tfpl blog

Risks and Opportunities in Social Computing

Napier University, in partnership with TFPL, are researching the opportunities and threats posed to organisations by social computing.

Last night we had the pleasure of hosting one of the focus groups of the project.  Twenty information professionals came to the St Bride's Institute in London to discuss the use of social computing tools within organisations.

Here are some of the comments made in the discussions that took place:

Blogs

• The government has published advice for civil servants on blogging and contributing to other online forums. It is only six bullet points long, but if you stick within those guidelines it is OK for a civil servant to blog (you can read the principles here)

• People put more care into their blogposts than they do into writing an e-mail. Instant messaging and e-mail are more of a risk than blogposts because employees fire them off so quickly.

• If you want to pursuade a company of the importance of engaging with blogs ask them what they would do if a nightmare customer blogged a complaint about them.  Give them the example of Kryptonite, a company that suffered when a video showing how to unpick one of their best selling locks with a biro circulated the blogsphere (you can read a blogger's view of the Kryptonite episode here .  The view of Kryptonite's public relations manager is represented here)

• Blogging is a good teacher for online life. Once you have received flame comments in reply to one of your blog posts you learn what you can write and what will land you in trouble.

• Blogs provide a flexible medium with which to communicate to stakeholders, additionally acting as publicity organs for personalities whether corporate, political or celebrity ("image management").  Not having a blog may diminish an individual's reputation among peers.

Wikis

• It is important to have Subject Matter Experts moderating wikis so that errors are identified and corrected. It is better that an error is made in a wiki (where at least it is visible) than in an e-mail.

• The email burden in one organisation was markedly reduced by the use of wiki posts in the place of mass general information emails. Additionally, the use of a wiki as an intranet benefited another organisation through its ease of update

• Wikis benefit product/proposal/document development and collaboration provided that audit trails are incorporated.

Facebook

• One company has a Facebook Friday - they are happy for employees to use Facebook at work on that one day of the week (here is a blogpost about Serena Software's use of Facebook Friday)

• BT were surprised to find that its employees had set up a FaceBook group and 4,000 of its staff had joined it. (Richard Dennison has posted a good case study about the BT Facebook group here)

• I use Facebook to organize my social life, I set up an event and invite my friends to it.

Twitter

• I complained about a company using Twitter and found that they responded to my Tweet quicker than they replied to an e-mail I had sent to them directly.

• I get my news from BBC’s Twitter news feeds, it is the fastest way of being informed of things.

Prediction markets

• Prediction markets are a great way of capturing the grass roots knowledge of the organization. One company’s senior managers rejected a product idea, but when they put it to a prediction market it was voted for by staff. They reversed their decision and it ended up being their best selling product. (there is a good blogpost about prediction markets inside organisations by Tom Davenport here)

• Is it better to allow people to vote on a prediction market anonymously? I think people should make proposals to prediction markets anonymously because that reduces the risk of the market being swayed by the proposer’s status/personality.

Attitudes to social computing

• One respondent reported a continuum of enthusiasm for social computing tools in their organisation:  Colleagues in marketing were enthusiastic users because they wanted to effectively communicate with their target audience.  Colleagues in IT were indifferent. Colleagues in Legal were hesitant on account of the potential minefield of litigation to which social computing tools may expose the organisation.

• The polarised positive and negative views of social computing tools stemmed from the collective view of specific departments and the personal attitudes of individuals, rather than from age differences or status differences.

• Graduates (generation Y) entering the job market expect that they will use SC tools in their workplace and a failure to accommodate this expectation may prejudice them against employers which do not utilise such tools. Additionally, the tools may benefit an organisation in employee retention efforts in the current "transient employment market" - not only by just offering use of the tools in themselves - but by perpetuating a more accommodating corporate culture.

Business case for social computing

• I keep in contact with my children through web 2.0 tools but am struggling to come up with a business case that will persuade managers to trial them in our office.

• Sometimes not having a big budget is beneficial, you have to focus on what the organization really needs instead of what the tools can do.

• It is a shame that stick drivers like compliance seem more potent for attracting investment than carrot drivers (hence the big investment in EDRM). If you say ‘wiki’ to the average senior manager they run a mile.

• The voice which social computing gives employees opens up the potential for  increased job satisfaction derived from making a contribution, a sense of empowerment, and can induce a feeling of corporate pride and identity.

