information services are separated and even in competition for money, staff or responsibility over systems. The traditional organizational set-up, where an IT service’s success is measured on the number of ‘jobs’ it manages to ‘close’, does not help. Information professionals struggle to resolve issues that, according to the terms of their service level agreement, have been settled by the IT helpdesk. In an ideal world, they should be working together to ensure continuity of service, ease of use and innovative technologies. Until this happens, the hybrid information professional exists to build bridges between the customer and the technology, and to ensure staff can access the information they need, when they need it.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Constance B. Smith, Firm Director, Research & Competitive Intelligence Service, Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP, for her generous support and guidance; F. Scott DeMaris, Research Services Librarian, ReedSmith LLP; and Katrina N. Perez, Resource Management Librarian, Drinker Biddle and Reath LLP.

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Disclaimer

This chapter is an expression of the opinions of Linda-Jean Schneider, and not those of her employer.

References

American Association of Law Libraries (2002) Beyond The Boundaries: report of the Special Committee on the Future of Law Libraries in the Digital Age, July.

Augustine, S. and Greene, C. (2002) Discovering How Students Search a Library Web Site: a usability case study, College & Research Libraries, 63 (4), 354–65.

Barron, S. (2013) Rise of the Cyborgs: the growth of librarian–IT hybrids,

presentation delivered at CILIP’s Umbrella Conference 2013 on 2 July 2013,

http://undaimonia.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/rise-of-cyborgs-growth-of-librarian-

it.html.

Goddard, L. (2003) The Integrated Librarian: IT in the systems office, Library Hi-tech, 21 (3), 281.

Greenfield, A. (2006) Everyware: the dawning age of ubiquitous computing, New Riders.

Mathews, J. M. and Pardue, H. (2009) The Presence of IT Skill Sets in Librarian Position Announcements, College & Research Libraries, 70 (3), 250–7.

Milton, N. (2014) The First Thing a New KM Team Needs to Learn, Knoco Stories, www.nickmilton.com/2014/07/the-first-thing-new-km-team-needs-to.html.

O’Grady, J. P. (2014) Introduction. In Kroski, E. (ed.), Law Librarianship in the Digital Age, Scarecrow Press.

Rogers, J. (2013) Considering the Librarian Tech Skills Gap, Attempting Elegance, www.attemptingelegance.com/?p=1958.

Watson, L. (2014) Decentralized IT Management: we’re all in ‘IT’ together, Practice Innovations: Managing in a Changing Legal Environment, 15 (1), https://info.

legalsolutions.thomsonreuters.com/signup/newsletters/practice-

innovations/2014-jan/article4.aspx.

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CHAPTER 5

Building a corporate taxonomy

Helen Lippell

Introduction The aim of this chapter is to give readers an easy-to-digest overview of the issues, requirements, practical steps and possible pitfalls of building a taxonomy, or controlled language, for use in an organization. It is designed for those with some background knowledge and familiarity with the associated terminology. As every taxonomy project is different, the value that information professionals can offer is to help organizations implement the appropriate solution to meet their objectives. A great taxonomist is partcompulsive organizer, part-techie and part-diplomat. The author has been working with taxonomies and other knowledge organization systems for a number of years and draws on her practical experience to provide a loose outline of the steps taken in building and implementing taxonomies. The chapter is divided into five sections, which deal with the full lifecycle of a taxonomy project, from inception to creation and then to ongoing maintenance. It may be that not all five steps are relevant to every project. For example, if the taxonomy has already been implemented in the business but is now undergoing a review, then only the later sections of the chapter will be pertinent. However, the tips and experience in every section will be useful no matter where someone is starting from.

Why do businesses need taxonomies? Business objectives and taxonomies

Taxonomies are tools by which we can divide up information so that items

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which are similar are to be found together, differentiated from each other where appropriate, and described using language which their users understand. They provide organizations with a stable, agreed set of controlled terms for use in a particular application. Taxonomies and other knowledge organization systems are needed because they are a means to organize, manage and direct information. Many organizations, no matter how small, handle large volumes of data, which must be processed in some way to enable it to become meaningful, findable and, for customer-facing products, financially valuable. Increasingly, organizations also deal with more diverse sources of data than ever before, and taxonomies are a way to apply consistent metadata to these streams. Ten years ago, it was common for information systems to be built assuming that the power of free-text search was enough to enable users to find relevant and specific results. Today it is recognized that some form of knowledge organization is essential to ensure that people can find what they are looking for, and even what they did not know existed. The desire to organize and classify seems to be innate to human beings. George Lakoff’s famous cognitive science book Women, Fire and Dangerous Things (Lakoff, 1990) is so called because these are three things which can be represented by the same classifying noun in one of the aboriginal languages of Australia (along with other random things like bandicoots and shields, as it happens). The earliest written symbols in human history were marks on clay tablets used for record keeping – a fine application of metadata to describe products, stores and quantities. Likewise, the classification of things in a modern business environment must be designed for the context in which it exists (how to do this is covered in Chapter 4, section ‘The rise of the cyborgs’). The strategic business objectives for most taxonomy projects generally fall into one of two broad categories: • improving an internal system or process (usually allied with an aim to reduce costs) – helping internal staff have access to the information they need to do their job • adding value to a customer-facing information product, by encouraging customers to find what they are looking for and thus increase usage or sales. It is fair to posit that an intranet fileplan taxonomy could end up looking very different from, say, an e-commerce site hierarchy. But the core principles of creating, promoting and maintaining these assets are the same. Also, internal

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and external taxonomies might have very different stakeholders but the personalities and challenges on the project might not be so different after all.

Kicking off projects

Taxonomy projects can be initiated at any level of an organization – the recommendation for a controlled vocabulary might come from a taxonomy practitioner themselves or from senior management. Managers might be explicit about the need for a taxonomy, or as I have more commonly found, they prioritize a need for improved search, website navigation and so on, and a controlled vocabulary emerges as a vital component of this. (Applications that use taxonomies are handled in more detail in Chapter 2, in the section ‘The corporate intranet’.) Management buy-in and having a project champion are both critical. A taxonomy is an important information asset that is embedded in one or more systems, and used by one or more people, for a period of time beyond the project itself. Therefore it merits being taken as seriously as content, code, marketing, communications or any other output from a project. It is important not to undersell the value of taxonomy work. I have been part of a team of very smart and well qualified practitioners who were teased as being ‘the list-makers’ by a colleague. However, when the time came for the content management system to start publishing content with accurate, appropriate and interesting metadata, the work of the taxonomy creators came to full fruition. Taxonomists can help themselves by evangelizing the value of their work whenever they can, for example by: ● presenting it to peers ● explaining the concepts in non-technical language to senior stakeholders who just want to know how it contributes to their strategic aims ● presenting at external events (this can help stimulate interest internally as it shows wider professional interest in the work) ● promoting successes, for example how the taxonomy work supports a new product launch.

Does it matter what the taxonomy is called?

There is a long-standing librarian’s joke: ‘There is a singular lack of vocabulary

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control in the field of controlled vocabularies’.1 This is true – I have seen all sorts of things described as a taxonomy that were just a controlled list. I have also come across taxonomies with related and equivalent terms that would have been more accurately called thesauri, not to mention ontologies, which were nothing of the sort. I actually like the umbrella term ‘knowledge organization system’ but unsurprisingly it is not well understood outside the professional community. The point to bear in mind is that the taxonomy has to be called something, so a name should be chosen that will stand the best chance of being understood within the organization. If ‘taxonomy’ is too arcane for some people’s tastes, then it might be helpful to refer to it in a more user-friendly way (perhaps ‘subject headings’ or ‘controlled list’) as long as the quality of the artefact itself is not compromised.

How and where are taxonomies used to help people complete tasks? Where are taxonomies used?

There are many places where taxonomies are used to aid searching and finding to good effect, both visibly and invisibly. Specific applications include: ● enterprise and site search engines ● internal applications such as digital asset management systems, knowledge bases, digital repositories for physical objects, intranet and document management systems ● data and content management systems ● text analytics solutions (integrated with for example a content management system) ● websites, for example for a primary navigation structure, site search facets, secondary navigation tools ● digital products such as apps, feeds and social platforms. The sheer range of applications is impressive and should give taxonomy practitioners encouragement, as they make the case for the value of controlled metadata artefacts in their organizations!

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Implementation considerations

Whether the taxonomy is being developed in conjunction with a technology project or will be deployed into an existing application, it is important to consider the various ways in which it will be seen and used. In an ideal world technical constraints should not affect the design of a taxonomy negatively, but in many cases a taxonomist has no choice about the platform on which it will eventually be used and this may affect the design. For example, if the taxonomy term-picker functionality is in a small window, then a very complex, deep structure, with many sub-categories, would be difficult to use. A skilful practitioner has to take into account the big picture of how their work will be used. At the same time they should be an advocate for the taxonomy to be designed as optimally as possible, given the information which its terms will be applied to. If there is an opportunity to specify requirements or test the application before its deployment, then this is worthwhile. It might just save future pain or user dissatisfaction. These are some questions to consider: • How will users access the taxonomy? Will they see a simple drop-down or pop-up window in a content management system content editing interface or be directed to another application? Will the hierarchy be represented as a tree structure or has a simpler presentation been asked for, such as an alphabetical list of keywords? Is there autocomplete functionality for users to type the first few letters of a term and quickly select and apply their chosen term? • If the taxonomy is the backbone of an automatic classification system, invisible to users, but makes their searches more relevant by matching key words to synonyms, how straightforward is it for business users and developers to access, modify and extend it? Enterprise-rules-based automatic indexing applications usually include well featured interfaces for taxonomy management. For statistical-model-based systems, it is generally less easy to make edits to language resource inputs such as taxonomies (or indeed, to track how effective the edits are in improving search quality). • If the application is being developed in-house, is it possible to work alongside the developers? These are some of the benefits of working alongside developers. They can:

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• feed into interface design decisions • help with testing (even the strongest software testers I have worked with were not familiar with the specifics of taxonomy design and implementation) • advise on business requirements (information professionals often sit virtually or physically at the confluence of technical and business teams, have a good eye for detail, and in my experience are good at understanding developer terminology) • use their skills in wider ways than ‘just’ the taxonomy itself (for example, in one role I was the business owner for a global taxonomy project, but also worked on data migration and data integration projects where my interest in data quality and categorization came in handy). It is important to consider how updates will be accommodated in the application. If the taxonomy can be managed within the tool itself, then this is not an issue (tracking changes and versioning notwithstanding). But if the taxonomy has to be loaded as a static file, and managed within another application, it is critical to establish business and technical processes for handling updates.

Working in the project team

I would urge taxonomists to be active participants in their project teams, even if it is tempting to focus mainly on the nuts and bolts of their taxonomy construction. Where possible, taxonomists should be visible and accessible to developers, product managers, editors and so on. This will help everyone understand the importance of the work and help the taxonomist keep abreast of inevitable changes in requirements, business priorities, timelines and so on. Popular development methodologies such as Agile and Kanban all advocate daily catch-ups of some sort and the taxonomist can be part of that conversation.

Discovery processes of concepts and vocabulary The ‘buy or build’ dilemma

For a project to build a brand new taxonomy, the ‘buy or build’ dilemma may

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arise as managers attempt to maximize time, budget and resource. It might be attractive to buy in a ready-made taxonomy – the most obvious advantage being that it saves someone building it from scratch. Online marketplaces such as taxonomywarehouse.com2 are dedicated to selling domain-specific taxonomies. There are also high quality taxonomies available for free or licensed use, for example from the Getty Research Institute3 or Unesco.4 Getty vocabularies are free to search but require licences for use of XML and relational database files. Over time, many vocabularies are being made available as linked open data. The explosion of interest in open and linked data has led to many more vocabularies, schemas and ontologies being published to the web by organizations happy to share their taxonomies and metadata schemas. These could be the foundation for new corporate taxonomies, but with the caveat that data quality should be reviewed carefully by a domain expert. If it is an open-source project, it is worth doing some homework to check how active the community and/or data owners are. There is a risk in relying on an external data source that could disappear or just fall into disrepair over time. The key question to ask as early as possible is ‘how important is it for the organization to have its own taxonomy?’ For example, at an online entertainment listings brand I worked for, some of its global websites had no strategic driver (or ongoing resource) to maintain bespoke taxonomies of geographical locations. Therefore these were bought in or minimally adapted from third-party data feed providers. However, London was the flagship site and there was a perceived competitive advantage in maintaining a taxonomy of locations that matched users’ mental models of areas within the city. (London is an interesting city in that unlike planned and/or new cities, it has grown organically with overlapping districts and ‘villages’. Users might variously search for events and venues by tube station, postcode, street name, area name or borough.) No known external taxonomy matched the local knowledge within the organization, or the breadth and depth of coverage needed to support user searches. Therefore a taxonomy of London locations was dynamically managed in-house. It is not advisable to rely totally on an external taxonomy if the enterprise taxonomy needs to have comprehensiveness, authoritativeness or a particular corporate tone of voice. I worked on a project at the BBC where the Unesco thesaurus was imported to provide an initial ‘big hit’ of terms in the kind of domains the BBC covers such as education, culture and science. The overall

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structure and terms were very good but much post-import mapping work by information specialists was needed to adapt it to be suitable for use in a BBC system. The best example of this was use of the term ‘intangible cultural heritage’. For Unesco this is a valid concept encompassing aspects of human culture and creativity that are not ‘tangible’ in the way that buildings, cities and the natural environment are. However, this terminology would have made no sense to internal BBC users of the taxonomy or indeed end-users of the tagged content. Therefore it did not appear in the final taxonomy, although it proved a very useful starting point for capturing more ‘everyday’ concepts such as music, cooking, language and drama.

Capturing user expectations, requirements and mental models Content analysis

Where there is an existing body of content, data or information, content analysis helps shape the design of the finalized taxonomy; concepts and structure are based on content that has already been created. If there is not time to analyse the whole body of text, images, video and so on, then select samples of data to review. If the data is textual, then a text analytics application could be used to automatically extract significant entities at a greater scale than is possible with manual review alone. The quality of text mining services is variable but it could be a useful head start in identifying significant concepts from unstructured data. Most automatic classifiers are not bad at finding proper nouns since these follow well defined rules around capitalization and so on. They are less accurate at finding relevant subject terms, which is one reason why automatically generated taxonomies, in my opinion, still lag a long way behind what a human can create.

User research

Whether the users in question are colleagues or customers, it is useful to run a card-sorting exercise or to perform informal research exercises. Card-sorting is a technique common in user experience design in which test participants suggest logical structures of concepts through moving index cards around (either real or virtual ones) and arranging them into structures and families. At this stage of a project, card-sorting is best done in an open way by allowing test participants to come up with their own categories and hierarchies. This

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process solicits user language and, if relevant, their mental models of what the taxonomy will represent. Later on, a closed card sort using the draft taxonomy as the basis will test the effectiveness of the new structure (see section on ‘Testing and validation’ on page 71) and whether it leads users to the type of information they expect to find under specific headings. A taxonomist usually has to balance a militantly user-centric focus with ensuring business and technical needs are met too (see section on ‘User language versus ‘official’ terminology’ on page 70) for some examples of these trade-offs). It is essential for businesses whose currency is information to get input from subject matter experts. Journalists, web managers, researchers, content creators and so on can be approached for information, which a skilled taxonomist can craft into the finished asset.

Stakeholder workshops

These are meetings or workshops which gather together the key people within the business who are concerned with how the taxonomy will be implemented and used. Common-sense meeting etiquette applies to arranging any workshop!5 It is important that there are not too many people, that there is an agenda which is kept to, and that actions are captured and followed up. It is better to make the session interactive wherever possible, for example by using sticky notes or whiteboards. If a lot of detail is being discussed, having a facilitator and a note-taker will ensure that everything is captured. In addition, taxonomy-related workshops may need careful planning and attention because not everyone understands or is enthused about taxonomies as we professionals are. In some circumstances it may be more useful to frame it in language that important stakeholders prefer, such as ‘keywords’ or ‘tagging’. (The workshop though might be an opportunity to educate people subtly.) Taxonomies may touch many different systems and user groups throughout the organization. It is imperative to minimize the risk of the stakeholder meeting becoming a chance for people to moan about related but not directly relevant issues such as the poor quality of the content management system being rubbish, or colleagues who do not tag properly.

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Construction and editing – the fun bits! What it is about – domain considerations

I have already discussed how to approach designing a taxonomy that is appropriate for its intended application and its users. It is also vital to think about the user-domain when collecting and organizing terms. Some domains are very technical and naturally lend themselves to very detailed hierarchies (for example, the Ministry of Defence taxonomy has 10,000 terms, because military equipment is rather complicated). In contrast, taxonomies for ecommerce website navigation tend to be designed for practical ease of use by customers not experts, with only a few levels of hierarchy and some broad but user-friendly category labels. Often the aim is to expose customers to a wide range of products and use faceting to filter search results. This may be an unusual consideration, but sometimes taxonomies need to incorporate existing knowledge organization systems from within their domain. This is not the same as adopting an external taxonomy for internal use. Rather, it means that terminology used in the new taxonomy should be consistent with generally accepted usage in the wider field. I consulted for a charity in the social policy domain who wanted a new information architecture for their website. The information architecture for policy areas could be built from scratch with regard to specific business and user needs, and the nature of the actual content. But there was also an important requirement that the labels in the information architecture were not too inconsistent with the language used by other similar organizations with which the charity often collaborated.

What the taxonomy will be created in Office applications

The simplest tools are the humble spreadsheet or text document. I generally prefer to avoid having to use generic office applications, but in a small organization it may be pragmatic to use these even if the taxonomy is thus little more than a list with some indented rows. These are the advantages: • It is cheap. • The applications are used and understood by nearly everyone in the corporate world. • It is easy to share a taxonomy document over e-mail or Skype.

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• For non-polyhierarchical taxonomies, it is relatively easy to depict the structure such that parent–child relationships are clear. These are the disadvantages: • It may be difficult to integrate the taxonomy into other applications without a properly marked-up output. • Standards such as the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS), a standard for taxonomies, are impossible to use. • They lack the specialist features of professional management tools. • It is much harder to incorporate more sophisticated taxonomy features like polyhierarchy, provenance information, scope notes and so on. • It is tricky to maintain version control and an audit trail if more than one person is making edits to the taxonomy. • If the taxonomy or thesaurus is expected to have related terms, then maintaining cross-references consistently in an unlinked list is immensely time-consuming.

In-house applications

If the taxonomy will be created in an in-house application, then in theory it should have only the features it needs. As described in the previous section, the expert user should have the opportunity to define custom requirements in a way that might be impossible for an off-the-shelf solution. If the application will be accessed and even used by non-specialists, there should be efforts to hide the complexity and/or jargon. The application should be technically simple – lightweight in performance and interface features. Clientside processing for some functionality may be preferable (for example calling on external data sources through application programming interfaces). It is possible to make in-house tools attractive – and a bit of thought given to visual styling and ease of use will help tools get embedded into the organization more quickly.

Specialist tools

Taxonomy tools may be paid-for or open source, but they all have specific features in common for managing taxonomies professionally. Wendi Pohs’

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presentation from the 2013 Special Libraries Association (SLA) conference6 is an excellent resource for evaluating requirements and business considerations, especially if it comes to justifying investment in software. She makes the very salient point: ‘Your environment and needs are unique.’ For this reason, choosing the taxonomy management tool wisely will make the whole project go more smoothly.

Designing the structure

It is not my intention to paraphrase the very many excellent, detailed resources about constructing a taxonomy. It is a huge topic with a great deal of academic and technical literature behind it. Instead, I will highlight a few aspects of taxonomy design and term selection in order to stimulate further investigation by the reader. The two main international standards for knowledge organization systems, ANSI/NISO Z39.19 and ISO 25964-1, are surprisingly readable, and emphasize workability over slavish adherence to any criteria that may not be relevant in a particular context.

Granularity

Granularity describes how specific you need your concepts to be. As highlighted in Chapter 4, in the section entitled ‘The rise of the cyborgs’, the taxonomy must be constructed with regard to how it will be used. This will steer the design as to how many levels of depth, or what facets are modelled. It is useful to decide from the outset how detailed the structure will be. This should always be considered with the ultimate usage in mind. For instance, if the taxonomy is powering a catalogue of vehicle parts, then it is entirely appropriate for it to include even the smallest components. On the other hand, capturing too much detail in individual terms could make the taxonomy too hard for users to apply correctly. On a geographical taxonomy I managed for a global financial news provider, the original aim was to have a complete set of sub-national regions, territories, provinces, cantons and so on. Over time, we realized that most of the terms were never used. The content published simply did not cover events at such a local level, apart from a few significant exceptions such as war zones or major financial centres. As a result, the taxonomy could be streamlined, allowing greater focus on other facets and simplifying the interface for manual indexers.

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Faceting

The high level design should ascertain early on whether the taxonomy will be hierarchical or faceted. A faceted taxonomy applies certain commonly occurring sub-categories in a consistent manner to the top level terms (for example: term – location – date) whereas a hierarchical taxonomy produces narrow terms which have a specific relationship to the broader term. A rough guideline, well expressed by William Denton,7 is: if it is possible to describe a typical entity by three or more mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive categories, then faceting may be preferable to a hierarchical parent–child structure. I worked on a project incorporating third-party data about restaurants into a website. Some metadata was provided with the raw feed but more was needed to make the data more compatible with the in-house taxonomy. Since there are many ways to classify a restaurant (for example, by its location, cuisines or price range), all of which are of interest to endusers, it was necessary to create or improve facets for cuisine, venue information, atmosphere and pricing. Within the cuisines facet, it must be said that it was still occasionally a challenge to represent all the data manageably. This is because cuisines are not always unique to a geographical area, or type of cooking, or a traditional–modern delineation. When Brazilian steakhouses or fusion restaurants became popular, a judgement call had to be made as to their best placement within the cuisine facets.

Polyhierarchy

Unless there is a strict technical constraint that prevents terms from having multiple parents in the hierarchy, it is worth considering polyhierarchy if it will make the final taxonomy more useful and powerful. This is particularly true if the taxonomy will be used to enhance discoverability, as terms can be accessed and used from more than one location in the structure.

Gathering terms Preferred terms

Preferred terms – the main subject terms in your taxonomy, to which synonyms are referred – should be selected consistently, with respect to style, terminology, qualifiers and so on. This seems obvious but in a busy project with many inputs it is easy to lose track of this. The value of a controlled

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vocabulary is in what that control enables, as compared to free text or nothing at all. Therefore it is best practice to make sure the preferred terms are impeccably consistent within the taxonomy. Examples of things to look out for include: plural–singular discrepancies and compound terms. If qualifiers are needed to disambiguate concepts, then they should be descriptive and written in parentheses after the preferred term, for example, from my government experience: ‘Holidays (annual leave)’ and ‘Holidays (leisure)’. These are both important concepts in their own right, and both are popular search terms for information on employment rights and consumer rights respectively. The information in qualifiers can also be used in automatic indexing and search applications to increase precision.

Synonyms

A 2010 presentation by Heather Hedden8 lists 17 different synonyms for the word synonym as pertaining to taxonomies. This neatly illustrates why synonyms or non-preferred or equivalent or ‘used for’ (etc!) terms are so useful in a controlled vocabulary. They enable the language of the domain to be modelled fully. They support users and computers alike to retrieve information more efficiently than a taxonomy of preferred terms alone could, or a folksonomy of user concepts that has no further term mapping. Synonyms – the variant language used by different user groups – can be acquired through various sources: • • • • •

search log analysis subject matter expert interviews user research open data repositories from the web analysing preferred terms for common linguistic variants.

User language versus ‘official’ terminology

The parameters of the project should help define whether official terminology or user language for concepts should be used, where these differ. This was especially true of a central government taxonomy I built. A correct term was ‘vehicle tax’, which then mapped to car tax, tax disc, road fund licence and other popular search terms. This was fine, as the taxonomy itself was not

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public-facing, but it was somewhat trickier to accommodate user synonyms if they were less neutral and more overtly politically charged. Thus there is a world of difference between the bureaucratic idea of ‘removing the spare room subsidy’ and the term, frequently used in the media, ‘bedroom tax’. This problem can also happen in reverse when organizations try to make their corporate language more user-friendly but get it wrong. I heard of one large retail organization where intranet users were unable to navigate to information about maternity leave because the site section had been relabelled ‘baby love’ as part of a marketing initiative.

Internationalization

For taxonomies that will be used in more than one country, it is important to agree right from the start what the default language or spelling will be, and stick to it. The global entertainment site I worked on (see the section in Chapter 3 entitled ‘The corporate librarian as a trusted internal adviser’) was managed from London and conducted most of its business in English, with translated content where applicable. Therefore the default language for taxonomy terms was English, with the further qualification that it was British English spelling. Terms in French, Latin American Spanish, American English and so on were marked with a language flag. As the flag could be mapped to local users’ profiles, this also had the advantage that they would only see terms in their language.

