tfpl blog

Home from home?

Recent Office Angels research (quoted in today's People Management) informs us that 87% of respondents carry out 'personal chores' during office hours.  Most interestingly it also states that two thirds of women (and one third of men) maintain a 'mini wardrobe' at the office. 

They could just have sent the researchers to look under my desk to count the pairs of shoes I keep here 'just in case'. 

Reading list

Jim McGhee has put a great reading list for aspiring knowledge workers on to the Corante Future Tense blog.

It  contains books that explores the things that are fundamental to our working lives:  creativity, problem solving, writing, consulting, teaching, learning, relating to others,  managing and using information.

I prefer Jim's list to another work related reading list:  the Personal MBA by Josh Kauffman, because most of the books on Jim's lists are helpful across your whole life, not just your working life.

If I could add three books to Jim's list that have inspired me in my career I would go for the following:

The Naked Leader Experience by David Taylor.   The most empowering book I have read.  For a flavour of book, here is his advice on motivating your team, and here is his advice on the quickest way to make a change in your life.   I loved his prescription for how to conquer fear of failure:  if you define failure as 'giving up on your dreams' then so long as you are working towards your dreams you can never fail.

The Complete Facilitator's Handbook by John Heron:  An exposition of the range of choices available to you when you are facilitating a meeting or a training course.

The Artist's Way by Julie Cameron:   Enjoyable ways of finding out just how creative you really are

 

Usability reading

Three books arrived on my desk this morning.  All on the area of web usability and information architecture.

After flicking through them all, I dived straight into Steve Krug’s new second edition of “Don’t Make Me Think”. I found myself nodding and smiling at the common sense advice.  This book is concisely written with often humerous illustration of the key points. Chapters such as “How we really use the web (Scanning, satisficing, and muddling through)” and “The first step in recovery is admitting that the Home page is beyond your control” get straight to the heart of usability and navigation.  Make it easy and make it clear. There is a very useful section of web navigation conventions including use of taglines, tabs, breadcrumbs and the placement on the page of these elements. The illustrations of users “thinking” and “not thinking” really give food for thought as to the “Reservoir of Goodwill”. This shows users attitudes as they travel through the site and what will increase and decrease their good will.

I scanned a chapter of the second book, “Prioritizing Web Usability” by Jakob Nielsen and Hora Loranger. Initial impressions are that there are a LOT of statistics and it seems a little repetitive.

According to the data gathered by the authors, users spend an average of 1 minute and 49 seconds visiting a site with the visit to the final site used to complete a task lasted an average of 3 minutes and 49 seconds. And a site only has a 12 percent chance of being revisited, once lost those visitors are gone for good.

Both authors clearly agree that the key to a successful website is to provide users with the information they need, and FAST.

I’m also looking forward to reading Peter Morville’s book “Ambient Findability” examining how people find their way through an age of information overload, filtering and making sense of information as they go. This one looks a little more theoretical than the other two and I’ll need to find a quiet corner to do it justice.

City of London Festival

What a lovely surprise.  Trotting around the corner to buy an iced coffee at lunchtime, we came across a group of school children playing Japanese drums on the steps of St Pauls Cathedral.  The kids had been working on a 'Taiko' project.

The City really is a great place to work.  The City of London Festival continues until 16th August.

Recruiting in IT

You can walk into some restaurants and there is a person that takes your coat, another sees you to your seat, a different one takes your order and someone else cooks your meal, I guarantee you that the price of all these people is reflected in your bill at the end of the meal.   Employers are realising that merging roles where appropriate can save them and the client money and still allow them to deliver a good service, chances are you would have been happy in that restaurant if the same person did all those jobs and you paid less for your meal!

We have been saying for some time that the crossover between IT roles and other information roles is increasing with employers expecting a greater technical understanding from their employees and also looking for specialist skills in more than one discipline, a prime example being the web content area where employers are looking for web skills, html and dreamweaver along with basic information skills and a good understanding of content and editorial. 

Peter Phillips has joined us to try and bridge this gap somewhat, Peter has been recruiting in IT for 20 years with the majority of his placements being in continental Europe. With clients such as Ebay and AOL on his books, he has seen how technology and particularly the web has changed the face of recruitment “employers are still looking for software programmers but they have to be competent in web applications also, almost everyone can put up a website with the tools becoming so much simpler to use, making it all the more necessary for information professionals to widen their skill set”.