• In making a business case for SC tools, mention how past fears of web and computer technologies and how these were largely not realised. For example, when desktop access to the internet was introduced it was widely believed that this would lead to time-wasting.

• IT must learn to trust people with tools and increase its user focus (a recurring theme from past generations of information tools!).

• If people are antagonistic to blogs and wikis, don't refer to them by those names. You can describe the functionality and benefits offered by wikis without calling them wikis.

Implementation and take-up

• There is a risk that social media will not be taken up by colleagues (but at least they are cheap: there is a similar risk of colleagues not taking up EDRM/ECM and cost of those systems is much higher!).

• The existence of different perspectives within the organisation on social computing means that these tools will be received differently in different areas.  Adequate consideration should be given to the change implications of these differences when rolling out social computing tools.

• Social computing tools enable greater flexibility in terms of work location and collaboration. Conversely, this may increase pressure on employees to work from home.

• Depending on how a tool is rolled out, it has the potential to either increase or decrease information overload.

Governance of social computing tools

• It is hard to keep your work and your on-line personas separate, if you comment on a blog you have to remember whether you are logged on in your work name/e-mail or your home name/e-mail.

• Concern was expressed over the information management issues arising from the sprawl of hundreds or thousands of internally facing and/or externally facing blogs and wikis

• How can personal data be protected in social media environments?

• How do you maintain trust in the veracity of information posted on social media given its potential for unsanctioned edition by employees?

• Enthusiasm vs. governance: too much regulation would frustrate and stifle creative individuals and teams.

• Formal licensed collaboration tools can be controlled by the organisation, public freeware can not.

The next focus group in this research project will be held in Glasgow on Thursday 31 July.  Details here.

James Lappin and Shooresh Golzari

Parliamentary Question on Google's enforced disclosure of You Tube user data to Viacom

A fortnight ago I blogged about the privacy implications of the US Court order which forces Google to reveal You Tube user data to Viacom.  Last week Sarah Teather MP asked a Parliamentary Question about it:  here is Hansard's record of her question and the response that she received:

Sarah Teather: To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform what assessment he has made of the implications for the privacy of British internet users of the requirement for Google to disclose to a third party the viewing log of people who have its YouTube service. [217419]

Malcolm Wicks: BERR officials made contact with the company on this issue and this is an unfolding situation which we are regularly monitoring. Although the US federal court granted Viacom's petition for disclosure of traffic log data including computer IP addresses, against Google, who own YouTube, the court has specified that Viacom cannot use the disclosed data for any commercial purposes, or to pursue individual users for copyright infringement whose computers might be identifiable from the log data. There is a protective order in the case that prevents information designated as highly confidential from disclosure to anyone but Viacom's lawyers and experts.

(Thanks to Paul Pedley at the Economist Intelligent Unit and his new subscription information law service KWtL for the tip off.)

The controversy over the court's ruling in favour of Viacom adds potency to the ongoing debate over whether Google has the right to retain details of our searches for such long periods of time.

Google retains details of every search you make on the Google search engine.  After 18 months Google anonomyises your search by removing details that could identify you as an individual (such as the IP address of your computer).

The European Union's Article 29 Data Protection working party has questioned whether Google has the right under European privacy law to hold onto data that could identify an individual searcher for as long as 18 months.  They want Google and other search engines to anonymise or delete personal data after 6 months.   This post by EDRI describes the strongly worded letter that the working party sent to Google in May this year.

And this week Outlaw.com reports that the same Article 29 Working Party has presented a Privacy Seal award to a search engine called lxquick that deletes its search logs 48 hours after the search is made.

I like the idea of a search engine that doesn't keep hold of my IP adress and link it to my searches.  The only problem is that on the evidence of a trial search I made on it, lxqwick is nowhere near as effective as Google.

 

 

Telegraph Media Group introduces Google Apps to replace Microsoft Office and Exchange

Euan Semple gave a link today to news from CIO that the Telegraph Media Group (TMG) have chosen to phase out Microsoft Office and Exchange in favour of Google Apps,  for staff to use for their word processing, e-mail and for collaboration.

The size (1,400 users) and visibility of TMG makes this a valuable coup for Google as they attempt to move into the corporate space.

Organisations change software suppliers all the time, but this change is significant because the move to Google Apps means that TMG's information will be hosted on servers provided and maintained by Google rather than on servers maintained by TMG itself.

