The move to digital has been going on for some time.  Products and services are more freely available online and in digital formats than ever before but have our methods of working adapted and developed too?  There are certainly the tools available to enable a more digital and effective way of working but as we now know none were really utilised in anger until fairly recently as the pandemic forced our hand.

In his first article for BIR Lee Bryant, Principal of POST*SHIFT and Shift*Base, explores the world of digital working and how we have struggled to truly take onboard its benefits for a more effective way of working when it comes to the ‘office’ environment.  Even during lockdown when we have been forced to work remotely most people have taken the processes and practices from the office and continued them as best they can online.  Enter in the back-to-back Zoom meetings, hours spent online more than ever and still talk of feelings of isolation and disconnectedness.

The Business Information Review Annual Survey (BIR) is the world’s longest running survey of trends in Information and Knowledge Management within the commercial sector. Now in its twenty-ninth year, for almost three decades the survey has provided invaluable insight into the ways in which professional practice and the commercial context has changed. This year’s survey is due for publication in the September issue of Business Information Review and was produced again by Denise Carter of DCision Consult. It is proving to be one of the most interesting and important we have published.

Each year in the run-up to the publication of the survey, we pick-out a handful of key themes for discussion in the BIR Blog. The information and knowledge management profession has been caught on the cusp of a perpetual technological revolution that has fundamentally changed how information work is done. These changes are reflected the first of our key themes from the 2019 BIR Annual Survey: the challenges of adapting to new tools and technologies, and the emerging skills required to manage these effectively.

In 1991 when the first Annual Survey was published, adapting to technological change meant incorporating online financial and news databases (such as ICC British Company Financial Datasheets and Reuter Textline) and CD ROM services (such as FAME and Kompass). At that time only 30% of respondents were using any CD ROM services, and the numbers using online databases were dwarfed by those using traditional resources. Although information management in the commercial sector had been exploiting online resources for over a decade by 1991, it was still heavily dependent on traditional paper-based resources. The explosion of digital information since the early nineties has fundamentally changed the ways in which information work is done, diversifying the very ideas of source and resource, and increasingly requiting critical and analytical skills in the evaluation of information. The BIR Annual Survey has borne witness to these changes, and over the past five years we have also tracked the impact of emerging technology on information work, exploring fake news and post-truth, and emerging technologies such as Virtual Reality and blockchains.

The challenge of adapting to new tools and technologies emerges as a strong theme in this year’s survey, particularly in relationship to emerging Artificial Intelligence tools. But the survey also reveals how technological change is demanding new skills and competencies from information professionals and knowledge managers. No longer merely the custodians and gatekeepers of authoritative printed resources and online databases, information management has adapted from managing resources to managing both the context within which information and knowledge discovery can take place and the quality of the information on which commercial decisions are made. As the very idea of source and resource changes through the emergence of alt data and big data, the survey reveals both the changing ecology of information work and the emerging skills required to manage information in the workplace.

Luke Tredinnick

We’re pleased to announce that the June 2019 issue of Business Information Review is now available. This issue contains the normal mix of professional and research articles, focussed on information and knowledge management in the commercial sector.

The first article in June’s Business Information Review was written by editorial board member Denise Carter and former editor Sandra Ward. Exploring the implications of the Hawley Report originally published in 1995 but recently reappraised for its potential contribution to commercial information management strategy, the article reports on the updating and development of Hawley’s original recommendation for a modern information context. Entitled Information as an Asset – Today’s Board Agenda: The Value of Rediscovering Gold, the paper traces the ways in which the information landscape has been transformed over the last 20 years, from connectivity, to the growth of artificial intelligence, and the redevelopment of the Hawley Report for contemporary contexts. The authors write:

The publication of Information as an Asset: Today’s Board Agenda by the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) in February 2019 is an important landmark in commercial information management, as out first paper makes clear.

Our second article was written by Paul H Cleverley and Simon Burnett from Robert Gordon University in the UK and addressed the topical and important subject of enterprise search solutions. Entitled Enterprise Search: A State of the Art, the paper reports on interview research conducted with 18 participants from a range of backgrounds into challenges for enterprise search and future directions for development. The paper develops a four-level model for enterprise search use cases that ‘could be used to reframe how enterprise search is perceived, influencing strategies, deployments and conceptual models’.

The third article for June 2019 is entitled The Innovation Ecosystem and Knowledge Management: A Practitioner’s Viewpoint. What does Innovation Mean? Witten by Rosemary Nunn from I&K, the Information and Knowledge Agency, the paper explores the meaning of innovation in organisational contexts, and the link between innovation and Knowledge Management. The paper explains how to map the innovation ecosystem within the organisation, and uses case studies to map the impact of knowledge management on innovation.

Our fourth paper was written by Paul Corney, founder of knowledge et al, a UK-based KM consultancy, and a Knowledge & Information Management Ambassador for CILIP. The paper illustrates the importance careful planning plays in creating the right environment for face-to-face collaboration and learning, and outlines 10 virtual facilitation success factors.

Our final article for June was written by editorial board member Denise Carter, from DCision Consult, Geneva, Switzerland. Entitled Real World Experience: Lessons Learnt From My Experience of Bringing a Fully Outsourced Library Service Back In-House, the paper reflects on the ways in which early professional experiences can have an important and continued effect on our working lives. We are very grateful for Denise in contributing this paper.