Testing and validation

Even the most straightforward-seeming taxonomies should be developed iteratively, and certainly in conjunction with some form of user-testing at one or more points during the project. As mentioned in the section on ‘User research’ on page 64, card sorting is a low-tech way of sense-checking a taxonomy with its potential users. Once there is a draft tree structure, it can be given to a group of users and/or subject matter experts and their feedback incorporated. If the taxonomy is very large and technical, however, cardsorting may be less practical unless individual branches of the structure can be assigned to different expert groups. Where the taxonomy will be incorporated into a website or search engine, there may be the possibility of running evaluations in a semi-live

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environment, by gathering data from search logs. Prototype or beta versions of websites mean the taxonomy can be used as part of wider usability testing or benchmarking. It is occasionally a salutary lesson to see a lovingly crafted taxonomy fail when tested in a wider application, though at other times there is satisfying vindication when testing shows that the taxonomy research and design processes have been robust and users can complete their tasks.

Releasing the taxonomy ‘into the wild’ – post-implementation considerations

So, having navigated the choppy waters of getting a project sponsored, kicked off, developed and completed, what comes next? It is very common for organizations to then regard their taxonomy as ‘finished’ or to make vague noises about having a look at the taxonomy again at some point down the line, with no real commitment to actually doing so. Yet arguably the postdeployment phase is the most important one to give the overall project a chance of success.

Training

The best practices for running taxonomy training share similarities with the principles for running stakeholder workshops (see section on ‘Stakeholder workshops’ on page 65). Broadly speaking, training for users of a new taxonomy should: • be engaging, especially if users may be resistant to changes to their roles • be no more technical than it needs to be to get users to apply the taxonomy correctly • emphasize the wider business benefits of tagging. It is a good idea to leave room for open discussion during or after the training. Sometimes informal question and answer sessions can yield as much information about concerns, gaps and problems as more formal task-based training (although the latter is obviously the highest priority when it comes to implementing a new application or process). In many cases, taxonomy creation is considered as a time-bound project, and those who created it may not be present to see it embedded into the business. This makes training

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especially important. See the section ‘Knowledge transfer’ on page 75 for more on how the taxonomist’s knowledge can be passed into day-to-day use.

Governance and stewardship

A governance process should be developed long before the taxonomy is live and in use, in order to promote successful adoption in the organization. The absolute minimum that is necessary is to ensure that the taxonomy has an owner from an early point, who is a named point of contact for queries and information. In my experience this is usually a single person, but it could also be a team, for example search specialists who look after different information assets. The business owner should have ultimate authority to accept or decline change requests. The idea of ‘data stewardship’ has recently gained traction as businesses start to develop strategies for exploiting large and/or diverse data assets. I worked on a public sector project where ‘owner’ was deemed too politically delicate a word, but ‘steward’ was considered acceptable as it implied more consensus and consultation. (In reality, taxonomy governance is similar regardless of how the role is framed.) I feel that someone with taxonomy skills should usually have the final say in a taxonomy-related dispute, as long as they are cognizant of all the opinions. An alternative to the centrally managed model is when control of the taxonomy is federated among different groups, for example regional or national branches, or business functions. This can have the advantage of giving responsibility to users who are experts in their area. Potentially this can free up the taxonomy manager to take more strategic oversight. The risk is that, as with any federated system, some participants will be more enthusiastic than others. When I managed a taxonomy for search at the BBC, some teams were alert to the value of the taxonomy in helping their content be found by a search. As a result they were proactive in updating terms and synonyms. Others were less enthusiastic or simply lacked resources to give it more attention, so their search results suffered if there was no central intervention to add relevant terms for them.

User groups and communication

For taxonomies that are used widely across the organization, and especially those that are used in different countries of global businesses, it is worth

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considering establishing a user group which can represent different stakeholders. Regular meetings might be needed particularly while the taxonomy is new to the enterprise, although over time a pragmatic approach of only meeting or updating when needed will save people’s time. There is almost a Goldilocks principle at play here: too many meetings and updates risk boring people, but if there is not enough there is a risk of valuable communication being lost and quality suffering over time. However, in fast-changing industries, or topic areas undergoing reform or restructure, the input of users with a real-life understanding of how the terminology is used is essential. They may be the people with the least time to add input, so a convincing case needs to be made to them that their subject knowledge is needed to ensure that the taxonomy remains accurate and useful. If necessary, online discussion forums can be set up to avoid the need for face-to-face meetings.

Review process

Any review schedule should be set up with the expected pace of change of the taxonomy in mind, and how critical it will be to get new terms available as soon as they are important enough to include. For taxonomies which work ‘behind the scenes’ of an application such as a search engine, it is efficient to just update the taxonomy with the new term, synonym, branch and so on as needed (assuming there are no technical barriers to updating on demand). In contrast, a taxonomy that is exposed in contexts with many users might need to be subject to more formal version control to avoid alienating users with frequent changes. I often hear of taxonomies being maintained only as a small percentage of someone’s already busy job. Even under those circumstances, however, it is worth trying to set up processes for identifying new terms, even if the amount of practical work that can be done at any one time is small. Content auditing or search log analysis will flush out how users are referring to concepts, enabling the addition of new synonyms. Within the business, corporate users should be given a means to make suggestions for new terms so that these can be considered for inclusion, for example, a ‘suggest a term’ link to an e-mail. While subject experts will notice immediately if a term has become obsolete, or is being used in an inaccurate way, it is more of a challenge to encourage them to feed their knowledge back into the system, and verify that a new term is more descriptive.

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Knowledge transfer

If the taxonomy has been built by an external consultant or by anyone who will not otherwise be involved in maintaining it after the project, then adequate documentation is a must. In practice, knowledge transfer can often get missed at the end of busy projects (although most taxonomists I have ever come across actually enjoy writing about their work). Documentation can also be useful for the taxonomists if they need to remind themselves in the future what they did! These are some things to consider including in documentation, if relevant: • • • • • • • • •

contact details for the business owner names and locations of files logins to applications licensing information for the taxonomy management tool procedures for handling updates in business terms and technically guidance on style, language, structure details of training materials links to user research findings information about design decisions taken during the project.

Conclusion

This chapter has attempted to provide the essential information for practitioners who are planning to implement a corporate taxonomy, whatever the circumstances of the application or the organization. Whether professionals are client-side or consulting, working on enterprise solutions or consumer products, it is important to remember that taxonomy projects require a mix of business and technical skills (and often lots of patience!). As someone who has worked in the taxonomy world for a while, I look forward at least once a year to seeing an article or blog titled something along the lines, ‘Why Taxonomies are Dead’. But while corporate budgets, headcounts and new projects are still squeezed to a certain extent, I feel there is room for optimism. Organizations are creating information in higher volumes than ever before, both for internal use and to create customer-facing knowledge products. The growth of interest in semantic web technologies (for example ontologies and linked data, data curation and big data analytics) offer

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opportunities for taxonomists to sell their skills in taming, shaping, filtering and curating information. The challenge for all of us who are passionate about organizing and using information is to spot the opportunities and sell ourselves, inside the organization and beyond.

References and further reading

Aitchison, J., Gilchrist, A. and Bawden, D. (2000) Thesaurus Construction and Use: a practical manual, Routledge.

Glushko, R. (2013) The Discipline of Organizing, MIT Press.

Hedden, H. (2010) The Accidental Taxonomist, Information Today.

Lakoff, G. (1990) Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, University of Chicago Press.

Lambe, P. (2007) Organising Knowledge: taxonomies, knowledge and organisational effectiveness, Chandos.

Rosenfeld, L. (2011) Search Analytics for Your Site: conversations with your customers, Rosenfeld Media.

Notes

1 http://boxesandarrows.com/controlled-vocabularies-a-glosso-thesaurus/.

2 www.taxonomywarehouse.com.

3 https://www.getty.edu/research/tools/vocabularies/.

4 http://databases.unesco.org/thesaurus/.

5 http://productivemuslim.com/productivity-ninja-how-to-run-productivemeetings/.

6 www.sla.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/SelectingTool_Pohs.pdf.

7 www.miskatonic.org/library/facet-web-howto.html.

8 www.hedden-information.com/Taxonomy%20Made%20Easy.pdf.

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CHAPTER 6

Practical knowledge management: stories from the front line

Danny Budzak

Introduction Knowledge management as a practice has the distinction of being ubiquitous but barely understood. At its best, it is the means by which an organization becomes able to fulfil its capabilities by realizing not just what information it creates and where to find it, itself an achievement, but also how to make the best of the skills of the people who work there, through communication and sharing. But it can simply be a new name given to existing activities in IT, internal communications or information departments, without any real ambition to improve the way these departments interact with the rest of the business. Worse, it can sometimes be brought in as a new initiative without any real appetite to challenge existing ways of working, leaving the newest recruit in the business to try and encourage the company’s major income-generators to work differently. The author has worked in a range of knowledge and information management roles over the past 20 years, in-house and as a consultant. He brings his experience to offer, first, an interpretation of the term ‘knowledge management’ and some of the concepts associated with it, and then some key areas of advice for anyone working in the area.

Background to knowledge management Management

Knowledge management can seem to be the most nebulous and hazy of subjects. A whole spectrum of the organization, from the top table to the rank and file, peer suspiciously at these words, wondering if they are just yet more

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management gobbledegook. The term has been around long enough now and goes in and out of fashion, something to be pondered when all is well within the organization, but to be discarded when times are hard. The knowledge management community does not always help itself with self-promotion, arguing among itself, in a how many angels on the head of a pin way, about what knowledge actually is, and how it can be described. So perhaps let us start with the second of the terms, ‘management’. Everyone who has ever had a job understands that. It is about being told what to do, when to do it and how to do it. There is an element of human interaction and emotion in there as well. There are ways and ways of telling and of doing. And yet if we think about this, how many really good managers have any of us ever had? In over three decades of working, I can still count on the fingers of one hand the managers I had who I really thought had ‘got it’ and who I had respect and some sort of begrudging admiration for. Being managed for many people is about learning how to work around the foibles and whims of their managers and of how to use kidology to get what they want and to deliver what they are expected to do. What do we, as a profession, want the management bit of knowledge management to do? One important point about management is that it costs just the same to do it badly as to do it well. In fact, it will probably cost the organization more eventually to do it badly than to do it well. And this important point needs to be at the forefront of winning people over to the ideas and practice of knowledge management. You need to talk about money, and you need to be confident that knowledge management can be quantified and can, in fact, help reveal the costs in time and money it takes to do things. Management is about an approach. It is about knowing what the organization is trying to do and where it is trying to get to. It is about organizing in a particular way, about control of how things are done and about measuring what is delivered. Authority is needed to manage, and an authority based on credibility. Those who wish to manage anything – people, buildings, technologies, knowledge – need to know what they are doing. Capability is better than blasé confidence. So we need to approach this by saying there is something in the organization, and it needs to be managed. But what is this something? What is organizational knowledge, and how can that be managed? Data, information, knowledge, intelligence, wisdom. We all have ideas and

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theories about these things. We do not necessarily need precise definitions, and it would not be helpful. But we need our own working definitions, and these are mine. These are what I used to differentiate between a data audit and an information audit or a knowledge audit. I use these definitions because I work in white-collar office environments, delivering public services. If you work in different environments, academic, research, manufacturing, your definitions might need to be different.

Data

Data, datum, dati. These are the building blocks. Data could be described as all the characters on a keyboard, the letters, numbers, punctuation marks that make writing possible. On their own, the characters do not necessarily have much intrinsic meaning, other than being the representation of letters and numbers. The letters a,e,g,h,s; the numbers 1,3,9; the characters *(“£$*&. But put these characters together and all sorts of things begin to happen. E20 1EJ does not intrinsically mean anything, until it is used as a postcode. Put lots of postcodes together, and aggregate which postcodes visitors to a shopping centre come from and the raw data is used to reveal all sorts of things. The collection of lots of data and the ability to analyse it in different ways creates the new science of big data, which is a separate topic; but at least it feels that data scientists have gained a lustre, which they never had before.

Information

Information. I like the word, and the fact that it contains ‘form’, like a clue in a cryptic crossword. It is the formation bit, which has importance here. The formation of data, the form of data, the pattern of data, the assembly of data in a particular way; that becomes information. In his wonderful book The Shape of Time: remarks on the history of things, George Kubler (Kubler, 1962) describes how objects can be viewed as emitting signals over time. Some of these are endogenous, they are part of the object itself, others are adherent, they are comments and tags added to the object by others. A good example of this is the painting by Vermeer called Girl with the Pearl Earring. We view the same painting as generations have since the 17th century, but since then a great commentary has been recorded about that painting, including a film. All of that commentary is the adherent signal.

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People involved in the world of knowledge management in business environments should be aware that there is a whole branch of philosophy that is concerned with the theory of knowledge, ontology and epistemology. This is fascinating and rewarding to study, but sadly most organizations don’t want philosophers, they want to know how to find things and how to run their businesses successfully.

Knowledge

So how do we define knowledge in business environments, in the organizations within which we work? If we check the thesaurus, we find that the word ‘knowledge’ is surrounded by terms such as ‘insight’, ‘intelligence’, ‘cognizance’, ‘information’ and ‘learning’. Knowledge implies understanding, that we have grasped a truth about something, what makes it tick, and what it is about. Knowledge is about context. I can read articles in Nature magazine about DNA sequencing, but afterwards I have little better understanding than I did at the beginning. I don’t understand the concepts, categories or terms that are used. Gaining knowledge of a subject takes time, a mixture of study, experience and cogitation. I have found the hardest part of knowledge management projects to be not the technologies, formal tools of classification and metadata, and building communities of practice, but understanding what it is the organization is doing and what it is trying to achieve. Only when that is grasped is the knowledge management bit possible.

Intelligence

I add the term intelligence here because it has become vogue-ish to talk about something called ‘emotional intelligence’ and despite being an awful term, it is actually quite a useful concept. Everyone has met someone who is very clever, but has no social skills whatsoever. There are certainly people like this in the world of IT I have been in at times, and probably where you work too. The problem with these people is that they can be useless at transmitting what they know, and annoy people so much that their cleverness is blunted and can actually be counter-productive. Intelligence is having knowledge and theory and being able to apply it so that people start to change their behaviours and to work in different ways.

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Forms of knowledge

The knowledge in an organization is what it has created over time about what it does and who it is. Knowledge is created within organizations using a variety of tools that range from pen and paper – unchanged for centuries, to smart phones and applications, so new that people now entering the workplace think they have existed in offices for ever. Some of us remember the days of typing pools and printed memos being sent around the office in big brown envelopes, which you might sign to say you have read the latest missive from the boss. This knowledge covers a very wide spectrum of activities and acts as a record and work-in-progress. The view of the knowledge changes over time as new issues emerge and as the personnel in the business changes. The value of the component parts of the knowledge changes as it moves from being live to being static, or redundant. Knowledge is in people’s head’s, and also formally captured in reports, briefing papers, research, accounts, annual reports, contracts, correspondence, drawings, maps, diagrams, images and websites. There is a lot of knowledge held within e-mails, and local, personal knowledge in notebooks. There is a danger of starting with the premise that knowledge management is hard, complex or complicated. It is possible to hear presentations which set out the complexity stall in such detail that the listener returns to the office and wants to lie down in a darkened sick room. Knowledge within the organization is understandable, and it is already being recorded. The key stores of this knowledge are paper files, digital files and the stuff which is in the old grey matter of everyone who works there. Paper remains an enigma in office environments. Where does it come from? Unless someone is using a typewriter, one has to assume that all the content which an organization has created for the past 20 years or so has originated from a computer and word processing package. Fair enough about the paper that comes from elsewhere – the stuff that others send you in the post – but why do organizations continue to churn out such vast amounts of paper copy? This is not the place to answer this question, other than to observe that the cultural change to the ‘paperless office’ has been a spectacular failure, and suggests that cultural change is a huge topic to be discussed in itself. Nonetheless, paper has the advantage that it cannot be replicated in the same way as digital content, is visible and is much easier to review quickly. The organization and management of knowledge captured on paper also

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benefits from the legacy of archiving and librarianship, which has been around for a long time and is supported by theoretical ideas and practical tools. Knowledge can be captured on a variety of digital media and forms. Cameras, websites, word processing, databases and specialist applications such as geographical information systems, computer aided design (CAD) and so on. A set of CAD drawings of a building captures a great deal of knowledge about the construction work. Supporting reports describe how the building was constructed and health and safety files and operational manuals describe how the building should be managed. There may be adherent knowledge in people’s heads, but unless there are formal ways to capture this, it can be lost, distorted or become reshaped over time. I would make a strong argument that businesses need to be educated that the representative knowledge of the organization is that which is formally recorded. If there are dozens of reports which state the building is fine in rain storms, but some clever clogs keeps walking around saying the roof is faulty, then that needs to be formally recorded. If this is the case, then there is clearly a knowledge management issue. But rather than wondering how you, as the knowledge manager, are going to organize the contents of someone else’s brain cells, you need to focus on getting that stuff written down in a formal way. And this is one of the knowledge management issues: how to ensure that the informal knowledge located in people’s heads is captured. Again, simplicity is a deadly foe of complexity. Rather than worrying about how difficult this is, think about how easy it is. The next section offers advice and anecdotal evidence of how you can identify the tacit and recorded knowledge within an organization, what you can learn from it, and how it can solve problems. Sometimes it is simple, sometimes dauntingly complex until the right questions are found.

Aspects of knowledge management Understanding your role

The role of the knowledge manager is not to create the knowledge. That is what people in the business do, be they lawyers, designers, social workers, engineers or IT developers. The challenge is to understand enough about what all the component parts of the business does without having to become an expert in each area, and that in diverse organizations there may be a need to organize and manage knowledge in different ways.

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You must understand what the business does, and that can be difficult for a new starter. Everyone will be given an unofficial probation period where you can ask what seem to be obvious questions. But never stop doing that. Some of the brightest people I have come across in working environments are never shy at asking. ‘What does that stand for? What does that mean?’ Your role is to learn. One of the hard practices is to learn how to learn. This is a terrible admission, but I have worked in some places for ages before I have totally got what goes on there. It would be difficult for many of us to describe how we have learned how to do certain things. A word or two of caution. There is a risk that people think that the role of the knowledge manager is to find out what is really going on in the organization and present the findings to an alarmed and startled chief executive. Unless you are extremely brave, incredibly stupid or a genius, this is totally the wrong approach. Your role is to help teams work together, and to make sure the knowledge of the organization is successfully shared and captured. The role is not to ‘put the organization to rights’. The politics of the organization need to be understood, but in the way a diplomat understands politics, not a militant rabble-rouser.

Learning from the organization

Organizations have specific cultures, and these cultures can vary between departments, across teams and within different buildings and are even local to particular spaces in an open plan environment. You must discover what these differences are so that if the issue to be resolved is knowledge sharing, you know the diverse environments in which this needs to be managed. Come to work much earlier than normal, stay later than usual; you will meet different people and have different conversations. Early mornings and late evenings can provide very rich conversation time when you might hear about all sorts of problems that don’t come out so neatly in formal meetings. If there are multiple sites, go and spend days working in them. Find out what it is like to hot desk in a strange environment with people you don’t really know. You will get a lot of insight as to how conditions like this can hinder or help knowledge sharing. If it is an open plan office you may be amazed at how different it is to sit at the opposite end of the same building. Different conversations are heard; the dynamics between people are different.

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What does this all mean for knowledge sharing, learning and problem solving? You must learn how to learn from other people. It is the listening bit. Here is a small secret from a well known and successful consultant, the sort of person who is sent to help organizations who know they have problems, but don’t know what the problems are. ‘So how do you do it?’, I ask him enviously. He told me: Well . . . I recently had a contract with corporation X. I arrive at the building and I

say to the guy who opens the door for me, ‘What’s it like to work here?’, and he’s

so taken back by this, he tells me three very sharp points. Then I go to the reception to check in.

‘What’s it like to work here?’ I ask the receptionist. I get two or three very

sharp points.

Then I get in the lift, and I ask the person with me, ‘What’s it like to work

here?’

And then I get out and introduce myself to the secretary of the chief executive,

and while I’m waiting to be sent in I say, ‘What’s it like to work here?’

And by the time I meet the chief executive of this large organization, I can say,

‘You know, the problem here is that no one knows what’s going on, no one gets told anything and the intranet is useless.’ And he thinks I’m a genius.

I like this guy’s style, because he is a questioner, and paradoxically, although knowledge management is very much about helping people learn, you do that best by getting them to learn for themselves by getting them to do the talking.

. . . but questioning what you hear

Everyone is taught to listen to business users and business users must drive the requirements, particularly their technologies. True? Well to a great extent, but there should always be an element of doubt. Are the business users always correct? A good way to test this thesis is to ask two lawyers in the organization for advice on the same issue. Don’t let the other know. See if what they tell you makes sense. All organizations are prone to myths and rumours. That is why an ear to the ground is needed, not because the goal is to set up an alternative management, but because if you are expected to know about business

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requirements in relation to the organization of knowledge, it is important to understand what the business requirements actually are. In one project, there was a great deal of noise about procuring an electronic document and record management system because the organization was about to receive 6–7 million documents from another organization which was being formally closed. Or was it 4 million documents? Or 5 million? It depended on who was being asked. Lists were produced of all the classes of data in the organization. These were duly taken around the business and people solemnly added a tick or a cross to folders called ‘procurement contracts’, ‘management team meetings’, ‘programmes’ and so on. Tender documents, invitation to tenders, pre-qualification questionnaires were duly produced. The one flaw with all of this was that the premise of the transfer of 6–7 electronic files was wrong. What was being presented as a business requirement was in fact a wish list. It was all based on ‘just in case’. It took a lot of meetings to get to the kernel of this and make business users explain clearly what it was they needed. Of the wish for millions, the actual transfer involved 120,000 documents and drawings, with a follow up of 139,000, some of which were duplicates of the 120,000; but within a specific database which enabled the integrity of the event history, document relationships and metadata to be retained. Phew. It took some guts to cancel a large and potentially expensive procurement but it meant that on the one hand the business actually got what it needed. It is better to admit a mistake in the original methodology, rather than ploughing on and spending money just for the sake of it. All the knowledge management techniques of problem solving were needed here – meetings, conversations, formal and informal interactions, desk top research, workshops, data analysis – and still it was wrong for the first three months, but because the knowledge management techniques were pursued, the project got there in the end.

Understanding the power of language

Vocabulary. Another book which is worth reading in a tangential way is Raymond Williams’ Keywords: a vocabulary of culture and society (Williams, 1976). Anyone interested in metadata and retrieval will already be picking up their ears. Vocabularies matter, as do classification and subject metadata. But

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do we understand how business users understand particular terms? Want some fun? On a project which grandly set out to create a platform for electronic democracy, we stepped back for a moment and had this thought. What do actual people, out there, beyond the walls of this office, think about local democracy? So we organized a series of workshops with – shock horror – local residents. And threw words at them such as ‘local democracy’ and ‘local authority’ and ‘scrutiny committee’ and asked them, ‘What do these mean to you?’ The results were as surprising as they were revealing. Here again, we got close to the users and discovered all sorts of issues about ‘categories’ which had been assumed, never been challenged and never been considered. This project was to build a web application which might have been used by thousands of people and yet there was no real knowledge about how those people were thinking. People did not really know what the term ‘local authority’ meant. They were very unsure what ‘local democracy’ meant beyond local elections, and there was some confusion as to who got elected and why. When terms such as ‘scrutiny’ were thrown into the discussion, the gap between the bureaucratic language of the public organizations and the actual public themselves was sharply revealed. Scrutiny? People said blankly, and in a rather worried way. ‘Is this where the council monitors all your e-mails?’ someone asked nervously, long before it occurred to the National Security Agency to do just that. We then built a web prototype based on the feedback from the workshops and recruited a different set of local people to see how they would find basic information such as how to find their local councillor. From a list of 12 top level categories, which included the terms ‘jobs’ and ‘health’, one of the questions was ‘What would you click on if you wanted a job?’. Answer, ‘health’. So the question was asked again, which category would you select if you wanted a ‘job’? The answer, ‘health’. OK, why did you click health? ‘Well, because I want a job in the health service.’

