Making Knowledge Work

November 27, 2011

Pillars of Strength in the Workplace

Filed under: Information Literacy, Knowledge and Information Management, LIKE — virginiahenry @ 9:24 pm

I’ve been feeling very fortunate lately. My day job’s with an extraordinary organisation, where I witness my colleagues work daily wonders: helping others to help themselves and others.  Their willingness to share and build our collective knowledge makes my role a pleasure to fulfil.  And my involvement with LIKE  gives me the chance to learn from my brilliant Information Profession colleagues about  ways of working and thinking.

LIKE 31 on Thursday evening focused on Information Literacy. Dr Susie Andretta was in the Chair, and kicked the panel discussion off by   explaining that “Information Literate people are those who’ve learned how to learn”.  Then we heard from three LIKE members whose jobs include imparting literacy.

Adjoa Boateng  illustrated information literacy issues facing students in higher education with a problem that was fresh in her mind: she’d prepared her talk and uploaded it to her dropbox, ready for the evening.  Unfortunately she’d neglected to download the PowerPoint application to her Samsung reader.  So although her presentation was ready to use, she couldn’t access it!  Her point was well made – the learning society we have now is hyper-complex, and you have to navigate many different mediums before reaching the information you require.  Students need to deal with many platforms and pathways –and  the Librarians who support them have a responsibility to assist with overcoming those hurdles as well as helping develop the critical skills students require to analyse the information they retrieve.

Spcialist databases,impentrable jargon and fast-changing technology are all barriers to information literacy.  So Adjoa feels her role must include the teaching of digital literacy as well as supporting students’ information requirements: going beyond the original seven pillars model for information literacy.

Adjoa also pointed out that information literacy is not free – the databases and eBooks her institution needs to acquire are expensive, and the decisions she (and people in similar roles) makes determine how information literate students will be.  And that’s a crucial ethical decision, as it directly impacts the quality of skills available to the professions those students move into.

Rachel Adams deals with some of those graduates.  She’s  worked in the legal information sector for five or more years.  Rachel said that, like many other businesses – such as accountancy firms and consultancies – law firms  trade off their knowledge.  Information literacy is, therefore, vital as it informs the quality “product” sold to clients.
A colleague told her that information literacy matters because it saves time, money and stress.  For example if fee-earners direct their research effectively: frame their research query well, know what resource to use and are able to interpret the result,  they work more cost-effectively.  Information overload is as common in law firms as anywhere else, so being able to understand the process of research and present results in a timely manner makes life better for everyone.

But how to sell information literacy to busy colleagues who don’t necessarily ‘get it’ ?  Rachel’s found he best way is to call it training in research skills, refresher sessions etc.  However, the training needs to be relevant – ‘just-in-time’, at the point of need.  Most of the firms she’s worked with focus only on induction sessions for trainees  at the beginning of their time with the organisation.  By the time they come to need the knowledge she’s imparted, they’ve almost certainly forgotten it.   So Rachel’s learned to take advantage of opportunities as they arise.  In October she was running three information literacy sessions a week.  The reason: in order to continue practicing as a solicitor, fee-earners need to record a certain amount of CPD each year.  Some of this can come from training on legal resources.  As the deadline loomed, lots of her lawyer colleagues phoned to book a session – and Rachel used the time with them to increase their information literacy.

Medical Librarians, Caroline De Brún  told us, have slightly different challenges to deal with. Health Information Literacy isn’t a common phrase in Medicine, they’ve tended to use the term “Evidence based Medicine” – meaning decisions should be based on best research evidence and clinical expertise.  Health Professionals need information literacy skills to fulfil this, but there are a number of barriers to this.  Time is one – GPs have few spare minutes between patient appointments to devote to research, and in emergency wards they have little opportunity to stop what they’re doing to search for information.  Resources are another barrier: Caroline is now based in a medical school library and has some great resources.  But she used to be a Librarian for GP services, and the variation in access and resources across the practices she visited was very wide: some had great tools and excellent internet access, others had dial-up.

Even if the resources are there, the skills may not be.  Some GPs don’t know what search terms to use,  or what databases to choose.  So then, as now in her new role, the solutions to these problems include outreach.  Caroline works with clinical teams to support their needs, giving them training and providing research skills when they need it.  She takes the teaching to their desktop and offers “ten minute” training sessions, adapting her approach to their needs and available resources.

As Susie widened the debate to include those who’d been listening it was clear that most LIKE members in the room, dealing with similar issues, were working hard to find practical ways to help colleagues improve their information literacy skills.  Some were daunted by the scale of the challenge, but  nobody was willing to “give in to Google”!

October 30, 2011

LIKE 30: Knowledge Transfer – making it work

Filed under: Knowledge Management, LIKE — Tags: — virginiahenry @ 3:55 pm

It’s often easier to talk about best practice than to just get on with it.  I’m sure lots of us have sat in after-action reviews or meetings where projects have been comprehensively analysed and “ways to do it better” have been skilfully identified.  Then everyone returns to their desks and carries on as before!  There are many reason it happens – change takes time, teamwork and, often, training.  Business as usual can dictate the pace of work (even if that work entails time-consuming activities such as trawling through over-loaded email inboxes to find important information).   Introducing new and more effective ways of working can prove to be ‘too much hassle’ – particularly if senior team-members consider themselves exempt from adopting new practices.