TMG's Chief Information Officer, Paul Cheesebrough gives the following reasons for the change:

• He wants the IT department to take one a more strategic role and was concerned that the most frequent message users receive from IT is 'you are over your e-mail limit' (One of the disadvantages of owning and maintaining your own servers is that you have to police e-mail capacity once server space gets tight).
• TMG are not convinced by Microsoft Vista, and did not want to pay to upgrade from XP to Vista
• TMG ran a trial of Google Apps with 10% of their userbase, running alongside Microsoft Office and Microsoft Exchange.  The trial was popular and users did not want to turn Google Apps off.

Microsoft's Office and Outlook products are vulnerable to Google Apps because word processing and e-mail provision have been commoditised and can be provided by anyone.  Open source clones of Microsoft Word and Excel exist and are free to download and use.  Two recent international standards on document formats (OpenDocument and OpenOfficeXML) mean that documents produced in Word can be read in their open source counterparts and vica versa.  This commoditisation means that Microsoft can derive little  competitive advantage from Word, Excel and Outlook.

The real battle front for Microsoft is around SharePoint: at the moment the SharePoint product is a richer collaboration suite than Google apps, and a richer development environment for organisations to build applications, workflows and databases in.  Microsoft Office and Outlook could yet be saved by their tighter and tighter integration into SharePoint.

James Lappin

Creating social network sites for your organisation's customers: choices and issues

I read two interesting blogposts today about the issues and choices involved for organisations implementing social networking sites applications

Michael Webb, the head of IT and media services at Newport University, blogged that when your organisation sets up a social networking site for staff or customers (or in his case, students) you face the choice of either:

• developing and hosting your own application
• piggy-backing on an existing, externally hosted application like Facebook
• using an externally hosted 'design your own social networking site' such as Ning

Newport University wanted to set up a social networking application for its future students, so that they could meet each other and their student mentors online, before they came to the university. 

They decided to use Ning.

Michael describes the pros and cons of taking this approach

• Speed:  it took days to set up.  If they had hosted and built their own social networking environment it would have taken weeks or months.
• Cost:  Ning will charge them once they go above 10GB of storage, but it won't cost much

The disadvantages are:

• The Universtity can't develop the functionality to the site.  Ning controls the future development of the funtionality.   Newport University have received requests from users for developments and tweaks to the system, but they can't do anything with them

• Ning pushes advertising to the sites  (you have to pay if you want to get rid of them)

• The terms and conditions are drawn up by Ning (though Newport University didn't have too much of a problem with them as Ning acknowledges that they own the content, and the data in question isn't business critical)

Michael seems happy with the way that the site is turning out.  Users can display their profile and set up new groups and events.  They have over a hundred members of staff and students up and running with it and are just about to invite the forthcoming students. I look forward to reading up dates on Michael's blog.  (and thanks to Brian Kelly for the link).

Read Write Web put up an interesting blog post yesterday entitled Corporate Social Networks are a waste of money .  They quote a Deloitte report that looked at social network applications set up by companies to encourage their customers to form a social network around their brand. These sites have been set up to build a brand, so a lot of money has been sent on their design to ensure that the sites reflect brand design values. Deloitte say that nearly 60% of the companies concerned spent over $1million on their sites.  But the money seems to be wasted:  Deloitte discovered that 35% of these sites have less than 100 members.  Read Write Web pours scorn on the whole idea: it questions why people would want to network around a brand, and is particularly withering about Nestle Purina's attempt to create a social networking site for customers of its cat litter. 

I agree with Read Write Web here:  even where there is a brand I am loyal to (like Fulham football club) there is no compelling reason for me to contribute to the social networking site provided by the brand owner: I can just as happily contribute to a site or message board set up by fellow fans.

James Lappin

Key themes from TFPL's 2nd SharePoint conference

Yesterday I attended TFPL's 2nd SharePoint conference.  Such is the burgeoning interest in Microsoft's flagship product that once again the 100 seat Wellcome Collection theatre was packed to capacity just three months after the 1st TFPL SharePoint Conference.