Using communities of practice

‘If it’s you against the world, then the world will win.’ Anyone who believes that somehow on their own, or with a small team, they can sort out the knowledge management issues of most organizations is going to lose. However, there are also pockets of good, even excellent, practice within

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departments and teams, and by individuals. Those people need to be organized; they are the allies in this. In one organization, some basic data auditing showed very wide discrepancies in how data and information were being organized and managed. The auditing also revealed that there were some people who understood how to manage information very effectively indeed. Those people were brought together in what became known as the iCoP – the Information Community of Practice. This was a loosely evolving group with no project plan or key performance indicators. It was formed to discuss the issues of information and knowledge management in an organization of over 10,000 people. Participants were invited to give presentations or talks about what they found worked well, or didn’t, or to give overviews on their good practice, or to describe some of the horror stories they had experienced within the organization. People were invited from other organizations to share their knowledge and to give a different perspective. These meetings grew and sometimes took on a seminar-like quality. But why not? An hour every fortnight of real knowledge-sharing about knowledge management provided a very effective tool. The idea of bringing together people from different organizations was used on a large government-funded customer relationship management project. Two of the most effective workshops involved site visits to particular local authorities where staff gave presentations on how they had implemented customer relationship management in two very different organizations. This was followed by visits to reception areas, one-stop shops and call centres, and a chance to meet and talk to a wide layer of people who had been involved in development, implementation and running not just a technical customer relationship management system, but a significant change programme on how customer services were delivered. Presentations, reports, discussion papers, briefings and all sorts of other documents were collated and each participant was able to take away not just new knowledge, but a set of written knowledge to re-use as appropriate. This type of knowledge sharing has multiple impacts. It reassures people that they are not alone in facing difficult tasks; it provides light bulb moments as the participants learn how other organizations have solved particular problems; and it provides the opportunity to see outcomes in a working, practical setting. From this, a group of people were able to continue to share knowledge over time, and across space, because although they were in

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different organizations, they had met, had social contact and shared their experience of the issues they faced.

Capturing knowledge

Create exit interviews. These are always seen as the province of human resources, but it can be very rewarding to hold exit interviews from a knowledge management perspective. One gambit here is to arrange to meet someone who is leaving to go through a leaver’s process – have they saved all business records to the relevant part of the folder structure? Have they removed personal e-mails? Have they sorted out all their paper work? Have they explained to team members where working documents and historical content can be found? Is there anything that might be worth knowing? Go on, probe here. It is the skeleton in the cupboard time. Don’t be frightened of asking these questions. I once saw a programme manager get all his project managers together at the end of a project and ask them directly, ‘What do I need to know?’ Carried out in the right way, exit interviews are a great way to capture knowledge about things which would not get recorded. And don’t worry about writing it all down, in fact make a point of not writing anything down. People will be more open if there isn’t someone in the room creating a verbatim report. The power of confession cannot be underestimated. Using this technique we discovered, for example, that Computer Aided Design (CAD) is occasionally wrong, that information standards were sometimes not applied properly, and that the data transfer the organization is reliant on didn’t cover everything it should have done. As with the most effective of knowledge management initiatives, exit interviews work because they get stuff out into the open.

Learning how people use technology . . .

It is always interesting how buzzwords or buzz phrases emerge and take off, becoming rigid truths without much thought. One such is ‘It’s not about the technology’. Really? Actually it is a lot about the technology. If anyone thinks it is not about technologies then try removing everyone’s computers, smart phones, access to the internet and e-mail and see what happens. Part of the problem is all organizations have a legacy of technologies, which in many

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cases have a whole range of built-in flaws. It would have been great if during the advent of the desk top computer someone had thought, ‘Hang on a minute, why are we replicating the desktop?’ The neat thing about computers is they can be networked so this could all be built in a collaborative way. Unfortunately this didn’t happen. What we got instead is this strange world of folders and files in shared drives, e-mails locked into individual inboxes, some stuff in databases (which may or may not integrate with each other) and now a layer of social media whereby some work interactions happen and some don’t. It is a monster to be honest, and there are no easy answers. The technology in some organizations – and readers may be familiar with them – still looks as it did 20 years ago. And 20 years in digital computing is aeons in normal time. Many assumptions can be made about the business users and technologies. But what really happens? Everyone at work interacts with technologies in the workplace and in their social life. They have smart phones, use e-mail, use social media, and create digital reports, spreadsheets and presentations. They use the internet to shop, communicate, find things out, book holidays and buy books. Consequently everyone has a theory. ‘Technologies have killed the art of conversation’; ‘No one reads books any more’; ‘All kids do is go on the internet’. I have been to high level conferences where this sort of nonsensical stuff, backed up by superficial reading in not very high quality newspapers, is churned out as if it is some sort of definitive truth. The interesting thing about technologies is that they get appropriated and accidents happen, and people do things with them that you might not expect. Even in a relatively small organization it might be surprising to discover how different users interact with technologies. One of my various backgrounds is IT development. By the time Friday afternoon came round, we were usually so zapped, we could not think too clearly, and certainly didn’t want to be doing any heavy technical stuff. And sort of by accident, we realized that this was the time of the week when we would cluster around someone’s computer and start talking in a different way. ‘What would happen if . . . ?’; ‘Could we do that . . . ?’; ‘How does that work . . . ?’ This was in the late 1990s when the world wide web was just taking off and this was when we learned how to build web forms, and set up chat rooms and bulletin boards. We even spent several Friday afternoons installing and configuring a search engine. Friday afternoon. The week is winding down and people are tired with all

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the stuff they have been doing in the 9 to 5. I took this Friday afternoon feeling into a different job – being information and knowledge manager in a very big organization. What could we do on a Friday afternoon that might be fun, and educational and helpful and capture stuff? The idea we came up with was the Friday afternoon internet café. We booked a room, set up half a dozen computers and declared open house for drop-in sessions. Those sessions are some of the most interesting things I have ever done at work. We sat with people and asked them to show us how they used the internet, how they used search engines, how they used e-mail. Not only was this tremendous fun, and tremendously funny, we learned far more than we ever taught. We saw people do things with the web that we had never dreamed of, which made our eyes water with incredulity, and think completely differently about what ‘the business users’ were actually doing. Getting close to people and what they actually do, rather than what they say they do, is really important in knowledge management. Drop the assumptions: the important thing is to learn how to learn, and learn exactly what is going on, rather than trying to teach people dogmatically.

. . . and knowing when technology is the solution

‘Facts have hard heads.’ It is worth remembering this, because one or two facts will change thinking and prepare people for the sort of change which knowledge managers might want to achieve. Faced with the perennial ‘tidy up of the shared network drive’, everyone sat in the room looking miserable. No one really knew what to do, the problem seemed too big and too intractable. The top level categories a confusing mix of functions team names and even installation software. Various half-hearted attempts had been made to re-organize this to a more useful hierarchical information structure. The O drive – even the mention struck gloom in the knowledge and information management team. Team members would sit in front of this, randomly opening folders to see if any enlightenment could be found. But this was the wrong approach. One of the biggest problems here was a team manager who for reasons still not understood fought against the purchase and use of software that would enable an analysis of the shared network drive to be carried out. We are not talking thousands of pounds here, the software cost is in the small hundreds. Dealing with awkward people is probably the hardest technique to learn.

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Fortunately for our project, the person left and we immediately bought the software, set up access for all the team and spent several happy and productive days analysing all the files, and then re-analysed them, and then again. For the first time in the history of the organization there were clear facts on the total number of files, on the total number of PDFs, spreadsheets, temporary files, html files, system files. The total volume of each folder could be visually represented showing which parts of the business had the largest amount of data. More; it is possible to use the tool to show the level of duplication. Hard facts emerged. There were 1.2 million files, of those around 40% were duplicates; another 30% of files were html (saved from the internet), miscellaneous files (usually corrupt in some way). Within a week there was a change from little knowledge about the files of the organization to knowing the precise numbers and volumes, and that of the total of 1.2 million files, only about 400,000 could be defined as business records. The creation of one piece of knowledge in this way can be a launchpad for all sorts of ideas. Once this was done, it made perfect sense to find out all the data in all the other data repositories. What did this show? That trying to find out some basic information can be a long and drawn out process; but seemingly simple questions can be a catalyst for change and for understanding.

Making meetings work

Meetings. Don’t we just love them? When I became self-employed, I looked forward to a life with far fewer meetings, but then after a while I realized I missed them. I missed the opportunities to day dream while someone else droned on about something I was not interested in. I missed the camaraderie that you get from good team meetings (some of which I have attended have been more akin to the Lavender Hill Mob’s party than anything to do with corporate business), and I missed the occasional great meetings where everyone took off with the most dazzling and useful ideas and discussion. Make sure meetings are chaired properly. Every knowledge manager should learn how to do this. Everyone will thank you for steering a meeting through a difficult issue, ensuring that there is a conclusion and actions if necessary. You are curating knowledge in this environment. This is your chance to ask questions, clarify, get agreement, tease out the skeletons in the cupboard(s).

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Meetings are a great aid to knowledge management and the knowledge managers need to know how to get the most from them. Think about who is going to be there. Loud voices are good; but not all the time. Go around the table and ask everyone directly what they think. Often small meetings of three or four people are much more productive than large meetings. Think about the arrangement of furniture. Does the meeting work better in an informal or formal way? Which people attending the meeting might act as a brake on a really good discussion? Meetings don’t need to have a verbatim account. They can be important places to clarify issues or to focus on particular things. Some of the best meetings might produce four bullet points for action, rather than four pages of minutes which no one will ever read. Stick at it in meetings and don’t let go until you properly understand something. On one web development project, we had six meetings with the business representatives before we understood that what they were trying to explain was the concept of layers. What they wanted was a way of creating layers of historical maps. But they didn’t have that vocabulary. They were historians, not computer people. When we finally understood what they wanted and said the single word ‘layers’ everyone started cheering. Take time to find stuff out. Another small piece of advice about meetings is something someone told me a long time ago. He found himself as knowledge and information manager in an organization of several thousand people, delivering a wide range of services to diverse teams. His role was not to ‘break down silo working’ and that was not really the issue. There is no reason why all groups of workers in an organization need to understand what everyone else does. But he had to understand what all the diverse bits did because he needed to try and produce a common platform for different groups to use to capture and share knowledge. This could have seemed overwhelming, but he attended as many meetings as he could, regardless of what they were about. This way he got to understand the general requirements of the organization, the specific requirements of different teams, and the different cultures within the organization. As he was an outsider to many of these meetings he found that at times people would tell less-often heard stories, because they felt that someone was showing genuine interest in what their business requirements were.

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Making training work

Let us be honest, we have all been on the most extraordinarily boring training sessions. Some problem is discovered in the organization and ‘with immediate effect’ everyone has to attend a ‘mandatory session’ on financial control, or tax inspections or data protection or whatever. Two hours of some of this stuff can tick a lot of boxes, but at the end no one is any wiser than they were at the start because they have spent the whole session so bored they have been planning their next holiday, a domestic DIY project or whatever else. Training sessions, if that is what they need to be called, can be an extremely valuable knowledge management tool, because they can raise the level, help people share knowledge and problem solve all at the same time. But they need to be organized properly. And they don’t need to be two hours. In my current role, I realized that no one really owned information security, so I decided to make that part of my role. That now involves delivering regular information security inductions, and I regularly go around the different departmental meetings to deliver short presentations. It breaks ice and gets me closer to the business and what they are thinking and doing. The connections people make when learning are often non-linear, and we cannot control them. In fact we should not try to control them. From information security we get to questions about remote access, which leads to the organization of the shared network drive, which leads to the problem of people not always using document control properly, which leads to not being able to find specific information when it is needed, which leads to the fact that the intranet is not being used to share knowledge, and that there is loads of stuff people know which is not written down anywhere, so you have to go and ask them, which is fine, until they go on holiday or are not in the office when you need something urgently. From a knowledge management perspective, having an opportunity to have this type of conversation with colleagues around the workplace is like striking gold. Another tactic we have recently used is to organize e-mail training. If we put out a flyer saying ‘knowledge management training’ I don’t think so many people would have come along. What is that? They are all thinking. But they all use e-mail; they all have things they like and dislike about it. They are always getting reminders that their e-mail boxes are too large. They all wonder what they should keep and what can be discarded. The sessions we have organized on e-mail training have generally been very

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well received. They are pitched as 20 minutes, but most have gone on for at least an hour. It is just the way in. The conversations might start about e-mail management, but then this goes on to records management, information sharing, remote access, the use of smart phones, the need to integrate data stores, the lack of communication among business users, and all sorts of stuff. That is what we want: the business users discussing these issues and learning from each other. We have also learned that this type of session is very good at creating the conditions for knowledge sharing without using the terms.

Effective auditing

In exploring how people use information, a great deal of effort is needed to find out about line-of-business applications: the number of files in them, the volume of the data, who the system owner was, the system administrator, who was actually using the data and what it was being used for. Oh, and asking how much each system cost. Difficult to find out? Well it can be. We live in a world in which government wants to know the exact cost of a cup of tea and biscuit for someone in a care home, but has no idea how much it spends each year on consultants and even less of a clue about how much has been spent on the huge number of government web projects that have come and gone. Asking these questions – including about costs – again shifted thinking and created new knowledge about what is actually going on in the business in relation to some of the building blocks of knowledge – the data, documents and files held in systems. The result of this piece of work was not just the hard figures, incredibly useful as they were. It raised issues about system ownership, data stewards, duplication and replication and the fact that unlimited storage is relatively free. By getting business users to describe these systems and provide some keywords, contact details and dates of the data, it was possible to create a layer of discovery level metadata. Too often knowledge and information managers carry out audits without knowing what is going to happen to their findings. What is produced is an accurate snapshot of a company’s information assets at a given moment, involving weeks or even months of work. But unless it is applied immediately, it becomes a redundant, unwieldy and ultimately dated set of figures. Related to data auditing is form auditing, which takes place too rarely.

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Forms are a key way in which organizations collect data, but how many organizations create a form library and assess what data the forms are collecting, and whether the data elements are the same, or whether the volume of forms is needed? In a project with a social services team, a forms analysis workshop was held and everyone was invited to bring as many forms as possible along. Working through the forms and assessing them meant that by the end of a very productive hour there were a lot less forms, and those remaining were a lot more consistent and clearer. By clarifying data collection, collation and data integration, it became easier to understand the wider issues of information and knowledge sharing between specialist social work teams, which is what the teams wanted. They are professional care workers primarily and should be given the support to do their jobs, not be turned into administrators.

Effective process review

A good way to learn how something is being done, what the problems are and how they can be addressed is to carry out a process review. This might be part of the implementation of a new application, but it could equally be used in a non-technology project looking at data collection and knowledge and information sharing. Process review can be as much about knowledge management as it is about business analysis. Process review can work well in workshops horizontally across the organization – through teams involved in the review and their interactions – and vertically. How does information and knowledge pass upwards and downwards in the organization, and how does that impact on how work is done, and decisions are made? One project looked at a refuse collection service, starting from the point of view of the drivers and workers on the waste disposal trucks, continuing to the point of view of the director of the department. This group of people were brought together to explain what they did, and what they felt worked and what didn’t work. Knowledge managers can play a key role in this type of interaction to help everyone understand what knowledge is needed to carry out the entire operation, and which parts of the knowledge need to be shared between which people. I have also been involved in a more horizontal process review, involving

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setting up ‘one-stop shop’ points of contact for a large local authority. It did not look at the managers and the workforce, but at different teams, with seemingly diverse functions, which were dependent and reliant on each other to make the operation happen. The challenge was to introduce a new way of interacting with the public, to introduce the concept of customer services and to develop and implement a customer relationship management system which would capture all of the customer contacts and track the responses and actions which flowed from those contacts. The teams involved included existing customer services staff, IT developers, designers for the interior of council buildings, language advisers and project managers. There were a lot of competing as well as complementary interests in this mix. IT wanted to do it the IT way; customer services staff wanted an alternative to having to log into lots of different systems in the morning; the project managers kept looking at their watches to make sure everything was measured by time; and the accountants were counting up the costs.

What is next?

So you have read this and you want to be a knowledge manager. You need to read. Anything by Elizabeth Orna is a good starting point; if you have to choose, why not Making Knowledge Visible (Orna, 2005)? Get a copy of The Social Life of Information (Brown and Duguid, 2000) for good examples and a good read. Cultivating Communities of Practice (Wenger, McDermott and Snyder, 2002) is more academic but very readable and full of insights and ideas. The Financial Times has sharp, concise articles about organizational theory and culture, technologies in the workplace, case studies and business profiles. It has got to be a regular read. Kubler’s book The Shape of Time (Kubler, 1962) is one of my favourite reads; get too into that and you might decide you really want to be an art historian, but that field too needs knowledge managers. Any city in Britain has all sorts of free seminars and workshops at local universities, or organized by bodies such as the Information and Records Management Society and the British Computer Society. Go along, they are excellent ways to learn and to build up networks. A few observations in conclusion. If the starting point is ‘complexity’ and

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‘complication’ then the world can look grey and confusing. If the starting point is the fascinating interaction of people and technologies in the cauldron of work, the madness of the office, the barking orders of the boss and the foibles of the top table, the funny interaction with your colleagues and the surreal nature of sitting in front of a computer all day, then knowledge management has endless possibilities. Approached in this light you can have a lot of control over what you do, and not everyone has that liberty. Take it seriously, but have fun with it. You are the ghost in the machine; you can innovate; you can turn the world upside down, if you have the skills and confidence to do it. We are in the world of work. We are not going to overthrow it (yet) but we can change and influence it. That is not a bad ambition by anyone’s standards.

References

Brown, J. S. and Duguid, P. (2000) The Social Life of Information, Harvard Business School Press.

Kubler, G. (1962) The Shape of Time: remarks on the history of things, Yale University Press.

Orna, E. (2005) Making Knowledge Visible: communicating knowledge through information products, Gower.

Wenger, E., McDermott, R. and Snyder, W. (2002) Cultivating Communities of Practice: a guide to managing knowledge, Harvard Business School Press.

Williams, R. (1976) Keywords: a vocabulary of culture and society, Oxford University Press.

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CHAPTER 7

Successfully managing your team through change and transition

Andrew Grave

Introduction This chapter examines the possible changes that corporate information departments may encounter and the drivers behind them. It provides practical advice on leading your team through such changes and successfully transitioning them to a new way of working. It examines the warning signs that tell you such changes may be coming, and seeks to answer the question: how can a corporate information department prevent unnecessary change occurring? The author, in addition to being a veteran of several organizational changes himself, interviewed several senior managers with experience of change in the workplace. Their joint experience and perspectives should provide the reader with the means to recognize the signs that a restructure may be coming, how to be ready for it and what to do if it happens.

Why change happens to information departments

Corporate information departments have changed out of all recognition during the last 30 years. From their original days as corporate libraries housing extensive hard-copy collections in prime city locations, they have evolved in many ways. A significant amount of content has migrated onto the web, removing the role of corporate information departments as gatekeepers of this information, with a consequential reduction in headcount. Technology has removed the absolute need for information departments to be located in expensive city

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centre offices in a head office location. They can potentially be based in cheaper parts of the country or even overseas. Conversely, as team members no longer need to be close to physical content, some have co-located with their internal customers rather than as part of a separate information centre. While traditional library research roles have reduced in number, technological change has also provided corporate information departments with new opportunities. Many managers of these departments have recognized that they possess the skills to establish corporate intranets and knowledge management solutions and have expanded into these growing areas. The abundance of information available online has proved a huge benefit for companies in many ways but it has resulted in information overload. While busy executives can now put their hands on hundreds of pages of apparently relevant information, they lack the time and experience to make sense out of it. And with inexperience and time pressures come the risks of acting on incorrect information. From this situation, information departments have created the role of research analyst where a researcher synthesizes, analyses and summarizes the information. Further developments along this path have resulted in information departments developing expertise in the areas of competitive intelligence, industry analysis and compliance. These have all helped to raise the perceived value of the services which corporate information departments provide. All these changes have a significant impact on the daily working life of the information professional. The transition will in many cases have been traumatic, offering a steep learning curve even where positive and challenging a profession that has been characterized as conservative to work outside its comfort zone. This chapter first examines how you can learn to be ready for change, and pre-empt its negative effects, and then offers suggestions on how to manage it. There are many changes that corporate information departments go through. In the context of this chapter, we are considering the more significant changes that a department may face. These include: • reducing headcount • relocating the department to a lower-cost UK or overseas location while still remaining part of the organization • outsourcing all or part of the corporate information department’s functions to another company either in the UK or overseas

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• merging the corporate information department with another department, for example learning and development or marketing • decentralizing or centralizing the information service • merging two corporate information departments following the combination of two organizations.

The warning signs

Identifying when a restructure is likely to occur can be beneficial by providing you with valuable preparation time. What signs should an information manager look out for? The appointment of a new CEO or someone new in a senior management role was highlighted by interviewees as a likely warning that the corporate information department may be under threat. Such people can be hard to influence as they come in with the clear intention of making changes. They may have been appointed with exactly this purpose, by a management board wishing to change the corporate culture. Corporate information departments are sometimes viewed as ‘nice to have’ departments rather than essential functions. On other occasions, internal and external reviews into the organization may well be the catalyst for their restructure or elimination. Those working in government-funded organizations may have some longterm indication as to how their departments or organizations may fare as spending plans and political manifestos are published. The performance of an organization can often impact on a corporate information department. Some professional services firms maintain strict feeearning-to-service-staff ratios. A reduction in fee-earning staff will inevitably follow through into non-fee-earning roles, particularly those areas that are not seen as aligned to client acquisition and retention. Ironically, the growth of a company may also pose a threat to an information department. The expansion of an organization into new markets may well result in budgets and space being reduced in existing areas, including the corporate information department. This is particularly the case if the information department has relied on similar groups of users, who are now no longer the key figures in the organization. The performances of many commercial organizations can be connected to the economic cycle and therefore investment in the information department. This varies significantly between industries. For example, companies

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providing foreign holidays tend to expand when the economy does well but contract when the economy performs poorly. However, providers of more essential goods such as water companies tend to be relatively recession-proof as demand for their services does not reduce significantly in downturns. Understanding how your organization has performed during past economic cycles can be a useful indicator as to how it may perform in future ones and highlight if change will occur to the information department. Sometimes change may come out of the blue. Keeping your ears to the ground and looking out for indications that change may be afoot is critical, but don’t get too paranoid! Warning signs may include: • • • •

projects unexpectedly put on hold regular briefings cancelled sign-off of regular expenditure delayed requests for lots of management information.

Reasons behind possible changes

While every organization’s experience of change is unique, it can be useful to consider the key drivers behind changes in information departments. The strategy tool PEST, which looks at political, economic, social and technological drivers, can be useful to examine the reasons behind such changes. Table 7.1 shows a PEST analysis for UK corporate information departments with a further category added, organizational. These different types of changes cover Table 7.1 PEST analysis for corporate information departments Political

•

Government spending levels impact government-funded corporation information departments. • Governments may close services and merge or separate departments and information departments will be impacted accordingly. • Government legislation around money laundering and client identification and freedom of information requests impacts demand in some corporate information departments.

Economic

•

Demand for the services of some corporate information departments in some industries, e.g. property, are heavily linked to the economic cycle while those in other industries, e.g. utilities, are not. • Even in industries which are unaffected by recession, economic austerity may be used as an excuse for downsizing where this is ideologically preferred. • In economic downturns, management may be more open to changing operations in order to save money. This may favour outsourcing.

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Table 7.1 Continued Social

• •

•

•

• • Technological

Current entrants to workforce used to using online tools and the internet. Growing internationalization may lead to centralization of corporate information departments servicing several countries and requirements for multilingual information professionals. The management trend since the 1980s away from doing everything in-house towards focusing on the core business has favoured the introduction of outsourcing. A move to specialization and flexible working has created a need for knowledge workers to facilitate workers to share information across boundaries. The growth of home working and remote working has led to changes in the way that information departments operate. Growing expectation for instant access to information.

•

The move away from hard copy to information online searchable by end-users may reduce need for information professionals and change the skills of others. • Some online tools have become simpler to use removing the need for a skilled intermediary. • Design of online tools focused on end-users which bypass information professionals, e.g., in business information, Bureau van Dijk’s Transfer Pricing Catalyst aimed at tax professionals. • Communications infrastructure provides the ability for many information services to be located thousands of miles away from the end-user. • The use of intranets in many organizations has lead to corporate information departments providing these services.

Organizational •

The expansion of an organization into new areas may require budget cutbacks in other areas. • The merger of an organization with another will usually result in corporate information departments merging; conversely the splitting-up of an organization can result in new departments being set up. • New senior managers often arrive with an agenda. They may wish to make their mark on the organization by changing the corporate information department. • An information manager may wish to make changes to pre-empt decisions being imposed from above.

both those which threaten the status or existence of the information department, and those which offer it new opportunities.

Can change be prevented?

In some situations, it may simply be impossible to prevent change happening. In many cases, by the time a consultation happens, and you are given the

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opportunity to provide a justification for your case, the decision has already been made and objections will be found no matter how much value you prove. However, there are many things which can be done to help minimize the chances of it happening. Some of these concern marketing the information service, and there are more suggestions in this area in Chapter 3. A 2013 Financial Times corporate report in conjunction with the Special Libraries Association entitled The Evolving Value of Information Management (SLA, 2013) found five essential activities associated with successful information services: • • • • •

communicating value understanding drivers managing processes keeping up with technical skills providing decision-ready information.