Maybe that’s why we’re more willing to invest external agents with the authority to make change or perform services that we could, if we chose, do for ourselves.

Gary Colet is the Facilitator for the Knowledge Retention and Transfer special interest group at the Knowledge and Innovation Network of Warwick University Business School.  He has a strong aversion to the term “Knowledge Management” preferring the description “Organisational Learning”.  It’s not difficult to see why he has a problem with the KM handle – it’s not exactly explanatory, and when practitioners (as they often are)  are called on to explain it, the descriptions of KM’s value and impact can vary widely.
So, organisational learning is what Gary facilitates.

The LIKE evening started with Gary calling on four volunteers to assist in illustrating how ‘knowledge’ rapidly degrades when passed along a human chain.  The first volunteer was told a story that contained a number of facts.  Their job was to relate the tale to the next volunteer, ensuring the facts were transmitted.  That volunteer then had to relate the story to the next person to enter the room and so on.  Surprisingly, one of the participants asked if she could take notes – Gary said that was the first time anyone had ever thought to do so (maybe not so surprising that a LIKE member should think so practically :-) ).  His point was well illustrated though – facts evaporated in the telling, and the name of a publication morphed into another (the New Scientist became the New Statesman).

We moved on to analyse the shelf-life and value of various examples of knowledge/information transmitters:

  • Transactional information such as emails = low value, short life
  • Round-tables and seminars = high value, short life
  • Meeting minutes, FAQs, check lists =  low value, long life
  • Partner contracts, design rationales, projects decisions = high value, long life

Transient knowledge fits into the high value, short life category – and the high value makes this knowledge well worth eliciting.  Gary is often called in at times of change in organisations: when a round of redundancies is taking place, or when acquisitions and mergers are in progress.  He facilitates meetings or dinners during which the outgoing individual (always a key team member or senior leader) is encouraged to pass on their knowledge and experience.
Gary calls his approach to achieving this ‘O.P.E.C.’: Open, Probe, Examine, Close.  So his questions begin with “Tell me about your current role?”  or “Tell me about the project you’ve just completed?” – deliberately broad and open queries aimed at opening the dialogue in an unchallenging way.  With the discussion initiated, he moves on to the probing questions: “What were your particular successes in…..?”, “What were you trying to achieve in doing…..?”,“What didn’t go so well in…..?”, etc: the kinds of enquiry aimed at garnering facts and details.  Then come the ‘examining’ queries: “Why didn’t it work so well?”, “Why did you choose that approach?”, “Who was your most useful contact?”.  These questions focus on clarifying details and encouraging the individual to make their implicit knowledge explicit.  Finally he asks the important closing questions – for example “If there were three main things you’d speak to your successor about, what would they be?”

As anyone who’s facilitated these exchanges can testify – the process is not easy or comfortable.  The last thing a person who is feeling bruised and cynical may want is to share their professional knowledge with the organisation that is discarding them!  So, as Gary pointed out, the approach you take is vitally important.  Even if the organisation believes they own, or have a right to, that person’s knowledge, the individual is likely to see things very differently.   These structured exchanges do, however, offer them something worthwhile: respect for their professionalism and the value of their know-how; acknowledgment of their contribution and importance to their soon-to-be former colleagues.  By making this respect and appreciation clear to the individual at the outset, exchanges which begin with hostility and suspicion can quickly become positive and rewarding experiences for both parties.

It may seem trite to say “do as you would be done by” – but it’s a fact that this sentiment underpins good practice in Organisational Learning (or KM, sorry Gary).  The moment you allow yourself to believe that time is too precious to invest in enabling individuals to exchange knowledge and information is the moment you step onto the wheel of organisational amnesia and recurrent mistakes from the past.

October 9, 2011

LIKE 29 – Connecting Information with Innovation

Filed under: Information Management, Knowledge and Information Management, Knowledge Management, LIKE — virginiahenry @ 2:07 pm

There was an enthusiastic response to our announcement that LIKE 29 would focus on the findings of a recent report by the specialist professional services company TFPL:  so enthusiastic that the evening was quickly over-subscribed.  The only way to satisfy demand was to run the event twice.

On both evenings the very lively discussions were skilfully led by John Davies , Head of Consulting at TFPL and co-author of the report.

The title “Connecting Information with Innovation” was chosen because responses to the survey forming the basis of the report showed organisations are increasingly linking information services with corporate purpose.  And the purpose of the report was to take a fresh snapshot of the Info Pro landscape.  (Back in 2006 the TFPL team had worked with Hazel Hall to produce “Who’s Managing Information?”)