New research on the information job market

Over the past four months at TFPL a number of us have been engaged in research into the emerging job market. We have now reached the data analysis stage of the project. Soon we will be able to report on the extent to which particular sectors of the information job market-place are identifiable; the major drivers for the creation of new roles; the sectors which offer the greatest potential for employment growth; and how the available roles might be filled. Our expectation is that the results will be of interest to anyone in the information industry whose own job function encompasses workforce planning or training, or the preparation of new graduates for information work, as well as anyone in the sector who believes in investing in professional development - whether for their own benefit or the benefit of the profession as a whole. For a sneak preview of the findings of the project you can sign up for a presentation to be made in London to ICLG by Hazel Hall on Wednesday 19th July. Please see: http://www.cilip.org.uk/specialinterestgroups/bysubject/iclg/events.

Librarian - upgraded!

Hooray - Nancy the Action Figure Librarian has been upgraded.  She now has her very own computer, trolley and books.

'Please and thank you'

Delighted to read this article in People Management outlining the contribution that good manners can make to effective corporate communications. 

According to the consultants behind Business Behaving Badly, one reason for a lack of simple good manners in the workplace might be that managers worry that if they praise a job well done the employee might ask for a payrise! 

The article is full of interesting, sometimes mind-boggling, statistics about communicating effectively in the workplace.  For example 70% of people who responded to the original research claim they 'normally heard about their organisation's plans via rumours'.   

The article also argues that sometimes managers are so bottom line focused that they simply forget their manners from time to time.   Feedback to colleagues doesn't always have to be in 'The Apprentice'/ 'X Factor' style!  And good manners, as my teachers were so fond of saying, go a long way.

Another successful BIALL

TFPL was delighted to participate in the BIALL conference and exhibition which took place in Brighton last week.

TFPL work with law firms of all sizes and we find the annual conference an excellent forum to increase our awareness of the industry's current issues and talking points.

What can our organisations learn from the web?

The two questions that most interest me in information management are:

• To what extent can the information management models that we have used succesfully within organisations be transferred across to the vastly larger scales of the world wide web?
• To what extent can the methods that have been succesfully developed to link people to information on the world wide web be transferred back to the smaller and more intimate scales of a single organisation?

The standard information management model within an organisation has been for information professionals to persuade/cajole/coerce their colleagues to describe and classify the information that they create. 

Information professionals spend a lot of time developing metadata schema,  controlled vocabularies and classification structures of one sort or another, and even more time trying to get people to use them.

Most information professionals would argue that the effort is worth it - it is vital to capture the knowledge that document creators have about the context and content of that information.

It is interesting to note that it has not proved possible to extend this model to the world wide web.

It is true that the world has agreed on a metadata schema: Dublin Core fixes 15 fields to describe the resource you are contributing to the web.   And a further standard, the Resource description framework, builds on Dublin Core by allowing you to identify which controlled vocabulary you are using to provide the keywords for any particular Dublin Core field. 

Many webpage owners provide Dublin Core metadata in the 'header' of their webpage.  But this data is largely ignored by the big search engines, and by people looking for information.

Google makes negligible use of Dublin Core metadata. It does not offer you an interface to search Dublin Core metadata on websites. It makes little or no use of the metadata in its PageRank algorithm. Its not interested in what creators of information say about their information, and with so many unscrupulous website promoters (think of gaming, porn, Viagra sites) who can blame it?

So if the web won't take the models that have (largely) worked in organisations, what can organisations learn from the web?

The two trends most apparent on the web that aren't yet replicated in organisations are:

• the attention that the web pays to the knowledge that users have of the information that they have found useful  (everything from Google's PageRank to all the social bookmarking tools on the web)
• the extent to which the web allows people to simply tag resources with words that are meaningful to the tagger, without constraining people with metadata schema and controlled vocabularies (see Technorati tags which lets bloggers tag their blogposts, Flickr which lets photographers tag their photos)

Here is a link to a case study detailing how IBM implemented a social bookmarking tool in their organisation, and the benefits it has brought in terms of:

• alerting people to the existence of colleagues with similar interests to themselves
• alerting people to the existence of information resources that those colleagues with similar interests to themselves have found useful.

Social bookmarking is by no means an alternative to classifications and controlled vocabularies.  When you need to get your hands on all the records arising from a particular project the social bookmarking tool won't help you much.   But it provides something that a classification could not offer: personal recommendations to particular documents or document collections.