Four of these attributes will be discussed below. The fifth, process management, is an area where only 13% of executives felt information professionals performed as ‘outstanding’. It recommended providing selfservice platforms, collating existing internal data so it can be harnessed, and ensuring that feedback is given on work to ensure it is as appropriate as possible, if it was used, and what the outcome was.

Understand the business and its drivers

By fully understanding how the business operates, where it gets its revenue and how its measures its success, the information department can both align itself more fully with the goals of the organization and understand how any changes in performance feed through to the information department. Jacky Berry heads the library at the British Medical Association (BMA), which is the professional association and trade union for doctors in the UK. She observed, ‘There was once a common belief that the income for the BMA was guaranteed as all doctors had to join us. In fact, membership of the BMA is voluntary and the organization has to market itself to its customer base to justify its existence.’ By knowing this, Jacky was able to position the library as a key membership benefit and her reporting line moved into membership services, helping secure the future of the service.

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Get on to committees

Establish what the key committees are and get yourself and your team onto them. Don’t wait to be asked or feel affronted that you have not been asked. The organizers of such committees may automatically select people from high profile departments but not from smaller ones such as information departments. Attending committees gives you an inside track to concerns at the heart of the business, raises the profile of your service and provides an opportunity to influence key people in your organization.

Understand what happens to the information you provide

How is the information you provide being used and how can you add value to it? For example, if it is to be used in a piece of content marketing or thought leadership, could a member of your team add value to it by contributing a finished article rather than supplying the raw information?

Understand reputation and compliance issues and how your intervention as a bearer of information standards can make a difference

If someone makes a decision based on incorrect, out-of-date or insufficient information, what is the damage to your organization’s reputation? The damage incurred by an organization in such situations goes far beyond a fine. The loss of reputation can have a multiplier effect with prospective clients unwilling to take up your organization’s services, new talent no longer keen to join your organization, and existing clients and key staff considering moving or renegotiating contracts. By understanding this fully, you can better justify the costs of your team.

Network internally

It is hard to put a price on the value of internal networking as it has a wealth of benefits. To do it properly, you need to invest time getting to know your peers and to keep this contact going regularly, be it through lunches, postwork drinks or trips to the local coffee shop. Networking helps you in many ways. It helps you to understand the political dynamics of an organization, to persuade others of your team’s worth, to cultivate an internal support

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network, to receive informal feedback and to hear internal news first. Importantly, people get to know you as an individual as opposed to a name on an organizational structure chart, which should assist in any restructuring.

Market your service

One of the side-products of information migrating online has been to reduce the physical presence of information departments. Furthermore, information requests that were originally conducted face to face have been replaced with more anonymous e-mail and Messenger conversations. Unfortunately, no corporate information department can expect people automatically to be aware of its services; unless the department invests in this area, its usage will suffer. As well as targeting end-users, it is useful to target people in other departments who may become advocates. If you take the time to cultivate people and to help them understand your services, they can help represent your service on occasions when you and your team are not there. It is useful to collect case studies. These can be used proactively in marketing and reactively if you are quickly asked to demonstrate your department’s worth. External promotion of your service can prove valuable. If you are able to win awards for your company, not only will you raise the morale and profile of your team but you will put your team in a stronger position if a new CEO joins and considers downsizing it. Marketing is not just about promoting your service, it is all about understanding the changing needs of your customers. User surveys can be a great way of engaging with a wide client base to better understand their needs and to raise awareness of your services. They may also unearth potential supporters whom you may wish to tap in the event of a proposed restructure.

Prove your return on investment

Perhaps one of the hardest parts of an information manager’s tasks is to devise some meaningful statistics which reflect the value. It can be tempting to measure the things that are easily measured. Consider what is valued by the organization and try to measure that. Start with what you would like to measure, look at how other departments and organizations measure their return on investment, and devise your own indicators. A traditional measure

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may be ‘produced 30 company profiles’. An organizationally aligned one would be ‘provided 30 company profiles helping win £6m-worth of business’. It is worth spending a lot of time in getting this area right as it may receive scrutiny and form part of a future case for maintaining your department.

Evolve your department and get it into the best possible shape before someone else does

Information departments continue to face scrutiny. If you are not providing the best possible service with the budget you have, then your department is potentially vulnerable. As technology and other factors shape your users’ needs and your ability to provide your services, you need to evolve your service. This may result in your having to make some tough but necessary decisions. As an information manager once told me, it is the three Rs – the right people in the right jobs providing the right services. Formerly an information manager, outsourcing adviser Gillian Watt of Isential urges information managers to understand what their core services are, and to focus on them: ‘The business is paying for your team’s professional skills so use them to deliver that great quality service. Concentrate on the core services where you add value. Consider outsourcing the non-core services. This could improve and control the capacity, budget and resource of the information service, freeing up much needed time to concentrate on core valuable work.’

Stay on top of changes

Information professionals have been astute at moving into new areas such as intranets. They need to continue their agility, monitoring changes that impact on the broader information field in technology as well as specific changes in the needs of their users. Jacky Berry, library manager at the BMA, highlighted that her library had historically focused exclusively on medical content, but the legislative changes in healthcare meant that GPs were now moving into commissioning services and needed to develop their commercial skills. By understanding the impact of this legislation, she could acquire the necessary resources to meet their anticipated future needs. If change cannot be prevented, then there is still the possibility that you can influence it. You will not help matters if you dig your heels in and try to resist

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all changes. It is highly likely to be inevitable and you will be helping no one, especially your team, with this approach. Put your business head on. Acknowledge the situation faced by your superiors. Try to make matters as straightforward for them as possible, and you may be able to optimize the outcome for you and your team. Yours is a specialist area, they employ you for your judgement and are likely to welcome your suggestions. You may wish to provide a list of three options together with the implications of each decision. Kate Arnold, SLA President and Information and Support Programme Lead at Macmillan Cancer Support, suggests that you prepare your arguments for how the organization would work if there was no information department. At an appropriate time, enlist the support of your advocates within the business to push your case.

Support during change

Change in an organization frequently brings with it threats, negativity and a degree of uncertainty. The ability to manage and motivate your team through change and to find the opportunities in change is important. Transitioning your team through change can be a stressful experience. The demands on your energy and emotions are high. Not only will you have to keep your department operating as effectively as you can, you will have to drive change forward while supporting your team. Having a good support network is vital in supporting you in a period of change. All the information managers I spoke to cited their personal network of fellow information managers as being the most useful people to help them. They have been through similar experiences and can share their experiences and tips with you. Work peers can also be useful, for they too have valuable advice to provide. Human resources (HR) staff can be a great support when dealing with hard situations. Many information managers I have spoken to have suggested building up strong relationships with HR staff when they join an organization. That way, it is easier to call on them when you need them. Your superior may seem a logical person to turn to for support. However, there may be an understandable reluctance to do this as it may appear that you are not managing well. Moreover, the changes may well have been instigated by that person and your attempts to mitigate them may be interpreted as conservatism and self-interest.

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The importance of having a good personal support network at home and among friends should also not be underestimated. Your friends and family will help raise your energy levels enabling you to tackle your time at work with renewed vigour. During a time of change, there is one thing above all which information managers should do: communicate effectively with their team. The temptation is sometimes to do the opposite. Not only do you still have to deliver an everyday service, you may have to spend extra time in meetings about the proposed changes. And to make matters worse, you may have few answers to provide to your staff. Information professionals, with their eye for detail and hunger for knowledge, may find such situations particularly challenging. If there are people in your team at a certain level, for example supervisors whom you can bring into the planning stages, then do so. Do not do everything yourself unless absolutely necessary. Being with your team at this time may not seem the most attractive place to be but that is exactly where you should be. It gives them security in a time of change, and enables you to understand how they are feeling, to tackle any rumours which they may share with you and to understand if there are things going on in their personal lives which you need to consider. Continuing to provide an information service while implementing cuts is a challenge for managers faced with disruption making the work more difficult, and a demotivated workforce. Diana Nutting, formerly head of information and strategy at Business Link for London, cautions that information managers should ‘avoid the temptation to absorb cuts while trying to provide the same service. You will lose good people who feel they are being exploited.’ Faced with these challenges, it can be easy for the information manager to lose hope. However, change happens all the time, and there are models which can help you pull your team through a difficult time.

The Change Curve

One approach which can help managers shepherd their teams through change is the management tool known as the Change Curve. You can use it to understand the experience which you and your team are going through and you may wish to discuss it with your team. It can help you plan how you

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will reduce the negative aspects of change and move your team through it more quickly. The Change Curve is attributed to psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s work on personal transition from grief and bereavement. It describes the four stages people go through when they encounter and adapt to change. The Change Curve is illustrated in Figure 7.1. The four stages are: • • • •

Stage 1: Shock and denial Stage 2: Anger and fear Stage 3: Acceptance and moving on Stage 4: Embracing change.

It is important that you help your team make the transition to the new order. Each stage of the Change Curve requires a different approach:

Information

Support

Exploration

Rebuilding

Strengthened by coming through

Shock Denial

Effectiveness

Realization

New goals

Sense of loss Anger Decision Fear Self-doubt Frustration Acceptance and moving forward

Depression

Acknowledgement Time

Figure 7.1 The Change Curve

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Stage 1 Information

When a change is announced, your team will be understandably shocked and may be in denial until reality starts to bite. If you have to communicate the change process to them, you need to prepare thoroughly. Book a room in the most appropriate location you can and try and avoid all distractions. You should practise your message choosing your words carefully. If appropriate, seek feedback from HR or a peer. Your message should explain: • why the changes are being made: now is not the time for a big corporate presentation but you need to tell the team why the change is needed • what is happening, how the changes will affect your team, and timescales • the support being made available. Your team needs to accept that the existing order is ending before they are ready to accept the new one. You need to define and acknowledge their loss and the emotions they are going through. Failure to do so may result in their resistance to the change. Team members may react in uncharacteristic ways. Prepare yourself to accept anger, silence, interruptions and crying. You need to acknowledge their reactions and feelings (for example, ‘I can see that this is very difficult for you’) but ensure that the message is delivered. This may demand skills that you have never used before as a manager. You are likely to receive many questions, so allow sufficient time to answer them. Most questions will probably be about the process itself. It is also worth preparing answers to some of the more difficult questions you may be asked. Possible questions include: • • • •

Why me? Why is it happening to our department and no others? Why is this happening when our organization is making lots of money? How can I concentrate on work when I don’t know if I will have a job next month? • What is going to happen to the project I am meant to be starting? • Are we still going to have appraisals?

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As well as the initial announcement, ensure that you communicate frequently. People will only be able to take in a certain amount of information each time. It is also important to inform other departments about the changes that are taking place. It may come as a shock to some as change often happens to information services which are busy and well used. Getting the message out to user departments that changes are taking place to the service should help prevent anger when services are no longer offered, and may bring support at an early stage when it may still make a difference. Although this can be a very hard time for you as a manager, you may find a degree of relief in being able finally to share the situation with all of your team and colleagues.

Stage 2 Listening and support

Once people realize that a restructure is really happening, they are likely to react negatively. They may start to mourn the loss of the working life that they have and feel angry about the situation. At this point, your team is most vulnerable to disruption, which can escalate if not managed properly. Staff may feel a bit lost, so provide them with a sense of direction. Try and set some short-term goals so they can achieve some quick wins, but above all encourage them to talk about how they are feeling. In the first stage, your speaking skills were important. In the second stage your listening skills are important. Your objectives are to help your team members explore their feelings and to think about their next steps, with the aim of transitioning them along the Change Curve. Take time to speak to your team individually and, as in the first stage, find an appropriate venue. Give each conversation your fullest attention. Deploy open questions like ‘where?’, ‘who?’ and ‘how?’ Encourage the speaker to continue with prompts like ‘and then?’ and ‘tell me more’. Avoid the temptation to interrupt even if you disagree with their comments. Don’t feel the need to fill silence by speaking. Give your team member time to reflect. Check what you think you are hearing is actually being said. Ask your team member to provide examples to illustrate what they mean. Paraphrase back what they have said, for example ‘It sounds like you are saying that . . . ’. When they finish a point, ask some specific questions. It is important to appreciate that change may affect staff in a negative way

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that you may not have foreseen. For example, you may think that freeing someone from a menial task can only be a positive thing, but whoever is performing it might be the best person in your team at performing that role. Take it away from them and you take away their position of respect, leaving them unsettled. It is important to understand that everyone goes through each stage of the Change Curve at their own speed. Those who are uncomfortable with change will stay in the first two stages longer than those who are comfortable. If members of your team have left, acknowledge the contribution that they have made. Ensure that you remind your team of the support that the leavers have received so they do not feel guilty at remaining. As humans, a lot of us possess a fear of the unknown. The more certainty about the future you can provide your team at an individual level, the sooner each member can progress along the Change Curve.

Stage 3 Exploration

Your team has now passed the turning point and you are out of the most dangerous period. Members of your team are moving on and no longer focusing on what they have lost. They are instead thinking through what the changes mean for them, both good and bad, and how they will adapt. You need to help each team member explore in more depth what the changes mean for them and what their new daily working life looks like, if they still have one. If you can give them an opportunity to experience what the changes will mean then do so. For example, in the case of relocation this might entail visiting the new location.

Stage 4 Rebuilding

With your team now embracing your new ways of working, you can start to see the benefits of the changes you have been through. Your team members should be enjoying the new challenges they are tackling and will feel motivated and effective, more so because they have been through a tough experience and survived. You need to continue to invest time and energy into making the change a success. Do celebrate success but be respectful to those who have left.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to the following individuals who offered their insight and time during interviews: Gwenda Sippings (Head of Knowledge and Information Management at the MDU), Jacky Berry (Library Manager at the BMA), Kate Arnold (SLA President and Information and Support Programme Lead at Macmillan Cancer Support) and Diana Nutting (former Head of Information Strategy and Development at Business Link for London).

References and further reading

Bridges, W. (2009) Managing Transitions, 3rd edn, Nicholas Brealey Publishing.

SLA (2013) The Evolving Value of Information Management, Special Libraries Association and Financial Times, http://ftcorporate.ft.com/sla/.

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CHAPTER 8

Successful management of insight, intelligence and information functions in a global organization Philip M. Weinberg

Introduction While some organizations have shrunk over the years, others have grown – through merger, acquisition or the absorption of formerly public sector operations – into global entities occupying hubs and centres across different countries and continents. Large multi-site global organizations, whether service-led or professional, face a unique set of challenges in managing their information and knowledge. They have significant knowledge requirements: they need to know about all the sectors in which they work, in all the territories in which they are based, and about all those which might offer opportunities for the business in the future, not to mention legal, regulatory, technological and political changes which might affect current or future activities. They need to know what everyone else in the organization is doing, what knowledge is being created and how they can re-use and exploit it. In today’s informationhungry world, such organizations employ teams of knowledge and information experts: research analysts, intelligence specialists and knowledge managers to ensure that front-line staff can do their jobs effectively. Although the trend is now to employ only at the higher level of analytical work, with more basic searching and ‘transactional’ activity automated, outsourced or carried out by end-users, some organizations also manage offshore teams who remain part of the enterprise while operating in cheaper labour markets. The author of this chapter has managed knowledge workers for a global consultancy for a number of years. In this chapter, he shares his advice on how to manage the challenges of providing information to a global

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organization. He covers both those concerned with keeping the information products relevant and well used, and the cultural, practical and human problems associated with teams dispersed around the world.

Successful global information functions

Careers in global markets, issue and policy analysis and knowledge management attract people with a wide variety of superb skills and aptitudes. And so they should. It is a privilege to watch the flow of data around the world, rewarding to see the impact of our distillation of it, and enriching to work with others who are trying to achieve the same goals. It is fun – and we want to carry on analysing or researching and be recognized for doing so successfully. Managing this environment is especially rewarding, offering the chance to make your own contribution to exactly how this profession evolves. This environment is changing, just as it has been in flux for decades since the advent of the internet and other communication and storage technologies. ‘Insight’ is a global business development tool rather than useful back-up material for a desired strategy. The boom in analytics that is already transforming industries from advertising to insurance moves market intelligence right up to the beginning of the planning process in the minds of leaders. Martin Sorrell recently and famously described the shift in power within his industry from mad men to maths men (although there is little doubt which department makes a better Martini) (Sorrell, Undated). There is increasing suspicion that hidden in a particular cut of market data is the secret to the next big thing. Amazon has gradually reduced its staff of human editors and review writers in favour of a recommendation engine based purely on sales data, which consistently beats their editors’ gut feels in predicting who is likely to buy what next. If there ever were the mythical days of comfy information offices where people whiled away the day pretending to be Connie Sachs from John Le Carre’s Smiley novels, they have mostly passed. This big data flavour also colours a lot of strategic discussion around the future global role of information services. Luckily, we know, though our leaders often don’t, how a higher volume of material does not always lead to better information, and how to help keep balance in corporate strategy or governmental policy. For knowledge professionals, therefore, it is a fantastic opportunity to filter the maelstrom of information and provide strategic guidance to an employer

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or client. Meanwhile, frankly, in global organizations, the term ‘information professional’ has almost passed out of use – and while the cycle might yet turn and businesses will begin to value and recall what that title actually means, it is not evident if this is already happening in 2014. The customer is getting more sophisticated just as you are – able to employ search tools from their smartphone with mind blowing access to data. We are all information professionals now; hence your emphasis should be on the insights you bring to the global role rather than your undoubtedly stellar information retrieval and codification skills. How will we define the ‘success’ of a global organization referred to in this article’s title? That is a high bar: first, if global knowledge is a strategic asset valued by leaders, you are off to a good start. Second, you need to be able to respond credibly to the problems they are asked to solve every day. Third, analysts in a global team should delight in discussing the international global scope, contacts and potential of their working lives. Fourth, the challenges and opportunities of change such as the impact of analytics should be openly discussed and embraced. Obviously there are many other constituents of success, but these crucial four are reflected in the themes of this paper. My credentials for writing about this topic are as follows: I have led insight teams spread across 24 locations worldwide, both solo and as part of a management team. I am part of the broader management community for a global organization with over 1500 knowledge professionals (and one which is consistently at or near the top in every ranking of knowledge culture and how much distinctive knowledge it is able to create). I am fortunate to lead one of the global learning programmes we use to develop our professionals to be insight driven, take well chosen risks, and tell a story senior business people find interesting. The people I work with outside ‘knowledge’ are phenomenally interested in how any high performing business works, and we harvest insights from all over the world. Regardless of this, let me emphasize that this piece of writing is entirely from my own perspective. The words reflect my experiences, but not the policies or opinions of my employer or any of my colleagues. Any examples given should not be taken to have any implications for historic work of my employer, but as evidence that I found the time to read more broadly.

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Quick win: 17 ingredients of a successful global knowledge organization

A major characteristic of such global organizations is that they tend to run at a rather breathless pace. With that in mind, here is the two minute version of this chapter, which takes a snapshot of some of the advice I have shoehorned into the text and sets the tone for the rest of the piece. Above all, keep things simple where you can.

Understanding your role, unit and place in strategy

1 Have a crystal clear idea of what you are supposed to be for. 2 Have a pragmatic approach to what you actually do, which is probably slightly different from what you are for. 3 Know what high performing rival entities do, and learn what you can from that. 4 Prioritize insight over information, but don’t lose sight of the need for one to make the other meaningful.

Getting things done

5 Everyone should know who is on the global team, who else in the company wants to be on the team, and carefully track who knows about which topic and who might like to learn. Grey areas need surfacing, but not necessarily solving so long as all involved are transparent. 6 Avoid reading or writing long e-mails that are not driven by insight or analysis. Prioritize voice-to-voice communications for anything taking more than 30 seconds to solve. Prioritize instant messaging for yes/no problem solving, although time differences will often drive you to e-mail. 7 Archive and share all work possible to allow everyone to see what has been done before; invest in sanitizing confidential work. 8 Have a clear well defined channel to market (a single IT tool, a newsfeed, a monthly digest, and so on) that will remain at the core as you diversify and innovate. Your work might arrive at the client via e-mail, but e-mail is rarely the ideal channel for managing it. 9 Have a clear list of processes, sources and any other administrative aspects of your shared work needed to maintain the highest impact.

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Expect entropy! Expect to reinforce these necessary processes every year, and hope to enhance them. 10 Ensure alumni, contacts and other companies are valued, and that the organizational appetite for knowledge is wide rather than insular.

Getting along

11 Establish and display a culture of enthusiasm for people having different working models, whether driven by culture, personal preference or necessity (normally something outside work). Ask about impact and try and harmonize that, not hours online. 12 Have a consistent feedback loop for frequent reinforcement of happy, sad or informative messages. This might be an e-mail, a videoconference or a combination of all. 13 Be transparent in your communications with each other. In a global organization, it is rarely enough to e-mail just the person you are writing to. Mass ccs and distribution lists are a necessary evil of transparent communication in a virtual international environment. 14 Maintain a full mutual understanding of global copyright and intellectual property law, with crystal clear unambiguous guidance for colleagues.

Evolving

15 Any vision should include concrete aims for your unit (such as an evolution in services) and individuals (such as increased depth of expertise, greater access to opportunities and rewards). 16 Embrace social media, blogs and other marketing tools at a corporate level as another test bed for new services and to share ideas while keeping yourselves visible. 17 Keep stakeholders engaged: attract sponsorship and maintain the momentum of your projects with input from leaders in your organization or, even better, invite them to join project teams. With this out of the way, we can explore a few aspects of our guidelines in more detail.

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The day to day: understanding and exploiting the global market analysis business

The way information markets work around the world is a crucial input to your success and ability to fulfil your role, with the most immediate impact on your employer’s perception of your value. Global markets are researched according to whether they can be analysed using corporate intelligence methods, whether legal restrictions in a particular regime allow such work, and whether they are hot and the data, profile, benchmark, commentary, interview, model or forecast will sell. A second category of forecast, closely related, might need a very detailed technical and scientific understanding, which a typical generalist analyst, however ingenious, can neither develop nor improvise, so we will discuss this separately.

Filling the void when the global information sector lets you down

Let us start with the familiar situation that the right material to solve your problem is not available. It is one of the happiest moments of an analyst’s life when someone calls and asks for the number of commercial toaster ovens in use in North Korea, or the average age of people globally who spend over $5000 on a mountain bike. Both questions can be answered, and answered well, but in spite of the available research rather than because of it. It is almost a definition of a global market question that it is worth asking because no one asked yet. Clients, unfortunately, do not always see this as the glorious opportunity that you do. International clients refuse to accept that there is no monolithic global block of constant reports generated each year. The market analysis sector, like the equities and bond markets, are driven by trends and which reports will sell. Even international charities have to focus on the most media friendly of their causes. In 2004, forecasts of the number of self-driving cars were non-existent, but anyone seeking projections of wholesale internet traffic capacity across the Atlantic could choose between seven options. In 2014, the Big Four accountancy firms are among those happy to provide ‘thought leadership’ on the potential market for cars that can drive themselves, while forecasts of internet capacity thankfully narrowed to a few specialist analysts. A CEO who came up from a marketing or strategy background will fondly

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remember the pet source they used a decade earlier, and is often rather bemused to hear that those analysts have moved on, just as she did. Whatever the route to this point, by promising to supply the best global insights, you may hit a barrier. First, there is no time to make the beautiful market model in your head. Second you must invest further time proving that this material does not already exist. If your attempt to negotiate more time is rebuffed, the likely solution is to find a proxy, and here globality can be on your side: the topics can be as obscure as you like. In the Philippines, for instance, alcohol is banned on national election days, allowing some quick research into the (admittedly tiny) effect on local sales and margins of similar proposed bans in US states on alcohol vendors. You might not agree with me that it is your place to fill the void. This is almost never an intuitive jump for a knowledge professional in my experience – to realize that the new graduate writing reports on complete unknown markets for their supplier is in the same boat as them, but with a different logo on the letterhead, rather than some beacon of insight. Admittedly, offering your own perspective takes time and confidence – difficult if you are in a generalist role.

Exploiting trends in the global market analysis sector

If we now address global information, which is always available for purchase, accepted as reputable in its home market and sold at a price point your entity can afford then we can consider how to best use this asset. Global information markets have consolidated in the last five years. Players like Informa and specialist equity analyst houses have taken many of the smaller research players to their bosom. Players that already had credibility and critical mass continue to ride the wave or stand aloof. For the sake of argument, let us split these into the types of supplier you will deal with. First, global and some national gorillas remain: Gartner in technology, Wood MacKenzie in mining, Yano in Japan and so on. They set high prices, they project or model a market consistently and they make their analysts available to your internal clients. You cannot avoid them (and you shouldn’t), and depending on the scale and budget available to you, you can arbitrage globally within your portfolio. For instance, in the USA it makes some sense to completely separate cable TV and telephony as few companies offer both.