Of ten thousand questionnaires, two hundred and twenty were returned.   35% of respondents worked in the public sector, 48% in the private sector, and the rest in education and the third sector.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, most respondents classified themselves as senior managers.  But more interestingly only half worked in core info management service, while the other 50% said their services were dispersed across the organisation.

Most people reported little change from 2006 in Knowledge and Information (KIM) staffing levels.  But there was much evidence that organisations were reallocating responsibilities – for example with business information being moved into the remit of business intelligence. And there was   strong evidence that organisations were looking for increased value from their information services, with more accountability and pressure to contribute to the organisations’ strategic plan than there had been in 2006.

Many of the respondents could be classified as Librarians, Records Managers, Content Specialists, Information Services providers, Business Analysts…..  but such things as  information security, information governance, communications, competitive intelligence and digital preservation fell outside of their responsibilities.

John said there are approximately 30 million people in work in the UK.  And, based on work done in the US following Drucker, around 60-70% of us are classified as “knowledge workers”.  However, for every million knowledge workers, there are maybe one thousand with recognisable qualifications. And, it seemed, qualifications still matter to recruiting businesses.
So he wanted to know how LIKE people saw their profession – what distinctions they made, and who they thought were “KIM” professionals.

It was clear from the comments people made that we’re not doing a great job of explaining to each other what we do, or feeling particularly comfortable with the KIM umbrella term:

“Business Intelligence is all about coding”. “Business development people get my goad”. “Archivists, Records Managers and Librarians have a similar mindset, but KMs come at it from a very different angle”.  “Knowledge Managers don’t need a qualification but librarians do”. 

Some people were bemused (and amused) by the increasing pressure to ‘professionalise’: “ If someone sees themselves as a KIM professional, they pretty well are”.  “In  Government there’s a move for civil servants to be part of a profession – IT Professional, Lawyer, Statistician etc – so that’s led people like Immigration Officers  to say ‘well I use information a lot, so I’m a KIM professional’”. 

John told us recruitment specialists are having a hard time keeping up with the demands of employers.  Job specifications are getting broader, deeper, more demanding.  The old distinctions between the junior and more senior roles were being blurred as everyone is expected to demonstrate business acumen, project management ability and IT knowledge.

Five attributes that were key to recruitment, came out in the survey.  He described them as:  Visionary, perseverance, logical, pragmatic, collaborative.  He wanted to know what we thought of these, and which of them we’d prioritise.

Several people said they’d never heard two definitions of ‘Knowledge Management’ that were the same.  Others confirmed that the same went for ‘Information Management’.  So how would it be possible to attain definitive descriptions, or prioritise attributes?
One Consultant had stopped putting job titles on her CV entirely.  She found they confused her clients and didn’t add value – her skills and experience were more important.

Someone said most Information Managers are just Librarians by another name.  And a professional from the British Library said “I work in the biggest library in the country – not a single post at the British Library is called Librarian.  Titles are meaningless!  I’m a Reference Specialist – what does that mean?  Even within the reference team there are different interpretations of what a Reference Specialist does and is.”

This was one of the areas of consensus on both evenings.  Lots of people felt it was pointless to define terms when each organisation had its own definitions.  Every organisation has its own jargon – “So you read the job description and interpret – then you repeat their language when you fill in your application for a job.”

Someone said “we’re good at collaborating among ourselves, but maybe not so good at doing it within our wider businesses”.  And it was suggested that some Librarians see themselves as Librarians first, then employees of their specific business.

But of the five key attributes Collaboration, Vision and Pragmatism were seen as the most important.  So we proved to be pretty good at prioritising!

John told us that since 2006 training on the job had fallen by the wayside.  In-house training is increasingly in demand, while external courses are being cut.  LIKErs confirmed that they were being directed to develop or use in-house resources for training.  Some are making use of online courses.  And, of course, transferred knowledge inside the organisation is an important element of Knowledge Management, so there’s a case for looking inside for skill development.

On both evenings the discussion about training and development inevitably led back to the issue of professional qualification and its importance – both to the professional and the employer.  Although “Some people are professionals in the field without having professional qualifications”, it was agreed that these individuals usually have years of experience to support their ‘claim’.  For others, especially those just starting out, it was seen as essential to have a professional qualification “so you have credibility and can demonstrate that you know what you’re doing.” “It’s a badge of honour, showing you can do the job” Some people also saw professional qualifications as a means of gaining a broader understanding of their specialism than can be gained in an isolated role “it gives you a structured core skills base”.  But there was a rider to the importance placed on qualifications: “courses really do need to link up with reality”.    And qualifications alone wouldn’t cut it in modern business: “inside the organisation it’s your success stories and the reputation you’ve built up.”  “It all comes down to demonstrating you have the skills to do the job”. 

During our discussions we briefly revisited a question that comes up pretty regularly at LIKE meetings (and elsewhere) – the value of professional bodies.  It’s always an interesting debate.  The specialised roles (such as Law Librarian) need to have their own knowledge networks.  It makes sense doesn’t it?  But what doesn’t make sense to many KIM professionals is to have professional bodies that are out of tune with their members’ requirements and experiences.