The conference heard how the world's second largest real estate company, the world's second largest law firm, and a sixth form college in Surrey were each using SharePoint as an all encompassing information platform for their business.  Christian Aid and DEFRA, who had spoken at the first conference, came back to update us on their progress.  Jeremy Bentley give a history of the evolution of SharePoint, from its first appearance as SharePoint 2001, through SharePoint 2003 to its current manifestation as MOSS 2007.  Marc Stephenson looked under the bonnet to give a detailed description of the information architecture challenges posed by MOSS 2007.

It was a fascinating day, which painted a rich picture of the complexity of SharePoint:  its massive potential, the imaginative uses that it is being put to, and its idiosyncracies and glitches.

These are the key things I learned from the day:

SharePoint ' My Sites' are genuinely useful!

I had always assumed that My Sites were one of the dangers of SharePoint:  providing colleagues with a place of their own where they can stockpile their documents out of sight of the rest of the organisation.  This belief stemmed from my experience of e-mail in-boxes, and personal network drives: silos that even your closest colleagues can't access.

Speaker after speaker described positive and imaginitive uses of SharePoint My Sites:

• Defra, Jones Lang LaSalle, Esher College, Christian Aid and Linklaters were all using My Sites as their organisation's people directory. My Sites are places where colleagues can maintain their own contact details, role, expertise and interests; and places to go to find out about colleagues.

• Jones Lang LaSalle, Esher College, Christian Aid and Linklaters were all allowing colleagues to use their My Site to customise what they saw on their organisation's intranet home page, and what alerts they received, by signing up to belong to different audiences.

• DEFRA have found a records management usage for My Sites:  they take information about the individual who created a document from that person's My Site, and save it as part of the metadata about the document.

Esher College had made particularly powerful use of My Sites:

• The college has a central timetable for students and staff.  Each student and staff member sees their own personalised timetable on their My Site.  If the date, location or time of one of their classes is altered this change will immediately show up on their timetable on their My Site.

• The college pushes relevant news and key messages to an individual's My Site, with the news appearing as a banner at the top of their My Site.

• The college developed a web part to enable students to work with their tutors to monitor their progress.  The student's development targets are displayed on their My Site. The student can input their self-assesment of their progress and this information is fed through to their tutor.

• The document libraries that individuals can keep on their my sites are not necessarily silos: individuals can share access permissions with colleagues to collaborate on particular documents.

The vast scope of MOSS 2007

Adrian Dale identified five key areas of functionality that MOSS 2007 possesses:

• Content repository:  a place to store corporate documents and records, with metadata and access rules, and (in the Records Centre site) retention and disposal rules. And with a vastly improved search facility compared with SharePoint 2003.

• Communications tool:  a tool to manage your organisation's web site and intranet site, to channel news and messages to different audiences, and to enable users to customise their views of their intranet.

• Application development platform:  an environment in which to develop new applications including workflows, and database applications to manage structured data.

• Collaboration tool: spaces in which people can work together on documents, and where they can house wikis and blogs.

• Directory tool:  managing the organisation's directory of its people and their roles and expertise.

Both Jones Lang LaSalle and Linklaters identified reduction in dependence on other proprietary software as a key benefit and cost saving they have derived from their SharePoint implementations.   Christian Aid's Steven Buckley described how the charity changed its knowledge management strategy from one of buying best of breed products for each required functionality (web content management, collaboration, records management etc.) to one whereby new applications are developed in SharePoint unless there is a really good reason why they can't be. 

Giles Gregg from Linklaters said that for every application you purchase from a different vendor or in a different programming language you have the cost of maintaining the IT staff or contractors who understand that application/ programming language.  These staff are needed in order to ensure that you can integrate the application with other systems, that you can upgrade it, that you can restore it if it falls down.   

For Giles Gregg the most exciting thing about SharePoint was the fact that it does not constrain you.  It doesn't do everything. But if it can't do something Microsoft have given you the development tools you need in order to customise it.  And there is a whole economy growing up of contractors, vendors and developers which can be drawn upon to fill the gaps.

The importance of SharePoint to Microsoft

Jeremy Bentley said that Microsoft claimed to have sold 100 million SharePoint licences.  Not all of these will be used, but even so it is a huge number.  Marc Stephenson had been told by a Microsoft insider that there were 25 million deployments of SharePoint on PCs around the globe.  Marc said that in the 1990s Office was Microsoft's main product, but now SharePoint is their flagship.  One of the selling points of MOSS 2007 was that it was bound in very tightly with Office 2007.  The next version of SharePoint is likely to come out in 2009/10, around the same time as the next version of Office (Office 14).  Marc speculated that this conjunction would allow Microsoft to fuse Office and SharePoint together as one product.  The company is hinting at such a fusion with the name of this latest version of SharePoint:  MOSS 2007 (which expands to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007).