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In EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Asia) and Asia, it does not. If the provider does not tell you this themselves, the market intelligence you provide can add the value necessary to ensure that your business models the market sensibly. Historic consolidation has meant that the smaller players who survive and have global appeal often do so on new terms. A typical smaller player exploits a niche or a technology no one else has. This is not necessarily new – someone at the United Nations has published biennial surveys of global robotics for years, whose day in the sun I was hoping would finally come this year with the first UN discussion of killer robots. One firm called Context Networks has been advising niche agricultural players on their choice of seeds since 1992. It is a characteristic of our epoch that there are ever more micro-niches: you might not have heard of Distimo, but if you are suddenly curious about how much money is being made from in-app purchases, you soon will. For the global knowledge professional the trick is to read widely enough and scan free newsfeeds so that the Distimos are not a surprise. The ‘celebrity analyst firm’ exploits social media and zeitgeist entities like TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) to build a brand around one well regarded rock star, which also sells qualitative reports from their team of analysts. The media strategy of these firms can be very impressive. Working in the media market sector, I see the best of the best at this – Claire Enders or Craig Moffat are worthy beneficiaries of this trend (Enders may even have started the trend in the first place). For you, this is an opportunity: not everyone will have heard of them, but if you can arrange a visit and presentation, it provides an odd ‘industry celebrity’ vibe to the meeting where post-event discussion is around the person as much as their opinions. Obviously, longer term, your aspiration may be to build a cult around your own knowledge. One method for a large team dealing with coordination of many sources globally is to appoint a source champion for each one (something I introduced in my current role). The exact purpose and activity of a source champion can be left vague or defined well so long as the key point is clear that a named individual knows they are expected to be a first point of contact and to be keen to assess the source to see whether it was used the way we expected. While you will have performance indicators in the background (testing return on investment, tracking usage and so on), word of mouth still determines the ultimate failure or success of information. The barriers to entry in our sector remain low, the opportunity to reach a

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global audience is very high, and sadly job security in strategy departments is not always rock solid, forcing analysts to look for new ways to share their expertise; therefore we can only expect more of these smaller players. They are often more open to creative and flexible deals and contract terms.

Legal issues and related information vacuums

Legal restrictions and the international variation between them are a huge pain for the nosy analyst. One expects shell companies in the Caribbean or elsewhere, but anyone who has ever tried to profile even relatively well known firms in Emirate’s free zones will know the agony of ignorance surrounding available information. Tax regime, employee numbers, even date of incorporation may not be considered publicly significant in some jurisdictions, and employees of the companies themselves are often surprised by how little the local authorities are willing to share. A second issue regarding material gathered by a government is turnaround time; one Eastern European administration was entirely willing to share some filings, given the requisite two week processing period. This is another situation in global market analysis where you can approximate and model, but more easily around organization than revenues. For instance, I have used LinkedIn and online recruitment advertising to try and guess where an entity’s employees are based, what their global structure might look like. You can be even more abstract: if you know the chief marketing officer once worked at Pepsico and was known for restructuring to a particular structure there (especially if the job titles you find line up), then it is at least plausible that they did the same thing at their new home. You need to be absolutely clear to clients of your confidence level in what is, essentially, a guess. At some point, there is no further opportunity to make a credible guess, and you are forced to stop, but an advantage of global scope and technical proficiency is that (unfortunately for whichever player had chosen not to publish that information in the first place) you can make far more headway.

Using expert networks effectively for scientific or technical insight

It is entirely possible to develop technical skills that allow you to educate

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colleagues on scientific advances. There is a limit: some global markets, policies and advances resist simplification. Any attempts to synthesize and explain the impact of a US ban on testing ebola vaccines on captive monkeys to a Korean company setting its 2015 travel insurance premiums is a fascinating exercise, but rarely amounts to more than restating headlines. The opportunity for most knowledge professionals here is to be a link to the expert, even if via an expert network like Gerson Lehrman. Expert networks are a sector in explosive growth at the moment, typical of any hype cycle. Quality is mixed. However, there is already a nexus of great experts emerging, dealing with confidentiality issues through good conduct, and jumping into complex discussions. These organizations have often done the hard work for you of arranging a global network of experts, which can substitute where other approaches to knowledge gaps cannot work. These three areas are the main themes in the global vendor landscape. Another chapter, another time, might address how we relate to data visualization firms, or analytics-driven research, or how we use our primary interviewing skills. For now we can conclude and move on to these people who can make effective use of the global glut of analysis to bolster their own team and skills to delight clients.

Organizational design – how global insight units work most effectively worldwide

Earlier in this piece I included 17 ingredients for success including some under the headings ‘Getting along’ and ‘Getting things done’. In this section, we’ll discuss nuts and bolts tactics to enable effective global teamwork in market analysis, a tactical and strategic view of how to balance offshore and onshore team locations in a large team and the strategic importance of making sure all analysts get the same opportunities (before we can move on to evolving new services). I emphasized that the best thing about a global organization is that it is global. You may stare despondently out the office window towards the local New Zealand High Commission (NZHC), but you are instant messaging Tokyo, e-mailing Sao Paolo and desperately trying to return a phone call from Lagos, with a video conference with Boston coming up later. What is more, there is a good chance you are working with exactly the subset of people from that nation with whom you would choose to spend the office day, given that

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people who are recruited by such an organization are exactly those with a predisposition to like an international environment. This internationalism has always been sufficient to motivate me to embrace most cultural differences I encounter enthusiastically, to absorb the best of other working models and want to export the best of my own. It has led to a better understanding of myself (I am very English, apparently) and others. I understand how my home (London, UK) looks to people very far away (a Harry Potter novel, but with smog and royalty), and I enjoy knowing how others would like to see their homes perceived (no smog). There are a few tactics required to make an international team work even if one took away this great motivational factor of simply ‘being part of the international’.

Straightforward tactics for a high performing global insights team

Let us start with the basics. Paying people fairly in their home market, treating them like adults by listening and responding to their concerns is key. This is more to do with strategic human resource management than strategic knowledge work. Beyond pay and conditions, maintaining a single global identity for your cell within the organization is important and more difficult than it sounds. Market analysis workers worldwide continue to struggle to know if they are more like an equity analyst, a strategy manager, a software analyst or a librarian (but no prizes for guessing where the majority would like to be seen, or at least compensated). However we define the group, let us look at how to maintain and improve coherence and performance.

Be consistent

A consistent global approach is very challenging even with a solid, steadystate, stable culture, given the widely differing national regulations, working environments and personalities within each team. If you work in a large team, there are likely to be offshore and local office team members, with different daily challenges and opportunities. If you work in a very small dispersed team, the likelihood is that local office culture has more influence on your work than any overarching global framework. Both as leaders and members of such a group, there should be an awareness of fairness. This does not mean

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everyone gets the same (or at least that is not what it means to me as a rabid pragmatist), but it means we try and ensure consistency where we can. Where we cannot, we are transparent. Trying to offer the team consistent opportunities to grow and show impact is another issue – this is nonnegotiable, and is addressed below (page 128).

Establish a single team culture

A single common language should be used globally for documents, e-mails and aloud. One of the most dangerous and common ambiguities is a different understanding of the word ‘deadline’ (which can be a precise commitment for one person, a general first target for another, and an entirely negotiable concept for a third).

Get the knowledge team close to their clients

There is no more piercing complaint from another manager than the following ‘Yeah, I spoke to them and they sent something, but honestly they didn’t seem to understand the business need.’ Offshoring used to drive this type of situation by creating a strange world where people who had never seen the business at work were expected not only to anticipate internal needs, but to instinctively understand the strategic agenda, shorn of all carefully crafted and guarded public announcements. Few can make this leap without help, but you help your offshore team and your employer far more by getting them as close as you can to the business end.

Transparency is your watchword

Share as much as possible, and on the issues people care about, as humans and knowledge professionals. The trick is to be able to be honest with yourself about what you would want to know: is there still no news on material to bolster a particular client opportunity? Well, that is news. It is a difficult balance between sharing too much information (in which case not only are you simply ignored, but others want to avoid being perceived in a similar manner so don’t share either) and sharing too little, which drives frustration and a similar reticence on their part. In this area, practice makes perfect.

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Individual travel to other team locations

Investment in travel is crucial in building community among global teams who are focused mainly on reinforcing each other’s strengths and insights. This team spirit is such a floating and ambiguous target, especially in a world characterized by tight deadlines, that it requires constant reinforcement. Budgeting for global travel can be very difficult, but it is repeatedly demonstrated that a single day’s physical meeting, or a single meal together, is worth hours of videoconferences in building a working relationship for knowledge workers. In the absence of these, at least run a programme of videoconferences between locations.

Team meetings

A team working around the world should have a chance to meet, and it should be a ‘normal’ aspiration. Failing global meetings, a regional meeting themed around knowledge and hot topics will substitute.

Invest in processes and knowledge tracking

Who allocates the work? Who is exempted? How do you know who has expertise in what area? Where are they today? We briefly discuss technical tools elsewhere, but these are enablers for virtual management to work effectively.

Be pragmatic where you cannot employ general guidelines

A tremendous degree of tedious discipline, or a great directory tool, is required to stay on top of who does what worldwide, and who they are doing it for. Once an organization reaches any scale, the checks and balances need to be automated, and need to accept that some redundancy and duplication will be built into the system if clients are to be served in a timely manner. We need to minimize duplication and the frustrations and inefficiencies it causes, but without endangering the business.

Tolerance and prioritization

Finally, working virtually requires a pragmatic approach to tackling problems.

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When you cannot see your staff, there are some problems that will be difficult to solve. However, if you can tick the other boxes in this list, this is rarely an issue that cannot be managed. One other key point builds on these with an additional and crucial requirement – that information and knowledge workers are offered the same options wherever they sit, in other words they are given equality of opportunity.

Ensuring global equality of opportunity

A risk of a global architecture for knowledge is that teams become distinct groups of different competences, when that is not what you wanted. First, information retrieval and synthesis at its most general level can be relegated to offshore locations. Second, customization to local needs is the natural province of those who are not offshore. Finally, some become the true expert who manages to float above their unit, their location and even their employer’s brand to become a global point of contact on, for example, regulation, supply chains or automation. These experts owe much to their drive and determination, but also to timing, choosing the right topic and people they work with. Mary Meeker is a great example of this rarified stratosphere of worker. Our aspiration is that this differentiation of purpose should be offset by opportunities to bring the best of all these worlds together, and to make sure all colleagues have the same opportunity. There are significant barriers to reaching into a local office to introduce someone from another environment just because you want to give them the same chances. It is human nature to talk more naturally to the people in the office you see every day (aside from initial friendliness when someone new appears). It is human nature to want to maintain contact and relations with the people who have delivered before, and to want to support them in developing. Finally, it is good sense to call or e-mail the person you know, and not to cc or discuss your needs with every possible stakeholder. If we accept that these are all perfectly natural ways of behaving, we can define this element of our strategy as battling much that humans see as perfectly normal. We have no choice – people leave jobs and we need to stop their knowledge residing uniquely with them, and departing. One consequence of this imbalance is that an offshore colleague normally

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takes more time to build a great network than a colleague in a local office. On the other hand, colleagues hubbed together offshore may show greater consistency and quality of output because of the critical mass for local training and quality assurance. We have already discussed some of the mechanisms to allow equality to happen – especially transparency, physical rotation and mobility, but the key solution is to ensure your own team and your core customers can agree with the strategy. If the overall corporate culture does not support this activity, it might be more pragmatic to take that fact as an influence on the design architecture of your knowledge team. In the next section we discuss how to use such thoughts to plan a global location and capability strategy.

A successful deployment strategy in global knowledge

Unless you are very lucky, there is no chance you will have representatives of your team in every location your employer has an office. This is for good reasons – the demand for your services may be constant, but it probably fluctuates in accordance with demand cycles, macro- and microeconomic shifts. Rents for office space in some locations can be immense, and some new locations simply will not have time to consider whether every corporate function is a crucial addition to their office or not. As the information is everywhere, the hypothesis is that the people who analyse it can be anywhere too. And yes they can, if managed carefully. It has become a fairly standard business decision to launch a centralized offshore hub for tens or hundreds of knowledge professionals. These days it is often more of a process question than a strategy question: where fits the parameters for a safe, efficient, sustainable, reachable, high quality location? The decision to move an entire team risks raising some issues. Full offshoring of strategic insight teams does not make an easy life for any party. It drives frequent misunderstandings, the need for plenty of autonomous decisions and a parallel working culture. It creates a barrier to effective impact despite the advantages in critical mass and ability to problem solve face to face with colleagues doing the same job. This barrier can be managed but it cannot be removed. Bear in mind that to deliver a return on investment in knowledge, three of the most crucial requirements are clarity of what is needed, confidence to admit your ignorance quickly, and a high level shared

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understanding of where the company is going. If you get these three things right, many other typical management issues can be handled smoothly. This comes with time in remote locations, but other strategies can deliver faster and more consistently. Let us review the other end of the continuum, where colleagues are spread around the globe. The consequences of having all information staff working on site in client-facing offices raises other issues. Typically there is a patchwork of colleagues at different skills levels with local leadership calling the shots on issues and driving strategy. For instance, it can be difficult for management to spot both high performance and low performance because the regular local feedback is simply that the team is wonderful so whether someone develops fast or slow is more influenced by chance. There are undoubted great advantages: local insights will be cutting edge, corporate culture will be focused, and precise and business need will be the core of every activity. It is probably clear that my ideal answer is to combine the two. Various footprints can arise for various reasons – balancing legacy issues in restructuring can mean a combination of offshore hubs, smaller regional hubs and other more isolated team members. The ideal balance is hard to find, but in managing information globally the two most obvious challenges we face are worth discussing (in case they are not obvious). First, the sharpest edge of new knowledge is often in a different language to the ones most people worldwide speak. Dynamic South East Asian nations constantly generate new product categories and sales tips that are frustratingly hidden until someone translates them out of Vietnamese (for instance). National regulators – in fact any government entity – and any small potential acquisition target are likely candidates. It is possible to hire great local language experts for any location from almost any location. The mere fact that this sounds possible tends to overly influence any high level strategic perspective and this view has merit. It is rarely the best solution to create a lone colleague in a new location, even with considerable demand. There are exceptions, but in general the pragmatic option is to find someone with a combination of great analytical skills who also speaks relevant languages. There is a tipping point when one might need to add a new office and two or three knowledge colleagues in that location, but this is rarely the first step for national market entry. However, we have to recognize it takes a lot of time to locate these

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individuals. Sometimes the hunt must be in their home market with the intention of moving them to a nearby knowledge hub. Such hires are often more likely to leave than colleagues with family roots in that location, and as the cycle begins again they take a long time to replace. The tactics outlined in other sections can help ensure you keep them longer; the longer term aim of many colleagues, if they stay, is mobility back towards their home, in whatever role is available. The patchwork of on and offshore knowledge teams can often create unusual situations. Remote teleworking, for instance, can become a rather caricatured affair. Working at home is a blessing, adding tremendous flexibility, personal growth and enriching the lives of everyone fortunate enough to have access to the technology required to do it properly. Working at home if you are already the only member of your team in that country does not affect how hard you work, or even how efficiently, in my experience. I have known people who are far more effective as telecommuters than in the office, and for many different reasons. Despite all this, just teleworking with no office life takes a tremendous risk with your ability to innovate, respond to change, or judge the global mood. The discipline required to make fulltime teleworking a success while advancing your career is extreme. It works for some, and it is becoming more common, but its management is a topic in its own right.

Technology as a substitute for a coffee machine

Global coordination becomes nonsensical without great IT tools. As someone working in an industry focused on storing, tracking and retrieving information, you are probably experiencing some disorientation. Technology is helping you, but is also making you feel as if each time you adopt or roll out an innovation, the needles moves. There are so many new ways to store, organize and supply insight that keeping track of them all is itself a well defined job description. If you review any literature about bleeding edge IT in knowledge management over 12 months old, you will already know the shelf life of any comments I make here (less than 12 months). We’ll content ourselves with two points. First, it is not precisely the IT tools you have which determine your success. The tool you are given may not be cutting edge – knowledge departments are normally secondary to revenue-generating cells so there is a tendency for information services to need to use customized

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solutions adapted from those used by sales teams or consultants. However, this might not matter – the trick is finding a solution which people can either enjoy, do very quickly, or both. Second, knowledge tools fall into a few broad (inevitably overlapping) buckets: • • • • • • • • • • • •

direct communication time management global coordination and work allocation storage and dynamic tagging version control and project management channel-to-client (for example intranet home pages) outside-in monitoring of aggregated activity security and spam filters macro-report generation feedback collection automatic formatting and organization of content automated profiling and insight generation (from the internet or other vendors).

The combination and mix of technologies will differ, but all have their place, and their price.

How do I market my unit, my new product or myself?

Information is often powerful because it is new or unique to someone. There are many examples of tools, insights and benchmarks that hold their power over decades. Many would argue that Warren Buffet’s ‘12 tenets’ for investing have proven their worth by now. In the corporate world, any fact-based benchmark of the synergies and cost savings when two large companies merge are still useful whenever similar situations arise. Unfortunately, while you can sell your team’s work on the basis of its discoveries, most of their work is unlikely to stay at the top of the bestseller list for long. Knowledge is becoming like mass media: new and exciting trumps much of the slow and steady. While it is tempting to say that those who ride above the current hype may have the most success in the long term, it is also fair to say that they were once probably the hype themselves.

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Novelty can take many forms in global knowledge. One national case study might become a generalized framework or a reference for future ventures, or gather momentum to become the anchor for a global benchmark. Novelty at its most engaging is often about data visualization and simply seeing the information through a new lens. However you do it, there is a balance to be struck around trying something new every quarter, while keeping enough FAQs and information assets maintained so that regular users always find what they want. If a high profile product launch is beyond your scope, incorporate some novelty into a regular recurring project by having a rolling ‘statistic of the week’ or some other eye-catching angle. Once your team is in the mood to innovate, you need to get your audience into the mood to listen. In a global knowledge environment, you face two great challenges, and three great opportunities. The first challenge is that in a virtual environment, your great idea risks being comparable to posting direct mail, or looking at the same return on investment as a mass advertising campaign (a 1–3% hit rate is great if your addressable market is millions of households, but less impressive if you are only reaching out to 400 or so people). The second challenge is that however much noise you make, you are unlikely to be the first or loudest, even on a particular day. The first opportunity is that people always love new toys, and that anything that helps build business will find resonance somewhere. The second opportunity is that you, knowledge workers, are ‘the future!’. Virtual knowledge has the luxury of riding on the hype of the internet to attract initial attention in contrast to paper. The association of knowledge with big data offers an opportunity to genuinely connect the two topics. Finally you can customize and tailor information to local needs with the aid of IT tools, building relevance for particular clients. ‘Relevance’ is a crucial term we have neglected so far. In the kind of rapidly shifting, global to local and back again yo-yo-ing environment we describe in this article, relevance can rightly claim to be buzzword royalty. To get the message of your relevance across, you will need persistence, quality and optimism just as much as when you start any new business. You will need the drive to track your leads, your contacts and feedback – these data gathering tools are crucial for demonstrating the impact of new knowledge.

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Tricks useful for global virtual environments

Here is a short list of tricks you might consider especially useful for global virtual environments. Knowledge workers tend only to use phrases like ‘multichannel’ to describe someone else’s strategy. In fact, it should describe your own.

Intranet pages announcing the innovation

This is often a painful process – there are format decisions, restrictions on references you can make. The temptation is to celebrate how clever you have been, to go deep and explain a few key insights. Resist temptation: drop crumbs, increase interest, tease, maybe give one example of use, and then sign off. The important thing is to ensure a name is highlighted for contact and to share messages that will find a welcome audience in at least one key location.

Road shows

A road show can be simply two to three events where you tell the story of the product and how it can help. Webexes, videoconferences, teleconferences and physical meetings are a great opportunity to jump in and share. Be bold: if you can already see you will not make it into a crowded agenda controlled by someone else, then reach out to a big hitter beforehand, and ask them to drop in a reference to this new thing and suggest people reach out to you. The downside is that you will sometimes find yourself on a conference call at 5am.

Highlight topics of interest for local markets

As discussed above, ‘relevance’ is a no-brainer. When you developed a certain product you knew what the potential market would be, so local examples are key. Keep on top of topics relevant to different user groups and send them regular update e-mails when you have something relevant. Take note of feedback and hone your products to suit the different user groups. This is also a good exercise for reminding you why your insight is good, and testing which insights garner a good response for your next iteration of this product.

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Focus your attention on buy-in from a local champion

Focus your attention on buy-in from a local champion with a vested interest in supporting the initiative. From Al Gore’s record of building support on environmental issues to alcopop sellers on a university campus, companies and activists know the appeal of focusing your attention on a local key influencer and getting them to do the work for you. Experience suggests it is not the seniority but the enthusiasm of your champion that makes the difference.

Physical media are not dead

Physical media are not dead, but in a global environment where people need to decide whether to check luggage, they are not crucial. If you produce a leaflet, make sure it is unusual enough to attract attention. My advice, even looking over many geographies, is to take risks with the format, to use bright colours so the edge sticks out in someone’s laptop bag. Regardless, it is becoming unusual to print out any marketing materials at all. (Funnily enough, this is a trend not necessarily reflected at the pinnacle of organizations, where a physical document can still be crucial to triggering recognition or discussion.)

Co-brand with an already established product

It is often a letdown to come up with something new and then hear feedback from someone more senior that ‘actually that is a lot like x’ or ‘fits into the suite of services we offer y’. In fact it is a great opportunity to use this channel to market, to use the contacts already made and often to provide an unexpected refresh to something that is no longer novel, making new contacts in the meantime. This is far from an exhaustive list. (Why not tie in with a major event? Do you bother with an internal ‘brand’ or just a name?’ Why not launch a competition or give an award?) My point in this section is just that you need to market to do more than simply survive and continue to transform in a global environment. An exit plan is useful, but not essential in a global environment. In fact, stopping providing a regular service is a great test of how many people will contact you to ask why it stopped.

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If I employ every tip described above, will I be professionally fulfilled, my global unit well functioning and my strategy robust?

In this chapter, we took a broad view of some tools that altogether build to make a global strategy with processes, team, footprint and assets worthy of the name ‘intellectual property’ in most multinational environments. We did not discuss many more: the potential of gamification, digitization, lean management, how to know when to restructure, how long a global planning horizon could be, how to respond when the jobs market in one of your locations goes crazy and everyone leaves . . . Let us just say there is a lot more to cover. It bears repeating that transparency, equality and open-mindedness, combined with tight management of processes, hiring like-minded people and driving value for the employer, are the keys to success. A large dose of pragmatism is also crucial where these values need helping along. Life would not be interesting without change. Unexpected events, new leadership, new team members, new technologies or your own shifting interests can trigger something new and sometimes radically different. Yet, for now, my answer to the question above is that if you employ every tactic, you will go crazy, but if you choose the right ones for your environment, then at least you have the foundation for an excellent cosmopolitan experience.

References and further reading

The following are indirectly referenced in the text. Each covers a crucial skill we need in making insights meaningful across cultures, keeping our teams motivated, keeping things simple, understanding our businesses, understanding how globalization changes the way we establish core beliefs about work, understanding how technology changes the way we interpret information and keeping an eye on the future. All are extremely readable despite some ominous titles. Few, S. (2013) Information Dashboard Design, Analytics Press.

Horowitz, B. (2014) The Hard Thing About Hard Things: building a business when there are no easy answers, Harper Business.

McCandless, D. (2009) Information is Beautiful, Collins.

Meeker, M. (2014) Internet Trends, Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, annual update

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MANAGEMENT OF INSIGHT, INTELLIGENCE AND INFORMATION 137 widely available online.

Rivoli, P. (2009) The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy: an economist examines the markets, power, and politics of world trade, John Wiley & Sons.

Rond, M. (2008) The Last Amateurs: to hell and back with the Cambridge boat race team, Icon Books.

Sorrell, M. (Undated) What We Think: why we are mad men (and women) as well as maths men (and women), www.wpp.com/wppataglance/2013/pdf/what-we-

think/sirmartin-sorrells-article.pdf.

Tucker, P. (2014) The Naked Truth: what happens in a world that anticipates your every move, Current.

Turkle, S. (2011) Alone, Together: why we expect more from technology and less from each other, Basic Books.

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CHAPTER 9

Working with suppliers and licensing for e-libraries

Tina Reynolds, Linda-Jean Schneider and Fiona Fogden

Introduction This chapter examines the issues facing corporate information professionals when purchasing and rolling out subscription resources to end-users. The authors have extensive experience in the area, working for law firms based in the UK and USA. While experiences may vary, their advice should be relevant to those managing subscriptions in all sizes of organization. Other variables include the type of licence models offered by the supplier, the size of the organization, the corporate culture and the position of the information service within it, but many issues remain common to all. As a coda to the chapter, a supplier offers her perspective on the relationship between vendor and subscriber, and some advice on how to make it beneficial for all parties.