John Davies was very complimentary about LIKE – he said it was invigorating and refreshing,   a model for how professional bodies could develop “rather than the ossified, committee-ridden groups I’ve been so familiar with over the years”.

If LIKE is any kind of model, that’s brilliant.  Our primary focus, though, is on providing LIKErs with what they tell us they want – open, inclusive discussions about issues relevant to them.

We seem to have done that with LIKE 29, and LIKE 30 should fit the bill too!  Gary Colet from Warwick Business School will be getting us thinking about how to make transferred knowledge stick.

 

 

 

August 10, 2011

Tardiness, tagging and things to come

Filed under: LIKE, Tagging — virginiahenry @ 4:14 pm

The year’s flying by, the ‘To Do’ list isn’t shrinking, and I’ve been meaning to write this entry for ages!…

Recently the LIKE ‘collective’ turned its attention to planning the autumn/winter season for the London Information & Knowledge Exchange. Looks like it’ll be exactly what we LIKE best – a programme of enjoyable and enlightening events.

We ended our official summer sessions on a high, with Martin Belam’s: “Information Architects: The Secret Librarians of the Internet”. Martin talked of the varied roles and experiences that led to his present job as Lead User Experience & Information Architect at Guardian News & Media, then he told us about how he does that job (read more about the talk’s content on his blog.   His hands-on, pragmatic approach to the role was inspiring. I guess you’d expect someone with “user experience” in their job title to be pretty focused on making the users’ experiences as fruitful and rewarding as possible, but expectations aren’t always fulfilled are they?  ’Guerilla usability testing’ helps keep his information architecture on track, as does his empathy for colleagues’ requirements and deadlines.
What fascinated me most was how the Guardian’s content model relies for its success on tags.  Having recently spent a few months implementing an Oracle WebCenter platform with Balfour Beatty WorkPlace I’d been immersed in content tagging (tags being one of the more pleasing aspects of WebCenter – a bit like delicious, but not as pretty), and was interested to hear how they manage tags and use them to create content relationships and cross-promotion of content.  I love that the Guardian’s got a keyword guardian (tag manager, Peter Martin ).

In a recent survey of LIKE members, one question we neglected to ask was “what were your favourite sessions of the 2010/2011 season?”.  If we had, I think Martin’s would have been high on the lists: it prompted a number of blog posts, and a vow from me that I’ll try tag-based file management on my laptop (anyone out there used software such as Elyse, or have any alternative suggestions?)

Informal LIKE summer meet-ups continue through August then, at the end of September, we’re back at The Crown for what promises to be a brilliant start to the autumn/winter season: ‘Connecting Information with Innovation’.  John Davies will be exploring the findings and implications of TFPL’s recent survey of KIM roles and responsibilities. See you there perhaps?

April 29, 2011

Human Library – LIKE 24 being bookish!

Filed under: Knowledge Networking, LIKE — Tags: — virginiahenry @ 7:47 pm

One of the many things that make LIKE  events wonderful is that you can turn up after a long day at work feeling weary and a little out of sorts (at LIKE 23 I was ‘going down’ with the pneumonia that kept me in bed for the next fortnight!), or maybe a tad dubious about the issue up for debate (what the heck is Human Library, and why should I care?!) – and in no time at all, you’ll be having a fascinating, illuminating evening.  And you probably won’t want it to end.

In truth, if you’re going to spend a night learning about Human Libraries, there can’t be anyone better to do it with than Linda Constable

Linda’s been working with Human Libraries for five years, and she told us how the Human Library is a forum for making connections, communicating differences and challenging ideas.  These events are best held in comfortable environments, with quiet corners for books and readers to talk – and with a few ground rules agreed:  books and their readers need to maintain a relationship of respect, books can refuse to answer questions they don’t feel comfortable with, they should be’ returned’ in the same condition as they were when’ taken out’ and the period of the loan depends on how many borrowers are waiting their turn.
Human Libraries are often used as a means to help bridge cultural gaps – getting people talking and listening to those they wouldn’t normally come into contact with.

There are a nice couple of sentences on the Human Library website:  “One of the great features of the Human Library and taking out a book, is that there are no such things as stupid questions.  Books have been prepared and made themselves available, in order for you to be able to dig deep and find out what you always wanted to know about the book title.”

Not sure how prepared the LIKE books felt, but Linda made things easy for us by guiding us through the process of writing titles and descriptions on sheets of paper.  These enticing “covers” also acted as booking slips, so readers wishing to explore the subject could book a loan with the book.

There was an impressive range of topics including:
Comics for Adults, Online Gaming, Multicultural Britain, Gardening, Running a Marathon, English Non-conformism, a Guide to Hackney, a Rough Guide to Italy, Flamenco Dancing…..

Linda was adept at pairing readers with books and orchestrating the loans- which was great, as everyone else was so deep in conversation they seemed scarcely aware of time passing.  I got very involved in discussing Knowledge Management with a LIKE member who’d flown down from Edinburgh for the event, and by the time we were joined by another LIKEer, and were delving deeper into ways of making knowledge work, it was almost time for dinner – but it felt as though we’d only sat down to talk a few minutes earlier.