The quirks of SharePoint's information architecture

Marc Stephenson gave an overview of SharePoint's information architecture.  Marc said that you can't assume that your fileplans, taxonomies and metadata structures will automatically translate to the SharePoint environment:  SharePoint provides a very distinct environment for information architecture and you have to map your architecure into that.

On the face of it there is a straightforward hierarchy within SharePoint:

• Site Collections contain sites (which can contain sub-sites and sub-sub sites down to the required levels).  Any site can contain objects such as lists and Document Libraries .   Document Libraries can contain folders. Folders can contain documents, images and other resources.

Complexity is added to the information architecture picture by elements which cut across the hierarchy, namely

• Columns:  Columns are SharePoint's way of defining metadata for any object in the repository.  You can define what columns of metadata you want for any particular site, document library, or documents within a document library.


• Content types:  you can define a content type for any type of documentation that you want to treat in a similar way across different sites: for example that you want to apply a similar access rule to, or use a similar template or workflow.

If you want to introduce a records management fileplan / business classification scheme into SharePoint you need to decide for each heading of your fileplan whether to set the heading up as a site, or as a document library within a site, or a folder within a document library.

Here are the quirks that Marc identified:

• Folders within document libraries don't have as much power as any of the other entities in the hierarchy:  they were put in as an afterthought by Microsoft who had thought they wouldn't need them.

• There is no support for hierarchical pick lists/taxonomy: you can only present the user with flat lists.

• The metadata columns you define for documents do not link in with the advanced search facility.  You can define a 'subject' field for documents, and you can provide a pick list to act as a controlled vocabulary for that field.  But (out of the box) you can't present that same pick list to a searcher, even though there is an advanced search facility which shows the 'subject' field.   

• Site-Collections work in a counter-intuitive way.  Every site must be nested within a site-collection.  But site-collections are invisible to users, who can only spot their existence through the url adress of the particular site or resource that they are looking at.

• Site-Collections function like boundaries within the system.  When you set up a content type, or a web part, or define metadata columns, these types, parts and columns only work within the boundaries of a site collection.  If you want them to apply across the whole system you have to set them up afresh for each site collection.  This would naturally push you towards having as few site collections as possible, but the catch is that there is a limit on the capacity of each site collection.  Site Collections should not exceed 100Gb (the reasons why are explained here).

• Document libraries normally inherit access permissions/restrictions from the next level up in the hierarchy (the site).  But access permissions can also be set by content types which cut across different areas of the hierarchy.  This leaves open the possibility of access permissions inherited from a site conflicting with access permission assigned from a content type.  Out of the box MOSS 2007 does not have any way of managing this conflict, and where the conflict occurs access permisisons are broken for that area of the hierarchy.

James Lappin

The UK's first professor of records management

I went to Northumbria University last week, to see Julie McLeod's inaugural lecture as the UK's first professor of records management.

Julie is project director of a major 3 year research project Accelerating positive change in electronic records management (ERM).  The project is an attempt to find out why progress towards ERM has been so slow, and to develop an architecture for ERM that is based on the ways that people work in organisations.  The project has a very good blog.

A crowd of around 50 people had travelled to Newcastle from all over the UK to hear the lectrue, including records managers, fellow academics, former students and Julie's family. The size of the turn out is testimony to the regard and affection in which the profession holds Julie.

Julie gave an engaging overview of the history of records management and the challenges it faces in today's world.   Shining through the talk was a sense that records management will have to change radically, but will still be very much needed.

Julie talked us through the requirement of the International Records Management Standard that records should be authentic, reliable, usable, complete, and unaltered.  She then contrasted this requirement with three great quotes about the fragile nature of modern digital information:

• 'digital information lasts forever... or five minutes whichever comes first' (title of a 2001 talk on digital preservation by Jeff Rothenberg

• 'The record, not the remix, is the anomaly today. The remix is the very nature of the digital' Quote from an article in Wired Magazine by sci-fi novelist William Gibson.  Gibson notes that in literature, film and music nothing is ever started from scatch, and nothing is ever finished, instead things are cut and pasted, sampled, altered, re-combined and re-purposed.  This reminds me of the underuse of the facility in ERM systems to declare a document as a record, thus preventing it from being further edited or altered (though the text can be re-used in a new document).  It is one of the hardest features of ERM to explain to colleagues and is frequently ignored by them: perhaps because it cuts against the spirit of our times.