Electronic resources in the organization

The library or information centre in a large corporation was traditionally a single, centralized facility, often a centrally located showplace in the organization’s largest office, and it could appear that this research repository was the ‘beating heart’ of operations within the firm. In law firms it was not unusual to see bookcases and aisles of extensive rows of reports, case law, statutes, regulations, and annotated treatises, reflecting the collections used in law school. However, once online legal research providers began gathering and indexing legal knowledge, offering full-text access, these collections began to seem unwieldy. Even before the advent of the web, the library offered an access point to these resources, as an adjunct to the physical space visited by

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staff needing to carry out research. Today, staff distributed around the offices of global firms have access to the knowledge they need at their fingertips, on their desktop PC and even on their mobile devices. Sophisticated aggregation and distribution of alerts as well as the full-text versions of materials are managed by information professionals, many of whom never see their users. In most large US law firms, the information service continues to be recognized as the central point for the organization of the electronic and digital versions of those same print resources, often via the organization’s intranet. In many firms, the information service maintains a separate site or ‘page’ on the network or intranet, which brings together the electronic resources, providing instruction on how to access the resources and who to contact for specialized research. Such pages outline the terms and conditions of the subscription, how to use it, support contact details, and any restrictions on use. Some resources may be accessed by IP authentication whereas others require a username and password. In many professional services firms, where the concept of the centralized information service is redundant, because information professionals are embedded in practice areas or research services are outsourced or offshored, there remains a need for a centralized service managing acquisitions and access to the research sources needed for end-users to carry out their work. Such staff will be concerned with trouble-shooting access issues, liaison with IT staff, contract negotiation, licensing work and promotion of resources and training. Managing online resources calls for a different set of technology skills to ensure the library or information centre is providing the access needed. What used to be the ‘backstage operations’ of a hard-copy library, the things which ensured that books and journals reached the shelves, has evolved to teams of systems librarians and digital resource managers, who coordinate and direct the operation of increasingly numerous sophisticated online and mobile resources, pumping the lifeblood of access through the entire organization. In smaller organizations, managing subscriptions may only be a small part of the information professional’s role. Urgent enquiries and ad hoc work interrupt the acquisition, testing, negotiating, embedding and supporting of subscription resources. Yet it remains essential to stay on top of subscriptions or you could end up paying significant amounts of money for barely used resources. In most corporate environments, the way in which users should access eresources is somewhat at variance with the reality of life. Despite the work of

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information professionals creating logical well organized portals, and offering online and in-person support and training on how to use them, their users come across paid-for resources via search engines with no idea of the library’s involvement. In these cases, it is useful to have some sign showing that the product is paid for by the library, such as the corporate logo or information service’s contact details. It is a hazard of the modern, disintermediated librarian’s role that the end-user’s seamless experience of the resources which help them do their jobs mean they have little appreciation of the work which has gone into acquiring them. This chapter covers five main areas involved in acquiring e-resources: selecting the resources, how they are accessed, how they are rolled out to endusers, how to mitigate the range of different user-interfaces, and their ongoing management and renewal.

Problems choosing and licensing e-resources

Information professionals have many difficult decisions to make in choosing how to spend their often highly limited acquisitions budget on e-resources. End-users often bring expectations of their use of online resources based on experience at university or with other firms. A small commercial organization cannot hope to compete with the resources provided by a large university, paying an educational or public sector licence rate. Private professional services firms may have to pay significant costs even though some of these may be charged back to clients. In a way, the myth that everything is ‘on the internet and free!’ is perpetuated by many of the more extensive, content-rich academic licences. A recent graduate may have a preference for a specific database with similar content (for example, Westlaw or LexisNexis) and a small firm is likely to have only subscribed to one of these. In some cases, the information service may only be able to afford to offer organization-wide access to a cheaper product and password-only access to an enhanced version. Where this causes significant annoyance, it may be worth involving users in negotiating a larger acquisitions budget. The complexity of matching user expectations with the reality of the limitations of online resources can also stem from users’ searching behaviour. Many end-users expect that random, ‘Google-like’ searching will provide answers to a research question in response to simply entering terms into the search box. They may simply use a search engine rather than the expensive

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database to which you have subscribed. Even where they are searching the full-text databases they may well achieve a large number of results, but without proper knowledge of the resources they are accessing, they may pull up out-of-date or inaccurate results. In a legal setting, this could cause problems of liability (Chapter 10 includes examples of this type of problem and how information literacy can mitigate it). Other issues may concern how the resources can be used. Users need to know that however easy it is to replicate and redistribute electronic content, the licence agreement may not allow it. Understanding the terms of the licence is critical and an important part of the information service’s role in ensuring their organization is compliant. A complex licence may include many separate pieces, which need to be understood in full context. Negotiating the licence is an important area of skill for the information professional. There has been an evolution of professional management positions in the areas of digital resource management in large global law firms such that in some, the role of electronic resources manager has emerged. This situation is in response to the need for a point person between the information departments and technology experts to work as a team in negotiating with the content provider. The electronic resources manager must be knowledgeable regarding online agreements and strategies to manage their execution, negotiation and compliance. Information professionals can demonstrate real value for their organization by negotiating better deals with suppliers. For example in licences which provide a limited number of seats (simultaneous users), there should be a provision whereby one user may be exchanged for another, to allow for personnel changes which cannot always be predicted. There should be adequate trial periods for testing, perhaps an administrator seat for one of the information team which is not an additional charge, and sufficient usage information and support provided by the vendor. There should also be contingency arrangements in the case that third-party content is no longer available, or there are technical or functionality issues for the users. Most information professionals keep a log of those issues that can be addressed at the time of renewal. The firm and provider try to negotiate clauses that show ‘good faith’ and flexibility when it comes to changes in content. Rather than worry about issues arising that violate the terms, the agreement should be crafted to facilitate compliance. During the acquisitions process, the information professional also needs to

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consider whether they still want hard-copy resources, such as journals, which sometimes come bundled into the licence for an electronic product, regardless of whether or not they are required. There may still be users within the firm who prefer to use hard-copy products, but the administrative cost of handling them can be high. Mailrooms are often not keen to distribute copies or attach circulation slips, it can take many hours of a library assistant’s time to check journals in, add circulation slips and distribute them. If a subscription agent is used, some vendors will not allow the ‘free’ copies that come with online access to be sent to an agent. But the bulk of subscription management carried out by information professionals today is based around the administration of online resources. More recently, information users are faced with the desire by their users to access information on the go via their phone or tablet. This can be problematic as the pricing of downloadable e-books is not yet tailored for a commercial workplace. Moreover, most e-book publishing remains at the consumer end, or with very niche academic titles. Technical and professional literature is often not available. Where it is, there is the additional risk of content not providing the same information as a hard-copy equivalent might have. This is particularly pertinent risk for e-books that are the electronic version of traditional loose-leaf titles, as the user, not the information professional, controls when and how updates are incorporated. Depending on the corporate culture of your organization, you may find that the library cannot meet the acquisition demands of their users, who then do not see it as the place to go for their resources. Working with users who make these requests to manage their expectations, and potentially trial e-book use where practical, can go some way to ensuring that the information service continues to acquire materials in a relevant and timely manner.

Providing access to e-resources

Most end-users in the corporate environment access their electronic resources from a dedicated page on the staff intranet. When the first e-libraries were created in the 1990s, access was reliant on an individual entering an ID and password for each separate database. Some suppliers only granted these credentials on completion of training sessions with the vendor representatives or information professionals in the firms. The arrival of IP authentication, whereby the supplier configures the product to recognize the range of IP

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addresses of the computer hardware within the firm, made use of online resources far easier for the end-user. Now, within the secured firewalls of the firm’s network, there is often no need for individuals to log in and access is easier, faster and more flexible. It is even possible for remote users to access resources. This will either be via a firm’s virtual private network or a remote desktop service such as Citrix. However, both are dependent on the location from which the user is accessing the resource being recognized as within your business’s IT space rather than the local address, which is not within the IP range. This is an important factor to take into account when setting up remote resources, and the part of the IT department responsible for supporting remote workers should be consulted to ensure that workers who are not using your organization’s own hardware can still access the resources they need. Where a resource is used by only a small number of people, password access for a few individuals may be a cheaper option. Password access has other advantages over IP access. For example, if a user has password access then in many databases (Lawtel being an example) they can access additional features such as e-mail alerts, customized home screens and apps. On the other hand, users can and do forget their username and password for services with alarming frequency. Some of the issues that are associated with username and password access can be ameliorated through the use of a product such as Research Monitor, which can store passwords for the user and, from their point of view, log them in seamlessly, allowing the ease of use of IP addresses with the customization of usernames. This has the advantage of removing reliance on IT teams to ensure that they send you a full list of all of the IP addresses for your organization. The administrative burden for library staff of having to ensure that these are circulated to the correct person or team at each of the vendors can be timeconsuming. In order to facilitate IP authentication, there is a need constantly to monitor IP addresses to ensure they are kept up to date as they can change frequently, especially if they are covering multiple sites. Even when a new IP address is submitted to the provider, if there are specific products or subapplications involved, there may be additional requirements to maintain the IP connection. For example, when providing an IP address change to LexisNexis, if a firm is also using one of its sub-applications, separate product teams become involved. In addition, even when an IP address change is accepted by the provider, there needs to be someone in your organization on site who can test the resource after the change is made. In the same way, you

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need to ensure that links are current and that firewalls and spam filters are adjusted to allow for e-mail delivery and access. In a poorly managed subscription, sometimes the first indication that the supplier has made a change is when the end-user contacts you because their access has disappeared. The vendor may themselves lay down restrictions on usage. Models exist where the vendor refuses to allow hot-desking staff to access their site from more than one machine, or when it was not permissible for two users of a service, who both subscribed, to e-mail content from the site to each other. Moreover, even where technical problems are overcome, your licence may offer ethical conundrums. Are workers accessing resources from home still covered by their organization’s ‘site’ licence? And what if an organization moves its office – do you need to renegotiate?

How to bring the users to the resource

Once the resources are chosen and access is arranged, the information service must find a way of rolling them out to users. Where it was once possible for information services to mandate attendance at introductory sessions before passwords were issued, now end-users are often expected to find the resources and dive straight into using them. As previously mentioned, the standard mode of access for end-users is via the intranet. This can be a very simple list of sites accessible to all with direct links out to the various databases or as complicated as multiple lists split by team, and topic linking to other intranet pages discussing the terms and conditions of the licence, who has access, and the strengths and weaknesses of the product. But leading staff to the correct location can be a challenge. There are many ways of letting staff know that resources exist: • • • • • •

presentations at staff inductions and orientations individual sessions with new employees leaflets e-mails posters presence on the intranet.

These all help, although they do not guarantee that the user remembers the resource exists at the point they need them. New joiners are often presented

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with so much information when they start that the introductory talk about eresources given by the information service may easily be forgotten. Following up with one-to-one sessions can be useful. One of the authors carries out short sessions with senior lateral hires at their desk running through the databases they liked and used at their previous firm. This has numerous benefits including being able to potentially source databases which are not currently used within the firm and highlighting the different subscriptions which might be of use given their practice area and sector interests. This individual contact makes a real difference to the quality of relationship and can ensure that ongoing feedback is provided on the databases used by new members of staff. Promotion is an ongoing issue. It is important not to target new joiners only as the information landscape changes so quickly. It is entirely possible for someone to spend 40 years with the same firm and thus have no idea about any databases that have been purchased, any changes to service or any other innovation except those which they have stumbled across or been directly informed about. Ways to address this include: • providing regular refresher sessions demonstrating what has changed in particular products • producing and distributing flyers advertising relevant databases • attending team meetings to promote services • advertising databases on the intranet front page • e-mailing people when new databases that fall within their interests are purchased. If possible, try to ensure that any library pages appear near the top of the results in an intranet search. Make friends with your intranet manager. Add key words to pages to ensure there are relevant results, make the most of metadata, tag results, and add alternative or former names so that when people search for a database they used a few years back, but which has since changed its name, it can still be found. It remains a struggle to ensure that best use is made of the databases, particularly in a large distributed organization where users may have different roles and requirements from resources. Face-to-face contact is immensely important in facilitating this. Introductory sessions conducted by information staff provide the opportunity to remind and clarify the firm’s policies about compliance with online research agreements and terms and

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conditions. They can be a forum for discussing potential research issues and then applying the practice-specific specialized resources to the research process. There is more advice about training end-users in Chapter 10. If there are significant elements of a database which need to be configured by the users in order to gain full advantage, whether signing up to various email alerts, personalizing the interface or setting up saved searches, your input may be needed. Some suppliers, when asked, will automatically set up specific groups of users (for example, in a law firm, from specific practice groups) with a customized front page or predetermined e-mail alerts. Where this is not possible, it is often worth visiting users at their desks and helping them to tailor their preferences. Although it may be impossible to reach users face to face in a large or distributed workplace, personal contact of some kind greatly helps users to know the resources are there, how they can and should use them, and how to get the best out of them to help them in their work.

Multiple interfaces and helping users through the digital jungle

Librarians who manage the variety of formats (print, digital libraries, the remnants of CD-ROM and e-books) have long dealt with the complexity of content across varied platforms. In the past, tables of content and indexes provided access points. There was a structure that when applied to online databases still seemed to provide a framework, which with Boolean searching yielded the correct answers and best results. However, with the dominance of Google-like searching, the illusion now exists that a single search box can retrieve relevant materials, providing proper vetting and analysis. Unfortunately, as vendors migrate more of their content to electronic or digital platforms, the functionalities vary widely and can require some familiarity before successful searching can be attained. The problems of gaining endusers’ attention for familiarization sessions and training, covered in the previous section and next chapter, exacerbate the problem. The user is lost in a jungle of different databases each of which require different search approaches, and structure their content in radically different ways. To mitigate this, some large organizations offer federated search products as a layer on top of their databases. They enable users to find information they did not know existed with a simple ‘Google-like’ search. A search platform such as Autonomy uses IDOL and its varied features such as cluster

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visualization, automatic hyperlinking and automatic clusterization to aggregate relevant content from different sources. But federated search results can be baffling to the user, as they do not work the same way that Google’s do. Often, people assume that a search box on the intranet only returns intranet content and are confused when other results are included. There can also be issues with the integration of various sources and the time it can take for them to return results. Ultimately, federated search tools always return worse results than the native interface. Its great advantage – that it offers access to e-resources without users knowing they exist – has to be balanced against the quality of the results received and the immense cost of purchasing, licensing and implementing the tool. Larger firms, particularly in the legal sector, with big technology budgets, and specific concerns about the risks of users accessing the out-of-date information, have invested in optimized search, where internally or externally supplied metadata tags will enable more relevant results to be found. In some cases, these discovery engines will also search internally generated content held in document management systems. Users are encouraged to tag documents in order to ensure that the most relevant items are found. Another initiative used by some law firms is that of the ‘model document’. Best examples of documents are identified by practitioners or knowledge managers so that they can be easily found, and used as exemplars to train search tools. The use of metadata schemas and taxonomies within an organization to optimize search can be a powerful means of ensuring that users can find the most relevant results. However they rely on a common understanding of a shared language. Users need to be prepared to be involved with developing naming conventions for types of documents and folder structures. Even here, the only way foldering and naming conventions work is if everybody uses them perfectly every time. At present, large-scale discovery solutions are beyond the budgets of most small organizations. But the technical possibilities for optimizing search across multiple platforms exist and may become more affordable in time. In the meantime, contact with end-users, familiarization and training are the main tools in helping users find the information they are looking for.

Managing and renewing subscriptions

The challenges of maintaining electronic subscriptions have increased with

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the number and complexity of available resources. Librarians face a morass of agreements, user name and password lists, and subscription term details to monitor and communicate. The mere process of pulling together the numerous documents governing the subscriptions can be onerous. Even maintaining a collection of current, signed and authorized agreements can be a daunting task. For example, negotiated terms can be in many locations: the fine print in the actual invoice, the original master agreement, which might date from years before, more recent amendments, price lists, user lists, permissible uses, terms and conditions on the website, and so on. In some cases, you may have inherited a subscription (from a predecessor or another department) that has been badly managed. It is not unknown for companies to lose contracts, particularly where there has been disruption to or closure of the information service, resulting in a situation where poor behaviour by the supplier cannot be challenged. Another problem occurs where there is a corporate merger. Depending on whether existing agreements already cover the possibility of a merger or acquisition between firms, there is a distinct possibility that negotiations will be required to decide which one is the governing agreement, or that a new one is necessary. Although a frequently cited benefit of mergers and/or acquisitions is the ‘economies of scale’, moving from a limited number of user-licences to an enterprise agreement, although justifiable, will require a much larger budget, a more complex negotiation and significant expenditure. As mentioned previously, even where the information professional is not a dedicated subscription manager, it is important to keep track of when subscriptions renew or how long they have left to run. Automatic renewals by suppliers could result in your organization paying for a product which is littleused or for which a better price could be negotiated. Do not rely on the vendor to remind you that a subscription is due to renew. Renewal documents or invoices sent by e-mail may go astray because of the vagaries of human error, replacement of staff and the corresponding termination of their e-mail address, and spam filters. One tip is to set a reminder in Outlook one month or three months before a subscription renews to reserve the right to cancel. This is good practice as you wish to have scope to negotiate not just the price but potentially on other issues such as a different number of users or a completely different package rather than being tied into the one you have had for another year. Some subscription managers send their notice to the supplier as soon as they have signed the contract. This ensures it does not get forgotten but, since they

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have just acquired the product, reassures the vendor that giving notice is genuinely just a matter of good administrative practice rather than necessarily being a sign of intent to cancel the product. It is also good practice to keep a standing appointment to meet representatives from your core vendors regularly to discuss any issues that have cropped up, resolved and unresolved, any new developments planned and any changes that might be made. Subscription managers should keep a list of subscriptions paid for, the date on which they renew and the price paid, and keep a copy of the terms and conditions signed. If you are setting up a system from scratch, the spreadsheet laid out in Table 9.1 offers a model. This will allow you to sort your subscriptions by month of renewal so you know what needs your attention imminently; you can sort by cost and percentage increase for budget purposes and you have the bulk of the necessary information, such as contact details and contracts in one place. If your organization uses Microsoft SharePoint, you could keep the same information in a list, which would have the additional advantage of allowing access to a small group of appropriate users, who could add information as they acquire it, and allowing direct links to relevant documentation such as the contract itself. It is good practice to keep the terms and conditions somewhere easily accessible, even if they are also on the vendor website, so that you can check them easily. This might be of vital use if one of the terms relates to how long the website can be down for! Additionally, be careful to ensure that your carefully negotiated agreement is not undermined by contradictory terms on the invoice. If terms and conditions are noted on the invoice, it is acceptable to request an invoice without them. Another communication and management issue is maintaining accurate contact information for vendor representatives, including changes in e-mail addresses and location, changes in websites and corporate ownership, and even territorial issues between Table 9.1 Sample spreadsheet entry for subscription management Supplier

Renews

Cost

Cost last Increase Contact year

Contract

Company 1 01-02-2015 £15,750 £15,000

5% TBC – account 2014–15 manager left in January

Company 2 31-06-2016

0% James Jones 020 7000 1252

£2000

£2000

2013–16

Notes

3-year contract

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representatives for different offices within the same firm. Dedicated subscription managers often use a product such as the contract module available from Research Monitor and other providers such as OneLog. These applications incorporate deadline reminders to monitor expiration dates, and provide a single standard interface to record contract details, linking to electronic versions of the contracts. The ability to embed reminders, initiate alerts, and provide training tips on the resource itself can assist greatly with facilitating understanding and compliance. Tools such as Research Monitor and Onelog can also assist in monitoring usage. Before renewing a resource, the internal authorization process can include soliciting specific feedback from users, obtaining usage statistics as available from the provider, and deriving a cost-per-seat figure that can heavily influence the justification for keeping access. If your service runs a large-scale library management system, it may include tools of this kind. Your relationship with your vendor is vital to ensure that your users continue to be able to use the resource. An effective vendor representative must be readily available for training and to ensure that support is provided where it is needed. Identifying the appropriate contacts on both side of the agreement is essential to ensuring its success. And managing the relationship well to mutual benefit can greatly improve the way that e-resources are brought into the organization. A well negotiated agreement could save your organization money and bring great kudos to you and your information service.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Constance B. Smith, Firm Director, Research & Competitive Intelligence Service, Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP, for her generous support and guidance.

Disclaimer

This chapter is an expression of the opinions of Linda-Jean Schneider, and not those of her employer.

Afterword: the vendor’s view, by Fiona Fogden

This section of the chapter is written from the perspective of the vendor and

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supplier. However before proceeding too far it should be noted that the author of this short piece has worked as both a librarian and vendor and hopes that combined insight will prove useful. The overarching objective is to have a relationship that is sustainable, painless and mutually beneficial. How this is achieved is through dialogue, a quality product or content set, effectively managing expectations and avoidance of nasty surprises. Debunking some myths is a good way to approach how this might be arrived at:

Myth 1: The publisher, vendor or representative is only in it for the money

Some customers may perceive profit as the sole objective of the supplier. However while the business model of the supplier needs them to make a profit, this cannot be achieved if they don’t have a product that is good enough to sell. Reputation is important for increasing the customer base. A bad reputation for pricing, service and product quality will make potentially new customers shy away from commencing a subscription. Supporting a relationship has some basic unit costs, therefore publishers can often be more creative about pricing the more products you take from them.

Myth 2: Once you are a subscriber the supplier focuses on ratcheting up the price

Having unhappy customers is also a pretty lousy thing to have to deal with and so suppliers don’t set out to do this. Huge respect is given to customers who are looking for long-term relationships with their suppliers, and thinking about price and capping it can often be built into your contract. Investment in a product does not fall in line with how inflation works, but it is generally understood that information budgets often use this as a key benchmark and suppliers need to have an insight into your budget cycles, when you make decisions, and so on. Other factors come into play too, depending on how long you have been a customer. If you became a customer a long time ago then the product you subscribe to may cease to exist or be bundled into a new product. This is not done just to annoy you, but is done for commercial reasons that might include

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the product on its own ceasing to be financially viable. You probably also hear the phrase ‘legacy pricing’ bandied about somewhat. This is not some fictional concept dreamed up to try and leverage more money out of you, but is genuinely the result of a number of factors. If you have been an early customer, the product or its components may be priced differently since it has reached maturity. Often new features that are charged extra to new customers have been included in your original licence. In many instances publishers respect that legacy pricing and the contribution you made to the product in its early days, but each publisher has limitations on how they can apply such concessions.

Myth 3: If I don’t contact my supplier then my experience will be none the worse

Lack of communication is a key cause of discontent. Your supplier needs to know about your experience of your product. Some suppliers will arrange a regular review; if this does not fit in with your timeline or business practices, let them know and suggest a better way of handling queries. There is nothing worse than hearing about problems with the database at renewal time when it is highly likely these could have been resolved much earlier. There are also key times when it is essential to communicate to your supplier and not expect them to initiate such dialogue. Just as you would expect to be informed if your account manager left, so you should contact your supplier if you are leaving or going on extended leave such as maternity or a sabbatical. Explain when you are leaving and who might be taking over, even if for an interim period. You also have to have an understanding of how that product you subscribe to relies on your internal IT systems as you will need to be the one to contact the supplier (or initiate a chain of communication) if your IP range changes and that product is authenticated by IP range.

Myth 4: If I ask for product enhancements or new content, it will make no difference, so why bother?

Products that get stuck in a time warp, especially in today’s fast moving digital age, will quickly cease to have any appeal to potential buyers. It is in the interests of the publisher to understand what direction their customers

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are going in, what their main challenges are, and to develop and adapt the product accordingly. How and when changes are made very much depends on the workflow of the supplier. Many contracts will include evolutionary product development within your subscription. Bespoke developments that are specific to your organization are likely to be outside any agreement. Check your contract or with your representative if in doubt. Find out how product development works in that company. Do they run a panel of customers that you can join; do they have a portal where you can submit requests and see what other customers are requesting too? You also need to be prepared to prioritize. If there is something that is key to you, let the supplier know why; there may be other requests that you have to accept are ‘nice to haves’. If your supplier is a third-party aggregator of content then there will be a different set of issues. Help your supplier manage your expectations about any content that is key to your organization. Separate agreements with publishers will be renewing, sometimes ending, on a rolling basis. No publisher can be forced to renew a contract or push their content through a particular supplier and if the aggregator cannot maintain a particular data set that you find valuable it will not have been for the want of trying. The key here again is communication on both sides about what has value and what is removed and added to the service. You can note certain content as key in your contract, but don’t expect to get major compensation if it is removed as in the grand scheme of all the data sets, unless there are just a few, your direct supplier will not be making a significant saving. You can also offer to liaise with the original publisher about their motives for removing the content from that aggregator; a conversation may well reveal a solution that works for all parties.