It was good to catch up with others over dinner, and hear about what they’d been “reading”.  And it was interesting to think about the applications of such a format in business environments.  An evening that had started with insights from someone who works a lot in communities – helping people to benefit from sharing their life’s experiences with strangers – ended with discussions about how useful Human Libraries could be as vehicles for business knowledge sharing.

April 25, 2011

Mobile Information. LIKE 23

Filed under: Communication, LIKE — Tags: , , — virginiahenry @ 3:46 pm

On the last evening of March Mark Needham – the far-sighted founder of Widget (UK) Ltd - presented us with information at the speed of LIKE ;-)

Just a few days before we welcomed the 500th person to join the London Information & Knowledge Exchange, it was especially appropriate that one of our newest expert members should give us a lightening review of the evolution of ‘pocket computers’.

Mark told us how a Starship hero in “The Mote in God’s Eye” had used a pocket computer in 1974, long before they were available to us in this tasty world.  By the 1980s you didn’t need so much imagination to see the future coming.  Mark was then working at Psion and their Organiser 1 . was a revolutionary device.  Its 2k of RAM and 8k or 16k memory cards may seem puny now but, Mark told us, the evolutionary line from Psion to Smartphone is clear.  And the great inventions – microprocessors, the worldwide web and wireless networks – that enable us all to carry pocket computers have been around for over two decades.

Mark compared the delay between the emergence of such innovations, and public uptake of them, to the time lapse between the invention of the internal combustion engine in the late 19th century and the mass production of the Model T Ford in the 1920s.  And, just as cars have remained basically recognisable for the past century, handheld computers are likely to undergo lots of minor improvements, but remain consistently familiar to us.  It may become common practice for us to use our phones for video calls and to make movies – but Mark’s iPhone will still carry the data he’s been transferring to each new device since he first saved it to his Organiser 30 years ago.

Henry Ford, with his vision of consumerism as the key to world peace, would probably have been delighted by the ubiquitous Smartphone and, maybe, even more chuffed that its development is so obviously being driven by user demand.

Andrew Swaine, another expert member of LIKE, runs knowledge sharing and internal communications at ARM 

Andrew explained the powerful influence Smartphone users were having on the evolution of his industry.  The focus used to be on how fast a computer was, now it’s all about power consumption: pocket computers need to run for an entire day (his Smartphone works for 10 hours, but his laptop battery lasts for 2 hours!).  And although battery technology isn’t progressing very fast, people are writing programmes taking into account not only how fast they are, but how much power they consume.

Speed of performance is high on Users list of must-haves too, so Andrew foresaw a pretty rapid evolution from multi-core (lots of phones are now dual core) to many-core.

And platforms are being consolidated – impatient users will demand a single working environment across all platforms.  Andrew hoped one day to be able to plug his iPhone into a docking station, as he currently does his laptop.

There’s lots of change happening in his industry, not least because it was taken rather by surprise at the big deal applications on phones became – in such a short time.  The web wasn’t really ready for it.  Andrew reckons that we’ll end up using web applications a lot more, to overcome carrier and storage issues, and improve user experience.

Users rule!  When, as is the case, the interactive experience is more important than the underlying hardware – anything that irritates a user is “officially” a bug (music to the ears of anyone who has worked with uncompromising, unempathic Developers :-) )!   If you’ve lost data because you didn’t save a document, you are not a stupid user – the interface is wrong.  So on mobile phones and tablets, you don’t need to remember to save stuff.

Andrew said it wasn’t because there’s anything special about mobile:  it’s just that at this period of change in the industry it has been possible to change underlying assumptions about user behaviour quite rapidly.

After the inevitable comparisons of what mobile devices we all had on us (to my perverse delight – it’s not like I don’t know how desirable Apple stuff is – we HTC users seemed to outnumber the iPhoners, and lots of us had business Blackberries) we got down to a pre-dinner exercise. Groups around different tables were asked to identify the kinds of information different professionals need to access via their pocket computers, and the barriers to doing so.

Requirements included:

Office documents, contact details, schedules, spreadsheets etc, legal information, research papers, reference sites, Hansard (for MPs), news reports, business systems, audio and video, sites for the co-ordination of activities (in case of Aid Agencies), lesson plans and registers (in the case of Teachers)

And among the Constraints were:

Tiny screens, the need for the device to be as effective at ‘ input’ as it is at ‘consumption’ of data, lack of single sign-on, lack of  voice recognition, unreliable infrastructure, employer policies, information management issues such as document versioning control and lack of confidence in data security – eg of cloud hosting under US regulatory system.

Well, Ford cars may not be the most inspiring of analogies, but the Maserati brothers  started creating their steel symphonies just a couple of decades after Henry’s Model T first came out – and look where that’s led in a relatively short time!  It surely won’t be long before our pocket computers can do all the stuff we want and need them to do.  Probably rather stylishly.