• 'The liquid version':  this concept comes from a thought provoking article on the future of the book by Kevin Kelly in the New York Times. Kelly thinks that books of the future will no longer stand alone, between two covers, telling a complete story from beginning to end.  Instead they will be drops in the liquid ocean of the world wide web.  Books will be annotated by their readers to link them into the rest of the world's knowledge.  Instead of reading whole books people will pick parts of them, much like i-tunes listeners select from the track-lists of albums.  In records management I often think of a good file as being like a good book: it tells the whole story of a piece of work.  If books were to dissolve would records dissolve too?

James Lappin

Privacy implications of US court ordering handover of YouTube viewers' data to Viacom

There has been a lot of comment on the blogphere today about the US court order requiring Google to hand to Viacom the records of every viewing of You Tube videos

This means ViaCom will get your IP address, your You Tube user name and a list of the videos you viewed from that IP address.

I went to http://www.ipaddresslocation.org/  this morning to check what someone knowing my IP address would be able to tell about me.  In my case the IP address of the computer I am using tells you the name of the company I work for.  Put that together with my video viewing history and my YouTube user name and you know an awful lot about me.

The case is ringing alarm bells.  When I use a web 2 application such as You Tube I assume (perhaps naively!) that the company that operates the application  isn't going to do anything reckless with my data on the basis that they need to keep their users happy in order for the application to stay viable.  But here a competitor of a web 2 application has been granted access to all the personal data of the users of that application.  Viacom would not suffer a jot (indeed could gain) if everyone decided to stop watching You Tube from tomorrow.

Their has been a lot of criticism in the US of the judgement on the grounds that it doesn't take into account the protection given to users of video by the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA). The VPPA was passed after a newspaper disclosed the video rental history of Robert Bork, who was a nominee for the Supreme Court.  Even allowing for the possibility that the judge's decision was flawed, it does seem to indicate a significantly reduced protection for personal privacy in the US as compared to Europe.

Under British and European law the third data protection principle prevents the processing of data that is excessive in relation to the purpose for which it was obtained. I am no lawyer, but I think the provision of the viewing history of all users of You Tube is excessive in relation to the purpose of Viacom in identifying breaches of its copyright by people posting its material onto You Tube.

In the UK the HM Revenue and Customs were strongly criticised for breaching that same third data protection principle by the recent Poynter Report.  They had providing the National Audit Office with a complete scan of every person on the child benefits database, when NAO only needed records of children who had started or stopped receiving benefits in the previous year. Of course that breach of the 3rd principle was compounded when the discs containing the data went missing.

The Information Commissioner regards companies like Google as being subject to the UK Data Protection Act in so far as they are collecting personal data within the UK by leaving cookies on UK based PCs.  It will be very interesting to see over the next few days whether the Information Commissioner (and his equivalents around Europe) makes any representations to the US about this case.

James Lappin

Report from the 'EDRM in Practice' Conference

TFPL's Martin Sanderson attended the EDRM in Practice conference at Edinburgh University on the 24th June. The speakers were all practitioners at different stages of designing and implementing EDRM in their organisations. 

The conference highlighted the changing nature of the way organisations are going about implementing EDRM. Here are some of the key points that Martin reported back:

• Adrian Cobb (Chief Operating Officer for Objective, an EDRM supplier) said that the number of Invitations To Tender for corporate EDRM  implementations issued in the UK had fallen dramatically over the past three years:  down from 85 in a year to just 11.

• The demands of a corporate EDRM solution with its resource requirements, complexity and change managment implications make it a non starter for many organisations.

• EDRMS is just one tool amongst many in the battle to better manage an organiastion's information assets. What tools should be used depends on the context of the organisation and the required benefits.  Business improvement and change were more essential than the tool chosen.

• A new model is emerging whereby instead of buying an EDRM for the whole enterprise,  organisations are buying a system (whether EDRM or not) to address a specific business problem in a specific area of the organisation, to acheive specific benefits.  If this proves succesful organisations then seek to extend the implementation elsewhere.  The challenge here lies in designing the initial implementation to avoid creating an information silo, and to leave open the possibility, if required, of scaling up to a corporate wide implementation.