Myth 5: Suppliers are more interested in the large organizations than the smaller ones

Large organizations do not necessarily mean larger profit for a publisher or supplier. They can be more complex and require appropriate complex support. From my experience smaller organizations with one key contact are a dream to deal with rather than a larger organization where you have multiple contacts, lots of different time zones and very set ways, especially when it comes to approvals and paying. Larger organizations may have the

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spend that justifies a bespoke enhancement or custom integration so it may seem as if they are getting preferential treatment, but it would be no different from a scenario where several separate customers said they wanted the same change – it would benefit a similar number of users. Yes, a big name that other potential customers might recognize has some cachet and a smaller publisher or supplier might make a concession on price or other aspects of the subscription for the ability to be able to quote that name in marketing literature.

Myth 6: Fixing of bugs seems to take too long

Here I cannot answer for every publisher. Some suppliers are more agile than others and you will find fixes within minutes of reporting them. Others seem to take far longer. Suppliers, just like their subscribing organizations, have to prioritize. If there is a workaround, however tedious or awkward, then it has a chance of being further down the priority list of fixes. There is also a grey area between what might be a genuine fault and what might be a preference – and thereby an enhancement request. How quickly something is fixed also depends on the information that is supplied. It is not helpful to say ‘is there a problem with your site?’ in an email, as this is just going to result in a minimum of two more e-mails, one from your supplier asking for more information and another from you giving that additional information. Suppliers will make every effort to let you know if there is a known issue that might prevent you from performing a function, but some systems work better than others. When reporting a bug or issue it is useful to think about the following: • Are your colleagues experiencing the issue too? If not then try logging out and back in; also try clearing cookies for that site. • Is there a page on the supplier’s site that tells you what services might be down? • Who do you address the query to? Is it a support e-mail address so that you get the first person who can pick it up, perhaps copying in your account manager so they are in the loop? • What information do you need to convey and how urgent is the issue? In particular, focus on what the issue is preventing you from doing so that

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the supplier can understand how urgent it is. Explain any deadlines that you might be working towards. Give the supplier the opportunity to replicate the issue by explaining the steps that you went through – include screen grabs or wordings of errors if it will illustrate the issue more clearly. • Who do you want copied into any reply? Make it clear if you are going away or will be in a meeting who should be included in any reply. Bear in mind that if you use an internal distribution list these are sometimes blocked to outside senders. • If you get an answer about an issue, is there an agreed way to cascade that knowledge internally within your organization? Sometimes the issue is out of the supplier’s hands as they are an interface for third-party content. This is where you can build that relationship with your supplier and work together to resolve the issue. Usually your opinion and concerns will carry more weight and can help resolve the issue sooner.

Myth 7: Honesty has no place at a negotiation table

Some believe that ‘laying all your cards on the table’ can leave you in a weak position. I am not suggesting that the customer should reveal what their budget is, but what I do say is that the most successful negotiations come about when customer and supplier are as honest as they can be about their priorities (whether they are financial, technical or content-driven). Trust is important in any relationship. If you are explaining internal processes, approvals and drivers then make sure these are based on fact. It is all too easy to get tripped up next time if something is not based on reality. It is then hard to believe any claim that is made even if they are all subsequently accurate.

Myth 8: Suppliers love filling out forms and running and supporting free trials

Suppliers love running and supporting free trials that have a chance of success, so be prepared for questions. They will want to know you will be investing some time in good analysis and what your criteria for success will be. However trials for the sake of them just so a firm can see ‘what’s out there’ are generally not beneficial to either side – a demo and conversation are more

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likely to be suitable, with a trial further down the line when a decision is in place that a choice needs to be made between products, or to get a new product. So don’t be surprised by all the questions before a trial goes ahead; it can be expensive to invest time in a trial and so it is not something that should be taken lightly. If you have good reasons to need a trial to make the next step, ensure you understand what those steps are and can communicate that to your potential supplier. Products can change a lot in a year so be clear about your timelines and whether a second mini-trial or refresher might be needed further down the line – it is all about managing expectations. I have also seen lots of forms in my time from data protection forms and requests for information (RFIs), to security forms and tender documents. They rarely help either side answer the core question of whether the product will suit them. We are happy to fill them in as we know they are required by other parts of your business, but consider if they can be reduced and focus on key questions. Those are some of the myths explored. I am sure you have some more of your own that you would like answered, as with all relationships each one has its unique elements. I encourage you to talk to your supplier and in many instances you will be pleasantly surprised by their answer.

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CHAPTER 10

Training end-users in the workplace

Anneli Sarkanen and Katy Stoddard

Introduction This chapter considers the role of the information professional in training end-users in the use of library resources. Although not traditionally considered one of the core elements of an information professional’s role, in the same way that answering research queries or cataloguing might be, it is an increasingly important aspect of the services offered by corporate libraries. Although the nature of the clientele and resources used may vary from organization to organization, not to mention the logistics used, it is clear that information professionals across the corporate sector are carrying out some form of training. A 2012/13 survey by the British and Irish Association of Law Librarians (BIALL, 2013) recorded that 68% of full-time respondents said user education on electronic resources was a duty forming a significant part of their role. In a recent informal survey of media librarians conducted by one of the authors as part of her chartership portfolio, 66% of respondents said they conducted at-desk training, 59% attended inductions for new employees and 41% organized group training sessions for their users. The authors bring their experience of running training and user-education sessions for very different types of organization to show why information professionals are carrying out this work, and how it can be done most effectively.

Information literacy in the workplace

People trained in the application of information resources to their work can be

called information literates. They have learned techniques and skills for utilizing

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information solutions to their problems.

Zurkowski, 1974

Many of the theories about training users to carry out research using information products stem from work around the concept of ‘Information literacy’. Paul Zurkowski, then president of the Information Industry Association, coined the phrase in a paper to the National Commission on Libraries and Information Science in 1974, arguing for a national strategy in the USA to enable the entire population to become information literate within a decade. Zurkowski wrote at a time when computers and online library systems were coming into common use, but before the advent of the world wide web and advances in mobile technology that we enjoy now. If information overload (what Zurkowski termed an ‘overabundance of information’) was a problem then, the situation we face is far more serious 40 years later. Modern information associations recognize the scale of the problem: the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) defines information literacy as ‘knowing when and why you need information, where to find it, and how to evaluate, use and communicate it in an ethical manner’.1 The Society of College, National and University Libraries (SCONUL) incorporates the creation of data into its definition: ‘Information literate people will demonstrate an awareness of how they gather, use, manage, synthesize and create information and data in an ethical manner and will have the information skills to do so effectively.’2 The Research Information Network (RIN) places additional importance on information management and curation: ‘Information literacy should also be informed by higher order and more generic researcher competencies, such as analysis, synthesis and evaluation, where intelligent use of information plays a key part.’3 The BIALL information literacy statement is comprised of a five-stage model. It considers continuing professional development a separate skill, defining it as ‘refreshing the legal research skills required of a lawyer’.4 It is not enough simply to learn the basic skills required in the legal profession; they need to be continually built on. Information literacy is a fluid concept: as technology develops and our learning and working environments change, so the definition is expanded

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and reworked. But its central tenet remains – the need to teach users how to find, assess, filter, process, present and manage information and data efficiently and successfully. How you apply it will depend on your workplace and your sector.

Why we need to train end-users

Information professionals in the 21st century are facing tough times. The profession has been hard hit by the recession, with widespread budget cuts and redundancies. Not so long ago it was feared that if users could conduct their own research there would be no place for librarians, as one of the core duties would be taken out of our hands. Now, pressure from job cuts and increased workloads means libraries need to roll out services. It is time to be realistic; we are no longer the gatekeepers of knowledge within our organizations, and with that shift comes the need to teach others how to search. One lawyer described the nature of research in the early 1990s thus: ‘If we did use a legal database we needed partner permission to do so and it had to be charged to a client matter; which meant that the librarians double-checked your search terms before you used it’ (Choolhun, 2012). Today, users do not need permission to use databases, and no librarian will check their search terms. This is where training fills a gap, providing a substitute for the ‘librarian check’ by empowering the users to search for themselves with knowledge imparted by the librarian received in training. Putting database knowledge into the hands of users does not make the librarian redundant, as was once feared; they are able to dedicate their time to more complex research, provide other value-added services, and create an information service which matches the strategic direction of the business. But if we empower end-users to search themselves, it is in everyone’s interest to ensure that they can do so effectively and efficiently; there is no point in providing users with access to products and services (and paying the large subscription fees they usually entail) if they fall back on the library at the first sign of trouble or, worse, search inaccurately. The consequences of using false information can be seriously damaging. The BIALL Working Group on Information Literacy5 found a number of worrying characteristics among trainees (newly qualified lawyers) carrying out research in law firms. They were unfamiliar with paper-based resources compared with digital, relied on one-hit searching, and did not check

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thoroughly or contextually around their findings. Google was used extensively in searches, even for legal queries, and they lacked persistence, diligence and organization in searching. Others have reported legal trainees referencing Wikipedia without checking further that the legislation in question is applicable to the UK or still in force. It is to be hoped that when this happens supervisors can spot mistakes before advice reaches the client, but this will not always be the case. Similarly, there have been cases where journalists have used Wikipedia as their only source and have printed false information in an article, which has then itself been cited on Wikipedia as proof of the erroneous fact – a self-citing circle, as it were. At best, publishing an error in a newspaper can lead to an embarrassing climb-down and a printed correction; at worst, it could result in a lengthy court case and cost the business thousands in damages. But information literacy is more than simply showing users how to navigate different resources. It also encompasses the teaching of transferable, ‘soft’ research skills – how to identify when you need information or data; how to evaluate a source for reliability and to select the best source for a given need; how to frame and refine a search to get the best possible results; and how to take the information or data you find and present it in the best – and most ethical – way for your target audience. The critical evaluation of sources is increasingly important in our digital world; information can be found at the touch of a button but there is no guarantee that it is factually correct. Even when every effort is made to verify data, errors slip through; Wikipedia prefers information which can be backed up by a reliable, published source, so readers can check its verifiability,6 but the example above shows that this does not always ensure accuracy. Research skills are vital if we are to teach users how to navigate the mass of information available to them. There is a clear and obvious need for an information service to provide training to their users. With the wealth of resources available to people at their desktops, which can frequently be updated, modernized or redesigned, it is crucial that training is carried out so that users can conduct research successfully and confidently by themselves, and learn techniques that allow them to become information literate. Seemingly similar databases have unique characteristics and need to be searched in different ways, for example, using differing connectors or having different defaults. Users will be familiar with using Google and may be of the belief that databases with a search box operate in a similar way. They can

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mistakenly believe that because they know how to ‘Google’ and use the internet, that they are information literate (Hunter, 2013). It can be especially confusing if a database tries to appear more ‘Google-like’ by using a single search box, lulling the user into a false sense of confidence. Training, in whatever format, should provide some tenets of information literacy and key techniques for interrogating databases. A lack of training can pose a risk to a business. It is easy ‘to Google’ to find something, or look on the most obvious website, but just Googling without cross-checking can have embarrassing consequences, as the case of R v Chambers (William) (2008) demonstrates.7 In this case, HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) lawyers referred to the Excise Goods (Holding, Movement, Warehousing and REDS) Regulations 1992 (‘the 1992 Regulations’) in alleging the appellant had dishonestly evaded a liability to pay duty on some tobacco goods. It came to light by ‘a fortunate accident’ that the 1992 Regulations the Revenue had been relying on had in fact been superseded in relation to tobacco products in 2001, some five years before the events which gave rise to this case. The barrister for HMRC explained he had relied on the Office for Public Sector Information (OPSI) website, which showed the 1992 Regulations in their unamended form. The problem with the OPSI website (now Legislation.gov.uk) is that secondary legislation (regulations, orders and so on) is not updated as later legislation amends it, nor annotated to show if it is still in force or not. However, commercial databases do amend secondary legislation. The case was suitably embarrassing for HMRC; a review had to be undertaken to uncover any cases that had also been taken forward on the basis of the superseded Regulations. The case demonstrates how hard it is for courts and the general public, without access to commercial databases, to find out what the law is. This case provides a useful training example for librarians of how important it is to understand the limitations of the commercial and free databases individuals have access to, and how tuition can help staff avoid mistakes like this.

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The librarian as a trainer

Some database providers send their dedicated trainers to a workplace and give instruction on their database. This has advantages in that time-restricted librarians can delegate the training and concentrate on other tasks – certainly for solo librarians or those in small teams this can be a more favourable option. The trainers will have a good knowledge of how the database can be used to get the best from it. But training is an important marketing tool for the library. Carrying out user-education demonstrates an information professional’s knowledge and increases their visibility in the workplace. Receiving training gives users confidence in asking them for assistance and helps broker a relationship between staff and the library. Moreover, the supplier’s own trainers, aware that the organization may use some of their competitor products, may spend some of the precious training time selling their database over the others or giving a great deal of background information which is not required. The training from the database provider might also come at a monetary cost; while many databases include a training element in the subscription cost, it cannot be taken for granted. When librarians conduct the training, they can take more time personalizing the training to those being trained by taking into account the subject matter and level of seniority of the trainees, so participants get more out of the training. They can provide a more balanced, impartial view on the strengths and weaknesses of the databases the organization subscribes to and can pass on their personal experience of getting the best from the database. There would also not be the additional cost of arranging for external trainers to attend. Librarians are more able to cover the informal day-to-day training needs of the business and be more flexible should availability of the users change. Being able to provide a 15 or 30-minute at-desk training session is not something that can be easily arranged with external trainers, especially if the users are then unable to attend at short notice. Some time-poor users may need even shorter sessions: a five-minute contextual run-through may be the only training a journalist will entertain in the course of a busy day. A session this short can only be provided by in-house staff with a good understanding of the trainee’s daily work. Showing you can provide bespoke, excellent training is a value-added service the information team can provide for a business. This training may then also be offered to clients of the firm. It is not unusual in law firms that training from the information department or learning and development team

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be offered to clients, in-house counsel, and can make the difference between a successful tender and an unsuccessful one.

Formal training sessions

While the importance of training cannot be underestimated, training for the sake of it is unrewarding for both you and your company. It might sound obvious but before you start planning, identify a training need that serves a clear purpose. What we think our users need to know does not always match what they want to know. You don’t need to conduct a formal survey but make sure that there is a knowledge gap – and a desire to learn – before you start. If you decide to add a training programme to the services you offer, there are a number of factors that should be considered in the design of the session in order for attendees to get the most out of it and to make it worthwhile for attendee and trainer.

Who should attend?

First, think about who you are training – their departments or areas of the business they are from, the positions they hold in the firm, what their motivation might be for attending the training. Working out who your audience is will shape the examples you use and the depth and breadth of the resources you cover. In law firms, partners may not do much research themselves so may be unfamiliar with the best search techniques and what the databases cover, so a lower and broader level training session might be required. Those who research more frequently will want to learn more sophisticated search strings – they will already be familiar with phrase searching and will want to learn more about proximity searching and alternative connectors to AND and OR. In the news sector, you might be training newly qualified journalists who have not used the company’s databases before but, fresh from studying, are au fait with basic research techniques; or more seasoned reporters and editors who want a quick route to the information they require but whose search skills might be rusty. Then consider the nature of the session itself – will the session be repeated, or a one off? If it is going to be repeated, each time it is, you will need to check that the examples you use are still valid and still demonstrate the point you

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are trying to make. Sessions that are going to be repeated may be incorporated into the formal training offered in an organization, perhaps by the learning and development or human resources department. Consider getting in touch with the relevant department to incorporate your session into what they do; this will increase your visibility within other business service departments.

Timing, location and length

When and where will the session be taking place? Timing can make a great deal of difference as to whether users can make it – first thing in the morning or lunchtimes are obvious times which do not impact the working day too much. If trainers and participants are willing, conduct the session before the working day might normally commence, with reminders being sent the day before. How long will your session be? The content of the session may well determine how long it takes, but offering a variety of session lengths – 30 minutes to an hour – gives users flexibility in an increasingly demanding day. Will the session be taking place in a training room where each user has their own PC to work from, or will it be more lecture style where users just watch you demo? The resources available will change how the session is designed and affect what you can offer to accommodate the differing learning styles of individuals.

Gaining an audience

It can be a struggle to persuade users to attend training sessions and there are a number of reasons why someone chooses not to receive training. They may not be aware of what is available to them or that librarians provide it; it could be that the user feels confident on the topic and does not need to be trained – whether that confidence is real or imagined. There may be issues with time – a common problem in any workplace where a user’s time is best spent producing content to support the employer and ultimately the profit of the business. Most corporate employees are accountable for what they produce and find it difficult to justify spending time on learning, even if it would save time in the long term. Common methods of marketing training are:

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● targeted, tailored e-mails to specific groups of people, either by seniority or department ● firmwide advertising through the company’s intranet ● incorporating your session into any brochures on training the human resources or learning and development department may send out ● posters, if permitted, at tea points or strategic places around the building ● leaving flyers on the keyboards of those you most want to attend. Once some people have attended a session, they may tell colleagues and, if particularly well disposed, provide positive feedback to use in your marketing materials. Consider how the session is marketed to the business. A straightforwardly descriptive title for a session might be enough, but using catchy or fun titles for a session adds intrigue and allure – the Battle of the Search Engines, for example. Such a title, avoiding the word ‘training’, may encourage users to attend, if they feel the session will be more interactive than just a lecture-style session they may be averse to. In one law firm the librarians enticed people to attend a monthly training session entitled ‘Google vs Database’. They chose a relatively catchy title and billed the training as a fight between the best known search engine and a well known proprietary legal database. The session was designed not to ignore how many people rely on Google but to embrace it and ensure people were using it in an information literate way. The session also offered continuing professional development (CPD) points. As lawyers are required to accumulate 16 CPD points throughout a year in order to keep their practising certificate, this can be an attraction, particularly towards the end of the year, but it is not a requirement in all sectors. Above all, attendees need to know why attending the session will benefit them and make their job easier. If you can show that by using a certain product or skill they will increase the visibility of their work, be able to conduct research more quickly or free up time that could more usefully be spent working elsewhere, your users are more likely to engage with training. Don’t be too proud to resort to bribery! Offering a tangible incentive for attending a training course can really boost numbers, particularly for staff lower down in the company hierarchy. Enter all attendees into a prize draw or give them free access to play around with the software you are training

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them on. And never underestimate the appeal of free pens and biscuits as a reward to those who attend the session. In some firms, training is mandatory, or part of a formal induction. If the library can arrange to have their training session included in an obligatory induction programme, attendance will be guaranteed and attendees will be made aware of the library before they have had a chance to become tied up in their jobs. However, it is important to follow up training where possible, as skills learned without being put immediately into practice are soon forgotten. Sometimes staff do not attend sessions even if they have requested the training or need it vitally. A tactful approach is needed if you want to entice them back in the future. Do follow up with each non-attender in some way, for example invite them to a future session, offer them a quick at-desk catchup, or provide them with some materials they missed, either hand-outs or videos. If the culture of the organization supports it, consider copying their supervisor or training manager into your communication; they may give them a nudge to encourage them to come to a future session.

Learning styles and teaching approaches

There are a number of learning styles and theories about how people take in information. The popular VARK theory8 categorizes users into one of four profiles or a mixture of all four. These are visual (learning through visual presentation of information, through diagrams, illustrations and so on), aural (learning by hearing or speaking), read or write (learning by reading or writing), kinesthetic (learning in a ‘tactile’ way, by doing) or multimodal (multiple preferences). Around 60% of the population are multimodal. As there is a majority of multimodal learners and you are unlikely to have insight into your trainees’ learning style ahead of the session it is difficult to adapt training to specific learning styles. However, it makes sense to use a combination of methods to make a more interesting and varied training session. A mixture of lecture style with hands-on practical work and/or discussion accompanied with hand-outs or other printed material should make for an engaging session and keep the attendees’ attention throughout. One method to incorporate differing learning styles can be to ‘flip the classroom’. This is a form of blended learning which gives the student recourse learning through videos, followed by classroom guidance and workable examples. By carrying out learning ahead of the session, the student

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is able to concentrate entirely on practical work in the classroom. Effectively, the lecture comes first and the homework takes place under the guidance of the teacher. At Fieldfisher, the information team has adopted this approach for their annual training of the new intake of trainee solicitors. As part of their induction, trainees are required to watch a series of short videos (each no longer than five minutes), which give basic instruction on each of the databases subscribed to by the firm. This is followed up by a formal session in the office, where they are given a series of questions which are designed to probe what they have learnt and provide opportunities for them to learn additional and advanced search techniques. Questions are relevant, based on ‘real-life’ queries the information services team have received. During the session, trainees are encouraged to ask questions of the librarians and each other, allowing discussion on the best approach to answer a question and debate on the merits of one database over another. Also useful are the toolkits provided by the various library organizations to structure your session to incorporate the tenets of information literacy. Both Hunter (2013) and Fishleigh (2013) used the BIALL Information Literacy Toolkit to devise formal training sessions, and adapted the toolkit to suit the audience, of sixth-formers and a legal department respectively. Don’t be afraid to address the concept of information literacy with your audience. While they might not be aware of it, they will certainly appreciate its aims. Fishleigh (2013) began her session with a summary of BIALL’s fivestage model and provided relevant examples to show how it worked.

Preparation and use of examples

Once you have your training outline, the examples you choose can be tailored depending on who you are training. As Gow (2013) says ‘It is not an overstatement . . . to say that the success of training may depend on the meaningfulness of the questions and examples used to the attendees.’ Make sure you take examples directly related to the work they do and, as they may not be able to think of real-life examples during the session, imagine the types of problem they will encounter which using the information resource could solve. If you are planning a training session, keep a note of any interesting queries you are asked. You may be able to draw examples from enquiries received via the enquiry desk or based on informal or formal interviews with

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users. In many corporate environments, there are colleagues who have a closer relationship to the information service because of the research-heavy nature of their roles, who can advise on the types of questions a practitioner will need to ask. In a larger law firm, for example, a professional support lawyer, whose role is to provide knowhow and precedents internally, rather than to advise clients, would be a good person to approach. If you have time, it is worthwhile running through a newly formed training session to see if it fits into the time allowed. Similar to preparing for a presentation, go through the session as if attendees are there, silently voicing your ‘speech’ and going through each example. It is a time-consuming exercise but it will demonstrate how the session will flow and if anything needs adding or deleting.

Informal training

Don’t just think of training in terms of formal group sessions. Every interaction you have with an end-user is a training opportunity (as well as a marketing one), and some organizations suit informal one-to-one sessions. Similarly, the different skills and resources you need to teach may lend themselves to different styles of training. Decide which style is most applicable to your workplace and to the individual training need as it arises. In an organization such as the Guardian newspaper, where only a small number of subscription databases are rolled out to end-users, wholesale training is unnecessary and journalists’ tight deadlines preclude commitment to an hour of formal training. Experience shows that is much better to train journalists at the point of use, ad hoc, when the need for training is obvious to them and the training can be tailored to an individual’s specific requirements. Shorter, five-minute sessions can slot into a busy working day and can be conducted at the participant’s desk. It is important to have a relationship with the end-user and be available to them for this to happen. These users will never ‘request training’ but if they know that you can ‘help them find something’, you can take the opportunity to provide them with a skill they did not previously have. Such users may be good candidates for ‘social learning’, the process of learning from and with others, rather than in a didactic classroom setting. This has grown in recent years with the development of social media and the proliferation of ‘how-to’ videos on sites like YouTube. While you may not

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want to host training sessions on the public web you can apply some of the same techniques to your in-house training programme. You could connect with trainees before and after training sessions over e-mail, on a wiki or on social media; make training blogs, videos, explainers and tip sheets available online; and provide follow-up exercises if they want to keep learning.

Keys to successful informal training You still need to be prepared

How can you plan in advance for a training session that might be arranged at a moment’s notice? To get the most from ad hoc training you need to rehearse your answers. Write some quick guides to using each of the services you share with users. They don’t need to be comprehensive – just noting down the log-on details and some basic search terms or tips will be enough to prompt you when you come to train someone informally. Think about the kind of questions end-users might ask – ‘how do I search on this database?’ or ‘how do I download or print results?’ Everyone on your team should be equally prepared, so save training tips or notes somewhere that can be accessed by everybody. The more preparation you do the better equipped you will be the next time a user says, ‘I don’t know how to do that. Can you do it for me?’

Know your audience and tailor the training

Even more than with formal training, informal training allows you to tailor your session to one user at a time, or at most a handful of users. Think about the person you are training – which department do they work for? What sort of work do they do day to day? How will they be using the software or techniques in the future? Make sure your training is relevant to them and matches their needs.