Talking of innovative chaps, my wonderful husband has just ordered me a Kindle.  On the basis that “you’ve always got your nose in a book, might as well have a lightweight collection to carry around”.  Among my first downloads will be a chapter or two of Mark Needham’s new eBook “66 Famous Plots Updated with Modern Technology”   Apparently it all started with Bill Proud’s tweet from Anna Karenina……

March 13, 2010

3D 21st Century Taxonomies

Filed under: LIKE — Tags: , — virginiahenry @ 8:08 pm

Fran Alexander has an enviable talent for taking the terror out of taxonomy.  Her pre-dinner talk made LIKE 11 (our first anniversary meeting) a thoroughly enjoyable and enlightening event.

She began by explaining that people have been organising ideas and making lists for thousands of years. By the time of classical Greece, taxonomies were familiar things, developed from lists as a way of representing knowledge.

And people have been predicting the death of taxonomy for almost as long.  It hasn’t happened yet, as our minds tend to like things to be organised – they understand order and narrower relationships.  The notion of zooming in on something you want is familiar and instinctive.

Even though we have a world of Google and free-text search, classification is still really useful.  Fran said she often gets asked, and wakes up at 3 in the morning thinking, “why don’t we just bung Google on the lot and forget it”.  But there are some very good reasons not to.

For one thing, free-text search fails to help with knowledge discovery.  It’s great if you know what you’re looking for, but not great if you’re not sure and you want to understand what’s known in a field.  You can wander about following links, but won’t get a sense of the field.  You’ll get random pathways that can be very interesting, but won’t end up building a body of knowledge and an overview of a set of subject matter.

Anyone who’s wasted an afternoon following random links and not answering the question they were trying to answer will understand that.  You tend to miss obscure, but important, unexpected, non-commercial things.

Other problems include disambiguation, misspelling etc. Google has phenomenal synonym control and thesauruses underpinning its searches, but they can’t help in smaller domains where you don’t have everyone in the world doing searches to process those results.  And that ties in with the notion of ‘about-ness’.  When you’re doing a search and looking for specific words – you won’t necessarily find things that are about that topic, but don’t use those specific words.  It’s the same case with audio- visual assets – you need to get a sense of what the asset’s about, and all sorts of metadata might not capture that.  So you need some classification to help you.

Fran said the real killer for the BBC is comprehensiveness.  They’re expected to know everything they hold on a topic. So they can’t rely on a few keywords.

People ask her – “can’t you just do some folksonomy?    That’d be cheap – just free tag”.  But if folksonomies are going to be any use, you need to collapse them into taxonomies.  Because if you  get too many people tagging too many things with too many different viewpoints and too many different words you just end up with a lot of meaningless nothing.  Fran found it interesting that some people say “taxonomies represent a single viewpoint, folksonomies represent everybody’s viewpoint”   Her response was to ask what viewpoint is represented in a folksonomy?  And her answer: you don’t really know – there’s some kind of algorithm underneath it putting tags together and doing some disambiguation, and weighting the tags. There are assumptions the software developers have made…….. and you don’t really know what’s going on.  At least with a library classification you can see what it is and how it works.  If it’s got a western bias, you can see that.  If it was written for lawyers – you can see that.

But, she said, folksonomies are tremendously useful in helping us keep our taxonomies flexible.  We’re not in the rigid fixed world that classificationists of the 19th and early 20th centuries were faced with.  Back then there was an assumption that you could build a classification having a sense of who your users were.  They didn’t talk in terms of usability and findability as we do now.  But classificationists like Cutter and Bliss were very interested in how people used libraries, how they looked for things in different ways – and how you could meet those different kinds of needs.  But they had an assumption that you could have an answer to that: you could set up your classification and it would be stable.  And they were more or less right, because those systems stayed pretty stable for a long time, for all sorts of social and political and technological reasons.  If you spend a great deal of time and effort building a classification – say back in the 1950s, using pieces of paper and cards and writing on your books and so on.  You weren’t going to say – “ooh, not sure we did that bit of Biochemistry right, let’s go and reclassify all our books”.  So classifications tended to be left alone: it was easier to get humans to understand the classification and adapt to that.