• A panel session in the afternoon explored the 'whys' and the 'why nots' of SharePoint - the expansion of which is taking on epidemic proportions in a changing marketplace

Overall this was a thought provoking day with lots of practical hints and tips for those embarking on an EDRM project

Our man in Seattle: Darron Chapman's trip to the SLA conference

I interviewed TFPL's Darron Chapman on his return from the 2008 SLA (Special Libraries Association) Conference in Seattle:

Who were the best speakers?

• The first keynote on the first day was Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the internet, now Google's Chief internet evangelist, being interviewed by Charlie Rose. We are rightly proud in the UK of Tim Berners-Lee, for inventing the world wide web, but without Cerf and his colleagues there would not have been an internet for the web to run on.  They were sat in comfy chairs, they had a lovely rapport, and their conversation ranged over the major questions of our day.  Cerf spoke about our reliance on software to read the information we produce (he was concerned that none of that software will be around in 1,000 years time). He speculated about whether the internet could move from search based on statistics (the Google algorithms) to search based on meaning (the semantic web) There is a good transcript of the interview here

• Seth Godin was inspirational, he told us how he'd given away his library because books were just artefacts now.  He told us to give away information.  He's written lots of books, but the book he made most money out of was a book he gave away for free.  It got his message out there, it got his name known and he got hired on the back of it.  He was talking about the proliferation of information clutter in the world. If you want to distinguish your product or service from the crowd you have to be able to wrap a powerful story around it. J has blogged Seth's talk here

How was it different from a UK conference?

• The size:   There was 5,000 people there.  You walk into the conference hall and see thousands of chairs, and giant screens, like a rock concert.   If it wasn't for the fact that I went with friends like Neil Infield, Penny Leach, Kate Arnold and Rachel Kolsky from SLA Europe I would have been lost.  There was so much going on.  People book half a year in advance, and spend a lot of time beforehand working out what sessions they want to sign up for and which events and parties they want to attend.  The organisation is fantastic: when you sign up for sessions it synchs with your personal diary so you have your own schedule.  But I didn't have time to do any of that: I only booked a week and a half before the conference!

• The friendliness:  It was the friendliest conference I have ever been to. Even though it was so large it felt intimate because the networks were so strong.

• The food: there was food everywhere! I must have put on a stone.  Lunch starts at 11:30 which is earlier than we are used to.  You could be wondering around the exhibition and all of a sudden all these trays of food are wheeled out.  One day they had a lunchbox event to help us network.  I walked into a massive room that was piled ceiling high and wall to wall with lunchboxes.  I opened my box and saw it could feed a family of seven.  After a few days I craved sitting down and eating with a knife and fork rather than my fingers, so a few of us went off to an Italian restaurant and chilled for a couple of hours.

• The intensity:  Workshops started at 7am.  You could go to a party every evening and they went on to 11 or 12 at night.  One evening I went to the Business and Finance chapter Party.  The next evening I went to the Military librarians' chapter party, followed by the IT chapter party which was the wildest night.  Another highlight was attending  the International party at the Sheraton where an award was presented to Dennie Heye (a.k.a. the obnoxious librarian from Hades) for his work in the wider community of information professionals. The award was presented by Clare Hart, President of Dow Jones Enterprise Media Group.  After the conference Neil Infield, Rachel Kolsky and myself took a day off.  We took the ferry over to Bainbridge Island and found an old place that did ribs: we really needed to unwind.

Darron  (left) with Neil Infield on Bainbridge Island

What is the difference between American Librararians and British librarians?

• I realised that to enjoy the conference I had to shed my British reserve.  People at the conference dressed more casually (flip-flops were fine) ate more heartily, clapped more often and danced and partied much harder than we do in Britain.  There was a real zest to work hard, celebrate all the good things about the profession and play hard. Neil has blogged about some of the cool librarians at the conference

Why did you go?

• TFPL were one of a number of companies that sponsored an award to enable some students from the UK and Europe to go over to the Conference for the first time. 

Would you go again?

• You bet!

Darron would also like to thank Janice La Chance, Stacey Bowers, Gill Voisey, Will Hann, John Coll, Liz Blankson Hemans and Sylvia James for making his first SLA conference such a great experience.