Keep it short

Speed is key to ad hoc training – it needs to be quick and to the point. Users don’t need five minutes of waffle about the product – all they need to know is how it will help them and how they can use it. Keep sessions short and focus on practical demonstrations, and if you think they would benefit from

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more information – or if they want to know more – use hand-outs or direct them to ‘how-to’ and online guides.

Use practical examples

A real-world example, suggested by the user if possible, will engage the user more than a theoretical one. If the trainee has no experience of the software or technique you are teaching, use a recent search you have conducted yourself, or something the user is working on. Applying your teaching to something relevant will help the user to see the benefits, encourage them to follow your advice and, hopefully, make the lessons stick.

Enable user-led training with online resources

If you have a simple training need that does not require input from you – how to register on a database, for example, or the key connectors on a particular site – consider writing a quick how-to guide and sending it to users as they need it. If your company has an intranet you could make training guides, tip sheets and other resources available there – a simple FAQ page for your service can be invaluable to new employees, for example. Empowering your end-users to answer easy training needs themselves will enable you to focus on the more advanced or technical sessions that need your experience and guidance. Short videos are a useful way of demonstrating new software to users. The NSPCC’s information service has created a new repository for electronic documents, using SharePoint 2013. Documents uploaded to the repository are quality checked by information specialists who add metadata to facilitate retrieval, and users can search for documents and refine searches using various fields. To help familiarize staff with the new site the library is introducing short videos created from screenshots with Adobe Captivate, capturing step-bystep actions for a number of processes: preparing documents for upload, uploading documents and searching the repository. These Captivate files are linked to from the repository’s Help pages, and users clicking on the demonstrations can view them in their browser. The videos proved very popular in the pilot.

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After your training Hand-outs

While we are in the digital age, many people still feel comfortable with handouts or notes that they can take away with them. Useful short ‘crib sheets’ which have the salient points from your training will reinforce the messages you were trying to get across. If these hand-outs are small enough to be pinned on a noticeboard, all the better. There is no need to include everything from the training session, or, heaven forbid, a comprehensive user guide to the database. There is no need to reinvent the wheel and many databases have detailed user guides that you could share after a training session. Giving bullet-pointed crib sheets removes the need for your trainees to take extensive notes during the session, acts as a reminder for any tips they may have missed and gives them something to refer to easily next time they come to use the software or techniques ‘in real life’. A short crib sheet tailored to exactly the type of use your trainee will make of the database (which will differ, for example, depending on whether they are in corporate finance, marketing or professional services) is far more likely to be used than a lengthy and comprehensive manual.

Revise, refresh and improve

Each training opportunity is also a chance to revise and refresh the session. Seek and learn from feedback, adapting the training accordingly – making small adjustments is good practice. Don’t be afraid to provide a short survey to attendees on how the training went for them. Did it meet their needs and the learning objectives set out? Had it covered the topics they thought it would? Had it fitted into the time allowed without feeling rushed? Negative feedback will only give you opportunity to improve; positive feedback will be encouraging, rewarding, and may provide quotes to use on future promotional material. An online survey will be easier to review and manage, but it is far less likely that attendees will fill it out once they have left the classroom.

Back up with online training tools

Hand-outs and printed tip sheets are incredibly useful, but there are some great ways of creating digital, online training tools too. A 30-second video

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showing how to use a database search engine or upload an image can be much more informative and practical than a written list of instructions (and is more easily accessed each time a user needs it than a sheet of paper, which can be quickly misplaced). They also allow the trainee to access the material in their own time. If they are for internal use only, host them on your corporate intranet, create a members-only private blog or share them via e-mail. Training videos or demonstrations do not have to be hosted on your internal IT space. If the training is not legally sensitive (and you should think carefully about that) you could host videos on your corporation’s website or make them available through publicly accessible sites like YouTube, or write a blog that users can follow at their own speed. There is a list of resources at the end of this chapter. Some organizations do not allow software to be downloaded, which will restrict your access to some of the suggestions. Look for alternative tools that don’t need to be downloaded, like Pinterest and WordPress, or which your organization already has the licence for, such as Captivate for VLEs , offered by Adobe. For more suggestions, take a look at the Top 100 Learning Tools 2013,9 from the Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies, which are voted for by learning professionals. One example of a successful online learning course was the CPD23 course,10 set up in 2011 with the aim of introducing information professionals to a range of tools and techniques to aid professional development. A new blogpost was uploaded each week, for 23 weeks, detailing a new tool and setting homework for those following the programme, and participants could interact in the comments section. Over 800 people took part in the first round, from countries as far apart as New Zealand, Latvia and the UK.

Summary of recommendations

● Use training in your arsenal of tools to provide a value-added service to the business. ● Don’t train for the sake of training – there should be a need. ● Make your training appropriate for the user. ● Preparation is key. ● Keep your training varied and interesting with different strategies, tools and techniques. ● Update your materials to keep it current and relevant. ● Remember to follow up to leave a positive impression.

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Resources for online training

There is a wide range of websites and free downloadable software that you can use to make interactive, snappy training tools, some of which we have touched on in this chapter. These are just a few examples: Google Drive – https://support.google.com/drive/answer/2424384 – A platform for sharing documents, spreadsheets, presentations, questionnaires and a host of other apps. Anyone can sign up to a Google account for free and log in online. Useful for sharing training resources, compiling a list of attendees or collaborating on tasks in a training session. Jing – www.techsmith.com/jing – Enables you to record and share short video tutorials up to five minutes in length, ideal for teaching simple tasks like registering with a resource or building a search string in a particular database. Can be recorded quickly, perhaps in response to a query instead of talking a user through a process over the phone. Jorum – www.jorum.ac.uk – A free online educational resource site for sharing content. Jorum is aimed at teachers, but includes higher education tools and a section on information literacy and digital skills that could prove useful in the workplace. Moodle – https://moodle.org – A downloadable platform that allows you to create a personalized learning environment for all your training sessions. The existing framework means you don’t need to start from scratch, and you can take advantage of a vast array of resources. Pinterest – www.pinterest.com – A public social media site for ‘pinning’ and sharing interesting web pages. You could search it for training aids or create a board to compile useful links and further reading for each course you run. Prezi – http://prezi.com – A great tool for creating interactive ‘zoomable’ presentations that are stored on the web so you can access, update, collaborate and present them from any internet connection. Includes access to a vast archive of presentation templates and materials. Quizlet – http://quizlet.com – Games are a good way of engaging participants in training, breaking up sessions and getting them to test their newly acquired knowledge with a fun exercise. Quizlet allows you to create your own games but you could use something as simple as PowerPoint.

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Survey Monkey – www.surveymonkey.com – Asking trainees to complete online post-training surveys is an easy way of getting feedback. You can ask up to ten questions using the free service, and should you need to report back to managers on sessions, the results analysis tool does the work for you. Wordpress blogging site – http://wordpress.com – A blog is a good way of providing training to users in disparate locations, or for self-directed courses that participants can undertake at their own pace.

References and further reading

BIALL (2013) BIALL Salary Survey, British and Irish Association of Law Librarians.

Choolhun, N. (2012) The Only Way is Information Literacy, Legal Information Management, 12 (1), 44–50.

Fishleigh, J. (2013) Turning Theory into Practice: fee earner training using the BIALL legal research 5 stage model, Legal Information Management, 13 (2), 124–6.

Gow, E. (2013) Exploring User Training Needs at Middle Temple Law Library, Legal Information Management, 13 (2), 80–93.

Horton, F. W. (2007) Understanding Information Literacy: a primer, UNESCO, http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0015/001570/157020e.pdf.

Hunter, I. (2013) Information Literacy and the Google Generation: teaching research skills to sixth-formers, Legal Information Management, 13 (2), 107–11.

Zurkowski, P. G. (1974) The Information Service Environment: relationships and priorities, Related Paper No. 5, National Commission on Libraries and Information Science, available through http://eric.ed.gov.

Notes

1 www.cilip.org.uk/cilip/advocacy-campaigns-awards/advocacycampaigns/information-literacy/information-literacy.

2 www.sconul.ac.uk/sites/default/files/documents/coremodel.pdf.

3 www.rin.ac.uk/our-work/researcher-development-and-skills/ what-is-information-literacy.

4 www.biall.org.uk/data/files/BIALL_Legal_Information_Literacy_ Statement_July_2012.pdf.

5 www.biall.org.uk/data/files/Committees/PR/Press_releases/BIALL_press_ release__LETR__20130627.pdf.

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TRAINING END-USERS IN THE WORKPLACE 177 6 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiable.

7 www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/Crim/2008/2467.html.

8 www.varklearn.com/english/index.asp.

9 http://c4lpt.co.uk/top100tools/.

10 http://cpd23.blogspot.co.uk/.

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Index AALL see American Association of Law Libraries Adobe Captivate, online training resource 172, 174 advisory role, corporate librarians 33–9 ALA see American Library Association Amazon, information functions, successful 116 American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) legal practice firms, changing skill-set 50 rebranding 52 American Library Association (ALA), job advertisements 50 American Society for Information Science 4 Association of Specialist Libraries and Information Bureaux (Aslib), origin 3 auditing data auditing 94–5 form auditing 94–5 knowledge management 94–5

barriers equality of opportunity 128–9 market entry 122–3 BIALL see British and Irish Association of Law Librarians BMA see British Medical Association British and Irish Association of Law Librarians (BIALL) BIALL Information Literacy Toolkit 169 information literacy 160, 161–2 training survey 159 British Medical Association (BMA) change 104 marketing 104 business objectives customer-facing information product improvement 58 internal systems improvement 58 taxonomies 57–60 business requirements vs wish lists, knowledge management 85

capturing knowledge exit interviews 88 knowledge management 88 Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies, online training resources 174 champions, local, marketing method 135 change 99–114 agility 107–8 British Medical Association (BMA) 104 Change Curve 109–13 committees 105 communication 112 compliance issues 105 core services 107 drivers 101–3, 104 economic cycles 101–2 economic drivers 101–2

evolving services 107 influencing 107–8 information management 100 information standards 105 listening 112–13 management tool 109–13 marketing 104, 106, 107–8 networking 105–6, 108–9 opportunities 100 organizational drivers 103 PEST analysis 102–3 political drivers 102 pre-empting 107 preventing 103–8 reasons for 99–101, 102–3 reputation-building 105 research analysts’ role 100 return on investment 106–7 social drivers 103 support during 108–9, 112–13 technological drivers 103 technology impact 99–100 types 100–1 understanding drivers 104 understanding the business 104 using information 105 warning signs 101–2 Change Curve, change management tool 109–13 Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) information literacy 160 librarian–IT hybrids 46 Umbrella 2013 conference 46 co-branding, marketing method 135 collaboration intranets 16, 28 librarian–IT hybrids 53–5 library systems 54–5 committees, change 105 communication change 112 skill-set component 50, 51 subscriptions 153 taxonomies 73–4 communication channel, intranets 15–18 communities of practice customer relationship management 87–8 knowledge management 86–8 community engagement and visibility corporate librarians 42–3 marketing 42–3 competitive advantage, legal practice firms 48 compliance issues, change 105 content creation and management, intranets 14–15 Context Networks (company), market analysis 122 continuing professional development (CPD), formal training 167

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contract negotiation skills, information professionals’ role 53 core services, change 107 corporate alignment, corporate information services trend 8 corporate information services defining 1–2 trends 6–11 corporate librarians advisory role 33–9 community engagement and visibility 42–3 dispensability 34 external value delivery 39–41 internal advisory role 33–9 leveraging your network 41–2 marketing 33–44 networking 34–5, 41–2 partnerships 41–3 reputation-building 35–6 risk and reward, calculating 36–7 speaking engagements 43 strategic sharing 40–1 supporter network 34–5 training 36 value 37–44 value, measuring and delivering 37–9 CPD see continuing professional development CPD23 course, online training resource 174 ‘crunch tech skills’, skill-set component 51 customer-facing information product improvement, business objective 58 customer relationship management communities of practice 87–8 knowledge management 87–8

data building blocks 79 knowledge management 79 data analysis, shared network drive 90–1 data auditing, knowledge management 94–5 data management, corporate information services trend 10–11 database providers, training end-users 164 deployment strategy, global knowledge 129–31 ‘digital cartographers’, librarian–IT hybrids 49–50 disintermediation, corporate information services trend 6–7 Distimo (company), market analysis 122 documentation, taxonomies 75 documentation management business requirements vs wish lists 85 knowledge management 85 drivers of change 101–3 understanding 104

e-books, subscriptions 143 economic cycles, change driver 101–2 economic drivers, change 102 e-mail training 93–4 embedded working, corporate information services trend 9 emotional intelligence 80 end-users information literacy 161–3

training 161–3 equality of opportunity, global insight units 128–9 e-resources see also licensing; subscriptions accessing 139–41, 143–5 choosing 141–3 introductory sessions 145–7 IP access 144–5 licensing 141–3 multiple interfaces 147–8 password access 144 presentations 145–7 problems 141–3 promoting 145–7 remote resources 144 rolling out 145–7 searching 141–2, 146–8 tagging documents 148 virtual private networks 144 evidence-based practice, corporate information services trend 10–11 evolving services, change 107 exit interviews capturing knowledge 88 knowledge management 88 expert networks, global organizations 123–4 exploration, Change Curve stage 113 external marketing 39–41, 43–4

facilitation, skill-set component 50 feedback, informal training 173 ‘flip the classroom’, learning technique 168 form auditing, knowledge management 94–5 formal training 165–70 see also informal training; training attendees 165–6 BIALL Information Literacy Toolkit 169 continuing professional development (CPD) 167 examples 169–70 ‘flip the classroom’ 168 incentives 167–8 induction programmes 168 information literacy 169 learning styles 168–9 length 166 location 166 marketing 166–8 preparation 169–70 teaching approaches 168–9 timing 166 titles 167 VARK theory 168 free trials, subscriptions 156–7 Gartner (company), market analysis 121 global insight units see also global organizations barriers, equality of opportunity 128–9 closeness to clients 126 consistency 125–6 deployment strategy, global knowledge 129–31 duplication 127 equality of opportunity 128–9 global organizations 124–32

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knowledge tracking 127 marketing 132–5 meetings 127 offshoring vs onshoring 129–31 prioritization 127–8 product marketing 132–5 tactics 125–8 team culture 126 technology 131–2 tolerance 127–8 transparency 126 travel 127 global organizations 115–36 see also global insight units Amazon 116 expert networks 123–4 information functions, successful 116–17 information vacuums 123 ingredients for success 118–19 knowledge requirements 115 legal issues 123 market analysis 120–4 organizational design 124–32 goals, intranets 16–18 Google, searching 26–7, 141, 147–8, 162–3, 167 Google Drive, online training resource 175

hand-outs, informal training 173–4 history of special libraries 2–6 hybrid librarian–IT experts see librarian–IT hybrids

ideation creation, intranets 28–9 induction programmes, formal training 168 informal training 170–4 see also formal training; training Adobe Captivate 172 brevity 171–2 examples 172 feedback 173 hand-outs 173–4 journalists 170 keys to success 171–2 online resources 172 online training resources 173–6 preparation 171 social learning 170–1 tailoring training 171 userled training 172 videos 172, 173–4 information Change Curve stage 111–12 knowledge management 79–80 information literacy British and Irish Association of Law Librarians (BIALL) 159, 160, 161–2, 169 Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) 160 defining 160–1 end-users 161–3 formal training 169 Research Information Network (RIN) 160 Society of College, National and University Libraries (SCONUL) 160 training 159–63

information management, change 100 information overload, corporate information services trend 8 information professionals’ role see also librarian–IT hybrids contract negotiation skills 53 technology 7 information services, activities 104 information sources, training 36 information standards, change 105 information technology (IT) see also librarian–IT hybrids library systems 54–5 information vacuums, global organizations 123 Institute of Information Scientists 4 intelligence emotional 80 knowledge management 80 internal marketing 33–9, 43–4 internal systems improvement, business objective 58 International Online Information Meeting 4 intranets 13–31 author engagement 20–2 collaboration 16, 28 communication channel 15–18 content creation and management 14–15 content management approach 18–20 content management system, choosing a 30 content management updating 20–2 content searching 25–7 design 22–4 goals 16–18 vs Google 27 governance 24–5 ideation creation 28–9 managers’ role 13–14, 31 managers’ skills and abilities 31 marketing method 134 models 18–20 navigation 22–4 people searching 25–7 purposes 14–16 searching 25–7, 146 social intranets 27–30 social networking 28 subscriptions 139–40 tasks management 15–16 IP access, e-resources 144–5 IT see information technology

Jing, online training resource 175 job advertisements American Library Association (ALA) 50 skill-set 50 Jorum, online training resource 175 journalists, informal training 170

knowledge defining 80 forms of knowledge 81–2 media 81–2 recording 82 knowledge management 77–97

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auditing 94–5 business requirements vs wish lists 85 capturing knowledge 88 communities of practice 86–8 corporate information services trend 9–10 customer relationship management 87–8 data 79 data analysis, shared network drive 90–1 data auditing 94–5 documentation management 85 exit interviews 88 form auditing 94–5 forms of knowledge 81–2 information 79–80 intelligence 80 knowledge 80, 81–2 language power 85–6 learning from the organization 83–5 management 77–9 managers’ role 82–3 meetings 91–2 possibilities 96–7 process review 95–6 publications, recommended 96 starting points 96–7 technology 88–91 training 93–4 vocabulary 85–6 knowledge tracking, global insight units 127 knowledge transfer, taxonomies 75

language power, knowledge management 85–6 learning from the organization, knowledge management 83–5 learning styles, formal training 168–9 learning to learn managers’ role 83 technology 89–90 legacy pricing, subscriptions 153 legal issues, global organizations 123 legal practice firms American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) 50 competitive advantage 48 technological changes 47–9 librarian–IT hybrids 45–56 CILIP Umbrella 2013 conference 46 collaboration 53–5 contract negotiation skills 53 ‘digital cartographers’ 49–50 library systems 54–5 skill-set 49–52 technological changes, legal practice firms 47–9 librarians see also corporate librarians as trainers 164–5 library systems collaboration 54–5 librarian–IT hybrids 54–5 licensing see also e-resources; subscriptions hard-copy resources 142–3 negotiating 142 problems 141–3

trial periods 142 listening, Change Curve stage 112–13

management aims 78–9 components 78–9 cost 78 definitions 78–9 organizational knowledge 78–9 managers’ role intranets 13–14, 31 knowledge management 82–3 learning to learn 83 managers’ skills and abilities, intranets 31 market analysis barriers to market entry 122–3 Context Networks (company) 122 Distimo (company) 122 exploiting trends 121–3 Gartner (company) 121 global organizations 120–4 niches 122 opportunities 120–1 TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) 122 trends 121–3 Wood MacKenzie (company) 121 Yano (company) 121 marketing 33–44 British Medical Association (BMA) 104 change 104, 106, 107–8 community engagement and visibility 42–3 corporate information services trend 8 corporate librarians 33–44 external 39–41, 43–4 external value delivery 39–41 formal training 166–8 global insight units 132–5 internal 33–9, 43–4 methods 134–5 oneself 132–5 partnerships 41–3 people 132–5 products 132–5 reputation-building 35–6 risk and reward 36–7 services 106 skill-set 132–5 speaking engagements 43 strategic sharing 40–1 supporter network 34–5 training 36 value 37–44 value, measuring and delivering 37–9 meetings global insight units 127 knowledge management 91–2 Moodle, online training resource 175 negotiating contract negotiation skills 53 licensing 142 subscriptions 156 networking

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change 105–6, 108–9 corporate librarians 34–5, 41–2 expert networks 123–4 global organizations 123–4 leveraging your network 41–2 supporter network 34–5 virtual private networks 144

offshoring vs onshoring, global insight units 129–31 Onelog, subscriptions manager 151 online training resources 173–6 organizational drivers, change 103 organizational knowledge, management 78–9 organizations, global see global organizations

partnerships corporate librarians 41–3 marketing 41–3 password access, e-resources 144 people marketing 132–5 personal skills, skill-set component 51 personality traits, skill-set component 51 PEST analysis, change drivers 102–3 physical media, marketing method 135 Pinterest, online training resource 174, 175 political drivers, change 102 pre-empting change 107 Prezi, online training resource 175 process review, knowledge management 95–6 product enhancements, subscriptions 153–4 product marketing, global insight units 132–5

Quizlet, online training resource 175

rebuilding, Change Curve stage 113 recording knowledge 82 relationship management, skill-set component 51 remote resources, e-resources 144 reputation-building change 105 corporate librarians 35–6 marketing 35–6 Research Information Network (RIN), information literacy 160 Research Monitor, subscriptions manager 151 research services, training 36 restructuring, organizational see change return on investment change 106–7 proving 106–7 RIN see Research Information Network risk and reward corporate librarians 36–7 marketing 36–7 road shows, marketing method 134

SCONUL see Society of College, National and University Libraries searching e-resources 141–2, 146–8 Google 26–7, 141, 147–8, 162–3, 167 intranets 25–7, 146 mistakes 163 risks 163

tagging documents 148 training 161–3 services core services 107 evolving 107 marketing 106 shared network drives data analysis 90–1 organizing 93 Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS), taxonomies 67 skill-sets changing 49–52 communication component 50, 51 contract negotiation 53 crossovers 52–5 ‘crunch tech skills’ 51 facilitation component 50 intranets 31 job advertisements 50 librarian–IT hybrids 49–52, 53 marketing 132–5 negotiating 53 personal skills 51 personality traits 51 relationship management 51 traditional library skills 51 SKOS see Simple Knowledge Organization System SLA see Special Libraries Association social drivers, change 103 social intranets 27–30 social learning, informal training 170–1 Society of College, National and University Libraries (SCONUL), information literacy 160 speaking engagements corporate librarians 43 marketing 43 special libraries, history 2–6 Special Libraries Association (SLA) 1 strategic sharing corporate librarians 40–1 marketing 40–1 subscriptions 139–57 see also e-resources; licensing administration 148–51 bugs fixing 155–6 communication 153 contract modules 151 cost issues 152–3 e-books 143 forms/form-filling 157 free trials 156–7 hard-copy resources 142–3 intranets 139–40 large vs small organizations 154–5 legacy pricing 153 managing 148–51 myths 152–7 negotiating 156 Onelog 151 product enhancements 153–4 renewing 148–51 Research Monitor 151 tracking 149–51

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vendors’ view 151–7 support change 108–9, 112–13 Change Curve stage 112–13 supporter network corporate librarians 34–5 marketing 34–5 Survey Monkey, online training resource 176

tagging documents e-resources 148 searching 148 targeting, marketing method 134 tasks management, intranets 15–16 taxonomies 57–76 applications 60 business objectives 57–60 ‘buy or build’ dilemma 62–4 characteristics 57–9 communication 73–4 constructing 66–72 content analysis 64 design 68–72 developers 61–2 documentation 75 faceted vs hierarchical 69 governance 73 granularity 68 hierarchical vs faceted 69 implementation 61–2 information architecture 66 in-house applications 67 initiating 59 internationalization 71 knowledge transfer 75 maintenance 74 mental models 64–5 needs for 57–60 nomenclature 59–60 office applications 66–7 open-source 63–4 polyhierarchy 69 post-implementation 72–5 preferred terms 69–70 principles 57–9 project teams 62 readymade 63–4 reasons for 57–60 review process 74 Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) 67 specialist tools 67–8 stakeholder workshops 65 standards, international 68 stewardship 73 synonyms 70 terms/terminology 69–72 testing 61–2, 71–2 training 72–3 user expectations 64–5 user groups 73–4 user language vs ‘official’ terminology 70–1 user research 64–5 uses 60

validation 71–2 value 59 teaching approaches, formal training 168–9 technological changes, legal practice firms 47–9 technological drivers, change 103 technology categories 132 change, impact on 99–100 global insight units 131–2 information professionals’ role 7 knowledge management 88–91 learning to learn 89–90 TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design), market analysis 122 Top 100 Learning Tools 2013, online training resource 174 traditional library skills, skill-set component 51 training 159–76 see also formal training; informal training British and Irish Association of Law Librarians (BIALL) 159 corporate librarians 36 database providers training end-users 164 e-mail 93–4 end-users 161–3 formal 165–70 informal training 170–4 information literacy 159–63 information sources 36 knowledge management 93–4 knowledge sharing 93–4 librarians as trainers 164–5 marketing 36 problem solving 93–4 reasons for 161–3 research services 36 searching 161–3 survey 159 taxonomies 72–3 techniques 36, 72–3, 93–4 trends corporate information services 6–11 market analysis 121–3 value corporate librarians 37–44 delivering 37–41 external value delivery 39–41 marketing 37–44 measuring 37–9 VARK theory, learning styles 168 videos, informal training 172, 173–4 virtual private networks, e-resources 144 vocabulary knowledge management 85–6 language power 85–6

wish lists vs business requirements, knowledge management 85 Wood MacKenzie (company), market analysis 121 WordPress, online training resource 174, 176 Yano (company), market analysis 121