Nowadays, Fran said, there’s no reason why you couldn’t have ten pathways to the same digital asset.  And there’s no reason not to quickly put another tag onto it.  Because the digital world is a totally different environment.  Users are more demanding now; people do tend to be fickle – they want to use the terms they understand; they want to pick up terminology quickly and they want us to react to it.  The old-style linear project planning was great – when you could say “I know who my users are, I know how they’re going to behave I can go out and do my traditional requirements gathering, tick all my boxes and set up my system, and it’ll stay stable”.  Businesses like you to do that, IT people love it – because you can fix your costs, set your parameters and say what you’ll do. You assume the world is going to stay the same and stable.  But with big projects, that doesn’t work.  Things change so much between the point where you do your requirements gathering and the point of delivery – you’re almost not delivering the same thing any more.  A nightmare for the finance people and the suppliers, because how do you cost something that’s constantly changing? And it’s a problem for us – how do we go about building a taxonomy today that’s going to be relevant in five years time?  It’s very hard, said Fran, but there is a way.  And that is to stop thinking of taxonomies as fixed classifications, but as organic and open entities, that need to grow and change.  One of the best ways we can make our taxonomies dynamic and open is to look at how we link them up with other taxonomies.  Once you start to think of your taxonomy not as a thing in its own right, that sits in a silo, that represents your knowledge, your view, your opinion, but look at it more like an application, an open port into your content repository, as a navigation method into your content, rather than a fixed thing in its own right – then you can open it up to other taxonomies.  So you can get round the problems of “this is a taxonomy for lawyers, and this is a taxonomy for salespeople.  This one is for marketing, and this for schoolchildren”.  Because what you do is take all these taxonomies and look at a mapping methodology – you look at how you can map them together.  By opening up your taxonomy, you immediately increase its range and the number of viewpoints it can serve.  And, she said, it also means that a trendy new technical taxonomy, some new terminology or your folksonomic terms can be harvested and bolted on to your main taxonomy.  So you’re not faced with major revisions.  You look at a link point, a route in – your taxonomy’s open, so you can fix other bits on to it.  Like a Meccano model of taxonomy.

This means your building starts to become a dynamic process, because as you bolt bits on they will inform how your main taxonomy is working.   So through the mapping process you can improve areas of weakness in your main taxonomy, responding to user needs, because you’re bolting on bits that are popular and not worrying about bits that are less popular.  You can create a very dynamic and exciting search experience for people that way, because you give them different routes in, different options. You can even allow them to navigate around their folksonomic tag clouds that sit around your main taxonomy – opening up the 3-D navigation by setting up all sorts of relationships through your content repository, and looking at it in all sorts of different ways.

Fran said that the semantic web and linked data technology is starting to be really useful in this area.  The basic principle is that semantic web and linked data languages – such as RDF, OWL and SKOS give you a way of expressing your taxonomy.

Basically it’s the computer coded bit, like XML, that sit around your taxonomy and mean that if your taxonomy’s expressed in SKOS format and so is someone else’s, all sorts of automated mapping can happen programmatically.  It takes a lot of the heavy lifting out of the taxonomy mapping process, so the idea of mapping two big data sets together becomes much more practicable.

The reason Fran doesn’t think the semantic web will lead us into one great unified consciousness is the amount of negotiation to be done.  Data sets need to match up; agreement on metadata standards is needed.  But, she explained, semantic web linked data is working really well in domains like the biological sciences:  if someone’s doing experiments on fruit flies they can use data from someone else doing experiments on fruit flies.

In organisations there’s a lot potential for this to have great benefits.  In the BBC they’re looking at taking the archive taxonomy and expressing it in a linked data format, to interact with people who are doing the public facing website navigation.  They’d then be able to do is pull in resources from the archive very easily, using their own terminology and their own web navigation systems and links.

Thinking in this way, Fran said, it quickly becomes obvious that you can surround your taxonomy with ontologies as well.  Ontologies are made of lots of taxonomies joined together, so the ontology fits into the semantic web world and fits into taxonomies, because it provides horizontal navigation between bits of your taxonomy.  It means you can dive off in all sorts of directions.  Which is tremendously exciting and we couldn’t really do with our old-style card classification systems because the number of cards we would have needed would have been unthinkable.

Fran gave an example of a really exciting project using linked data.  The Europeana project is creating cross-navigation of all sorts of cultural artefacts in museums, libraries and archives throughout Europe.  By mapping their taxonomies together they’re creating a single user-interface into all this data, immediately opening up all sorts of possibilities for researchers.  And the rest of us…..

December 9, 2009

LIKE 9 – Sharing the Point

Filed under: Knowledge Networking, LIKE — Tags: — virginiahenry @ 7:57 am

There was a record turnout for LIKE 9 last Thursday.  If you’re an information professional (or an IT wizard) struggling to make SharePoint work for your organisation, you might not find that surprising – as we’d gathered to tell our ‘tales from the SharePoint trenches’.

A few LIKE members had completed pre-meeting questionnaires, and one particular comment seemed to sum up the general sentiment of those with SharePoint experience: “in some ways SharePoint defines my role rather than enabling it”

Metataxis’ Information Architect and SharePoint expert, Cerys Hearsey, works with the system, and makes it work for her clients.   She told us about the charms and the challenges of SharePoint, and filled us in on its history:

In 1998 Site Server 3.0 was released.  It did some web content management, offered analytics and search, had some personalisation, some indexing and a little document management – pretty much what we see now in MOSS 2007.  The product fitted well with Bill Gates’ vision of “information at your fingertips”.

By 2000 Portals were taking off.  Microsoft wanted a funky portal user interface, so between public beta 1 and public beta 2 of SharePoint 2001, they re-branded.