You can access the issue here: https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/bira/current

Contributions are invited for a themed-issue of Business Information Review on the topic of “The Connected Workplace” to be published in December 2019. The issue will explore emerging technology in the workplace, with a particular emphasis on human issues and the impact of technology on Information and Knowledge Management in the commercial sector. Topics of papers may include:

• Virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) or mixed reality (MR) applications in business environments; remote working facilitated through VR/AR. Training and skills requirements around VR/AR.
• Artificial Intelligence (AI) in commercial settings; how AI is changing professional roles; training requirements around AI; the ethics of AI in commercial contexts.
• Intelligent automation reshaping the way in which work gets done.
• Collaborative software and cloud based systems in the workplace.
• Technologically enhanced distance learning; implementing flexible working spaces; virtual offices and virtual organisations.
• Gamification of the workplace.
• Machine learning in business contexts

We also welcome contributions on any other aspect of emerging technology in the workplace. All papers should address the professional requirements of Information and Knowledge Management as it pertains to practice in the commercial sector.

Expressions of interest in contributing to the themed issue should be sent to the editors (via l.tredinnick@londonmet.ac.uk) by 15th May 2019 Papers should be between 3000 and 6000 words in length, and the deadline for submission of completed papers will be 01st August 2019.

About Business Information Review

Business Information Review (BIR) is published by Sage Journals and addresses information and knowledge management within commercial organizations. The journal features papers by professional practitioners and LIS researchers in equal measure, and has a strong record of encouraging and developing practitioner research. The journal also promotes evidence-based professional practice and encourages the sharing of professional expertise and experience. We aim to:

• Report on best current practice in business information provision;
• Evaluate business information resources and anticipate new forms of resource;
• Highlight new professional developments and trends;
• Scan the horizon for longer term developments.

For over forty years Business Information Review has helped develop the careers and practice of commercial librarians, information and knowledge managers, and to promote the commercial libraries, information and knowledge management sector.

Business Information Review publishes a range of different kinds of article, including:

• Professional articles sharing professional expertise and experience
• Research articles reporting on research projects or findings
• Opinion articles discussing an emerging issue or controversy
• Out-of-the-Box articles addressing technological developments

Initiatives articles addressing changing contexts of professional practice

If you are interested in writing for Business Information Review, or would like more information about the early career prize or the journal then do please contact the editors Claire Laybats and Luke Tredinnick via businessinformationreviewj@gmail.com

In the September issue of Business Information Review (BIR) we will be publishing the 28th Annual Survey of trends in commercial Information and Knowledge Management. The BIR Annual Survey is the longest running continuous survey of the needs and working lives of commercial information and knowledge managers in the World. Since 1990 it has provided an invaluable insight into the changing world of Information and Knowledge Management. Throughout July on this blog we will be giving a taste of some of the trends that have emerged in this year’s survey. These blog posts will not reveal any detail from the survey, but provide an indication of the themes that dominate the commercial information world today. The first of these themes is the growing presence of AI in the workplace.

Over the past year Artificial Intelligence (AI) has moved from science fiction and Hollywood cinema into the business mainstream. Business Information Review has tracked this trend, exploring the emergence of AI in the workplace in an Out-of-the-Box special and editorial in December.

AI describes a cluster of technologies: machine learning; natural language processing; decision making and reasoning; automation of business processes, and so on. The ways in which AI is impacting on the commercial world is therefore quite varied. Nevertheless the impact is tangible; PwC report Sizing the Prize predicts a $16 trillion contribution to the global economy by 2030. AI in the workplace is still in its infancy and while in the future it is likely to impinge on professional roles and functions, at the moment that impact is limited to defined tasks and functions, such as for example the growing use of IBM’s Watson in legal and health research. Yet the embryonic nature of AI technologies today should not blind us to the disruptive potential of the technology over the next ten years. We are at the beginning of a process that is set to transform business, particularly in those fields that have largely remained immune to automation: the professions, business-to-business services, and elements of creative work.

Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody is ten years old this year. In it Shirky observed the following about the disruptive potential of technology for professional occupations:

Most professions exist because there is a scarce resource that requires ongoing management. […] When a profession has been created as a result of some scarcity, as with librarians or television programmers, the professionals themselves are often the last ones to see it when that scarcity goes away (Shirky, 2008),

While Shirky’s diagnosis of the challenges facing librarianship are overly simplistic, they do help explain some of the changes to the profession over the past ten years, and some of the ways that professional work in general has changed. The web revolution disrupted the scarcity of information – resources that had been locked up in hard-to-access physical media or esoteric information retrieval systems were unleashed. We have seen that the gatekeeper role over collections and resources has tended to decline in the digital age. But as information managers have stepped back from purely managing resources they have found new roles in facilitating access to and use of information, and in applying their professional expertise to align the strategic management of information with organisational aims and objectives. Ownership over resources has declined, but evaluation of information and information resources has become increasingly important.

We are perhaps on the brink of another major technological shift in our relationship to information. If decline in scarcity in the digital age tended to emphasize a set of very human aptitudes to leverage the most value from an increasingly abundant resource, particularly around research, evaluation, re-presentation and strategic information management, then the rise of AI threatens to colonize these remaining roles. In the liminal space of information today the tide of technology is constantly encroaching. The next ten years may see automation of a whole range of business functions that previous depended on human reasoning, decision making and interpersonal skills.

AI cannot, however, function in a vacuum, and just as with previous changes in the structure of information delivery, the technology opens up new possibilities for the information profession. The ways in which AI is beginning to impact on information work is a key theme in this year’s survey, and mark a beginning of a conversation within the profession about the future of information work.