tfpl blog

Which world do we live in?

Author: Vivienne Winterman, Senior Consultant

Physical or virtual?

Tangible or indefinable?

Real or imaginary?

The list is endless. These are the worlds the information professional (IP) has to deal with. Skill requirements are changing. Paradoxically the world is getting bigger yet smaller at the same time in information terms. As the rate of information creation continues to increase at an exponential rate, its retrieval is still ever challenging. Digitisation is in to bring the world of archives into our homes and businesses.

When will it stop?

How do you contain it?

Is it necessary?

Does it benefit us?

To answer the questions. Never. You can’t. Yes/no (glass half full/empty syndrome). It should do.

To take the last question first. It should benefit us. We should learn from good practice, stories and events that ought not to be repeated. But do we?

Is it necessary? Absolutely. All information should be transparent and there if you need it. It does of course need to be well managed, structured and retrievable.

How do you contain it? Well the cloud concept is doing a good job, but I dread to think what will happen when there is a cloud burst! I’ll leave that to your imagination.

Will it stop? No way. There is so much to learn. With the world population rising to 7 billion more and more information will be created just to manage daily living requirements.

What an opportunity for the IP. TFPL’s recent report ‘Connecting information with innovation’ (TFPL’s 2011 survey of skills and roles) http://www.tfpl.com/resources/index.cfm shows that investment in knowledge and information management (KIM) is seen as an essential component contributing to business success. KIM skills are being embedded in the workforce to bring about a new way of working, so that KIM is ‘not another initiative’ but the ‘way we do things around here’. IPs rapidly need to increase their range of skills. They need to be IT proficient, provide e-learning as a means of communicating with the virtual, global, workforce, be metadata and taxonomy advisors, maintain information governance, be concerned about managing risk, aligned to the business supporting the goals and objectives, and many more as detailed in the report. Over 350 individuals have downloaded the report, available in English, French and German.  Have you?

Social Media adoption research

Author: Claire Valentine, Training Manager

We at TFPL have long be interested in the impact social media has on organisations.  Following on from a survey that was conducted with Edinburgh Napier Univeristy in 2008, we are now happy to promote further post graduate research that they are conducting. 

Are you interested in how social media can support information and knowledge management? Would you have 15-20 minutes to spare to complete a short survey to help us enhance our understanding of the role of social media in organisational settings?

A postgraduate student supervised by Professor Hazel Hall at Edinburgh Napier University is conducting research into the opportunities and risks of social media tools to support information and knowledge management. You can find further information on the previous work that was undertaken jointly by TFPL with Edinburgh Napier University in 2008 here  http://www.soc.napier.ac.uk/~hazelh/esis/soc_comp_proj_rep_public.pdf.  

We would be most grateful if you would contribute to this project by completing the online survey at http://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/672848/5b1b3dc8a308.

All responses will be aggregated and no individual or organisation will be identifiable in the results. The findings will be shared with the broader information and knowledge management community after the project is completed.

The Cloud: Sharing information....redefined (Not nebulous, but grounded)

Author: Julia Hordle, Director of Recruitment

Let’s be honest, it isn’t often these days, that you go to an conference event expecting to interested in every topic and speaker on the schedule.

Yesterday, we heard about the principles, potential and applications of cloud technology in a way that even a lay person (me) without a technological bone in their body, could not fail to be impressed by.

I consider myself to be a lay person because, whilst I am interested in (now fascinated by) the possibility of doing so much more with the information we hold, there is always just the promise of doing wonderful work with information, and I am always reliant on others to make the magic work.

In practice, making progress with legacy systems, written in older eras, is painfully slow and there is a high dependency on IT partners who may not share or fully understand the business purpose behind the work.

We had here a group of experts, from many different perspectives, who spoke about a new era in Information; we are at a point where we can optimise value from the content we have already invested in by designing our domains so we can share, inside and outside our own organisations.

The key points driven home were:

• That given the rate of increase of the volume of data held, a cloud solution is the safest and most economical way to store information which is not security sensitive
• The way forward for most large organisations is to use a combination of private and public clouds, infrastructure and content clouds
• That in the use of the cloud, businesses perform better by encouraging self service for customer/users, thus creating the capacity to do much more
• Through social and dispersed media, the cloud can be an excellent mechanism for due diligence, through the smart use of links
•  Economies of scale and better community working are easily enabled through a cloud
• To make clouds work, thought must be given to classification, taxonomy and linkage, if they are to work across border, cultures and languages
• There are clear cost savings via reduction in classical IT expenditure
• But the ownership, value and “curation” of data needs to be carefully thought through, or we may lose information, valuable in years and decades to come
• Who pays for content, provision and/or usage? Authors, owners, users or society? How do we pay?
• Little wastage of storage or data utility in the cloud
• Need to get into good meta data habits to be fit for the cloud

Caution: we were advised that in this ”free-for-all” stage of Cloud uptake, the current wisdom is to be cautious in your commitment to cloud service providers;

Pay detailed attention to contracts. Have an exit strategy.

Who owns the data once you hand it over, what are the rights issues, will you cede power over your own IP if you are not careful?

Make sure you are prepared to have your data back, if contract terminates. Will this undo your cost reduction?

Do providers have the right to keep and use a copy of your data?

• Understand implications for compliance and for QM systems and accreditation requirements
• Independent audit  is essential. Don’t rely on service and solutions providers
• Think carefully about security and encryption versus utility
• If encryption bars algorithms for analysis, will this prevent the cloud as a useful solution to data storage and analysis?

TFPL Events did a wonderful job of bringing together a group of speakers and participative delegates who gave The Cloud a rigorous 360 degree, public scrutiny. The event discussed the Cloud as a positive, adventurous mechanism for collaborative working and for engagement with external customers for interest groups. The event worked, because the vendors did not oversell, and the users and the sceptics came to learn but not to deride.

The sentiment in the room was of an event that delighted in its effectiveness, to raise awareness and expand our perspective on the Cloud, through real experience. There was a call for more – perhaps a follow up event to share more about inventive applications of Cloud, to inspire innovation. There is also a clear demand for CIOs –intrepid strategic information and IT professionals able to lead organisations on adventures to a promised land of cost reduction, shared information and easy information living.

One of the delegates talked about a “race for adoption” and how important it is for growth, to take up new technology ahead of the curve for optimum performance. This seminar made us all want to race.