However, by the end of 2001, the fraudulent accounting practices of WorldCom and Enron executives had focused the minds of business people around the world on records management.  Not especially funky, but essential.  So Microsoft brought back Site Server and put it into their portal.  As this version was slightly better than the original – it was believed to be good…..

‘Veterans’ who experienced the painful upgrade to SharePoint 2003 found no comfort in the fact that Microsoft had replaced their Webstore hierarchical database with relational databases.   Building file plans in SharePoint became pretty challenging.

Indexing isn’t much fun either.  In the 1998 version of Site Server, Microsoft talked about document “profiling”, then changed the term to document “properties”.  They stuck with that until, with SharePoint 2007, they opted for “columns”.  Sadly, these can’t easily be replicated across site collections.

Workflow has had a chequered history in SharePoint.  Windows Workflow Foundation was there in 2001, was removed in 2003, and in SharePoint 2007 it’s back – unchanged and unimproved.

Another change has been more costly – in 2001 search was free, with 2007 the same search engine is covered by one of the most expensive licence Microsoft offers!   (There’s talk that for SharePoint 2014 Microsoft may incorporate FAST, which they bought a couple of years ago.  We didn’t even begin to discuss what impact that may have on legacy content….)

According to Microsoft’s overview pie chart – MOSS 2007 provides:  Portal, Search, Collaboration, Business Intelligence, Business Process and Forms, Enterprise Content Management.  Into that last slice of the pie is crammed document management, records management, knowledge management, web content management and pure content management.  This lack of distinction between types of information is further demonstrated by the low-profile place records management holds in Microsoft’s hierarchy of user groups – it’s a subset of the document management working group

Why, asked Cerys, do we tolerate this apparent indifference to our concerns and priorities?
Liz Scott-Wilson and one or two others helped her list the main reasons:

  • SharePoint has a lot of incredibly useful features, if you can make them work for you
  • Considering the very high cost and inflexibility of some other systems, it’s not such a bad option
  • We can, at least, get more involved in configuring and managing SharePoint
  • Unlike other unwieldy and CAPEX-devouring systems – much of SharePoint is OPEX
  • It sits well with Office 2007

If the world were a different place – one in which $4 billion was spent on developing SharePoint and only $3 billion on marketing it (instead of the other way around)….a world where ‘records management’ and ‘archiving’ were cool buzzwords, up there with ‘dashboards’ and ‘workflow automation’…. a place where Info Pros were the acknowledged superstars of their organisations…….   Yeah, right.  Better to hold on to the hope that SharePoint 2010 will address some of the most troublesome issues, and to take careful note of Cerys’ 5 top tips for making the product your organisation has opted for as good as it can be:

1. Have a coherent strategy
Whether mapped to an information strategy, IT strategy, or tools strategy – it must fit the wider landscape of the organisation.  If it’s the ‘odd one out’ it will look odd, and looks matter.  If it’s the core to your business, it won’t seem strange.

2. Be innovative
Traditionally, EDRM systems worked like old paper filing systems.     SharePoint cannot and will not ever work that way.  You need to think about your information as a set of objects rather than using the distinctions of data, knowledge, content etc.  Think about how you use and automate data, and how you present it to your organisation.

3. Talk to your IT department
In a SharePoint implementation, they’re the best friends you can have.  You will need to work closely with them to make sure SharePoint works for the organisation and its strategy.  But it’s important to remember that the more development you do, the more difficult it will be to migrate and to get support from Microsoft if things go wrong.

4.    Get involved on the ground
Talk to people.  If they don’t like the system, and you don’t know about it, that is not good.  Discuss peoples’ problems with them and offer help with resolving them.  To do that, you must get to know the technology stack.   It’s not easy to master: it has plenty of legacy issues and lots of components.  But an organisation is unlikely to use all of them.  So, for example, if yours decides to embark on the Forms route – get to know Info Path inside out.  Then you’ll know what the issues are.

5.    Know where you’re going when you start out
Have a clear idea of what the thing is going to look like and work like at the end of the implementation.  Do not decide to pilot some document management with a couple of teams and let them use it as ‘business as usual’.  Because, all of a sudden, everyone will want Team Site, and everyone will want to be able to save their documents and search for them.   Then your pilot for a couple of teams will be for the entire organisation – and you’ve built it in one site collection which can only support up to 100 gigabytes worth of data.  And that accrues pretty fast, especially when you’re doing transactional stuff.

So take the time to plan for where you’re going at the start.  If you want to do document management today, but you know you want to do records management tomorrow, that’ll have big design implications from the outset.  If you want to store a bunch of data and then harvest it using business intelligence tools, you’re going to want to use a dashboard.  You may want to explore excel services, do you have an enterprise web licence?  Most of the cleverest features of SharePoint aren’t in the standard edition, they come in the enterprise edition – and that includes the business data catalogue that enables you to link the SharePoint database to, for example, your old Lotus Notes database.

Cerys’ advice reminded me of a quote I read somewhere from Guy Creese of the IT research and consulting firm, Burton Group: “a really good SharePoint installation is as much organisation as it is technology”.

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