First issue of 2018 now out online

Our March issue contains a number of papers with the general theme of looking at the effects of technology on information and knowledge management. Hal Kirkwood returns to look at how artificial intelligence (AI) is affecting information professionals and their job roles. Delphine Phillips and Mark West from Integreon look at the future of Business Information Services (BIS) within the financial services sector and the effects of technology and other internal and external environmental factors in that area. We also see a contribution from Gabriela Labres Mallmann, a PhD student at the School of Management, UFRGS, considering the influences of Shadow IT on knowledge sharing. Here is a short overview of each of the papers in this issue.

  • The Current State of Artificial Intelligence and the Information Profession: Or Do Librarian Droids Dream of Electric Books? – Prof Hal P Kirkwood, Purdue University.

Hal begins by observing that while there has been an increasing interest in AI in the last 12 months, there has been 100% increase in the use of the terms AI and librarians. AI as a technology is fast moving from science fiction to reality with the rising popularity of voice-activated tools such as Siri to the developing use of self-driving cars and even a self-operating grocery store! His article, unlike others, is not a review of the good and bad sides of using AI, but about considering how the technology is developed and its psychological impacts. A lot goes into the development of the technology, it is not created as ‘all knowing’. It requires a lot of human interaction and consideration to develop the algorithms, providing ‘good’ and ‘relevant’ information and data to the AI tool in order for it to provide an effective service. It still also requires ‘policing’ to ensure that information it provides is accurate and relevant which still requires human interaction. His article also reviews what is being done around the world to consider the impact of AI and ensuring that it is used for the greater good rather than creating a negative impact on people and society at large.

  • Exploring the Future of Business Information Services in the Financial Sector – Delphine Phillips, Knowledge Solutions Manager, Integreon, and Mark West, Operations Director, Knowledge and BIS, Integreon.

Delphine and Mark have conducted a highly interesting research study on the role of BIS within financial services and its future in light of changing internal and external environmental factors. Their research is gathered from global investment banks and equity houses and considers the role technology is playing in the development of the BIS of the future. They review different operating models, how these are affected by internal and external changes and look at future drivers and future scope developments. They also consider the influence of knowledge management services on BIS, how they link and interact.

  • The Influence of Shadow IT Usage on Knowledge Sharing: An Exploratory Study with IT Users – Gabriela Labres Mallmann, PhD student at the School of Management, UFRGS.

Gabriela presents a new look at knowledge sharing from the point of view of ‘Shadow IT’ (software and hardware not authorized by IT departments) and its effects on knowledge sharing. The research is gathered from a series of interviews with IT users looking at how they share knowledge and information, why they share it in this way and considerations for managing risk for the future.

  • Knowledge Management Process Arrangements and Their Impact on Innovation – Eduardo Kunzel Teixeira and Mirian Oliveira of PUCRS, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, and Carla Maria Marques Curado of ISEG-UL, Lisboa, Portugal.

Moving away from technology and focusing more on process, this paper discusses the impact knowledge management process (KMP) has on facilitating innovation. The authors look at how different processes and different combinations of processes can affect innovation. Their conclusions, overviews in the abstract, provide a good taster of the paper itself –

1) it was identified that in general the companies apply balanced KMP arrangements;

2) that the same innovation results can be achieved using different KMP compositions; and

3) that KMP investments tend to reach a maximum effect, beyond which innovation decelerates.

  • Out of the Box – Virtual Realities in the Business World

Luke Tredinnick reviews the emergence and current uses of virtual reality technology and considers how it can impact our world. Will it become just another passing fad like 3D television or is it set to be one of the next disruptive technologies on the horizon?

  • Perspectives

Martin White returns with a review of the latest papers across Sage which could be of interest to you. Highlighted is a paper on the importance of being allowed to make mistakes in order to develop knowledge and innovate. Martin draws from his own background to illustrate the importance of this in the work environment.

Other subjects covered include the use of language and the ability to analyse and use it to consider cultural fit within an organization; considerations for HR and prepping the workplace as the amount of knowledge-led work increases with the working environment becoming more and more complex; AI and human interaction and the development of shared mental models to facilitate future developments; a discussion on the impact of libraries’ ISO standard; and the importance of user interfaces and display of search results in a meaningful way to improve findability. Luke Tredinnick and Claire Laybats

See more online here http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0266382118762967

 

Latest Business Information Review issue now available

Our latest issue of Business Information Review is now available online and contains the usual mix of academic and professional articles. First is an article by Judi Vernau, founding director of Metataxis Ltd which specialises in building ontologies and taxonomies. Entitled Using ontology to improve access to information: the New Zealand experience, Judi’s paper described the development of an ontology intended to support findability within an enterprise content management system in the New Zealand Department of Conservation.  It explores in detail both the ontology itself, and also the comparative benefits and advantages of this approach.

Next is Ali Rezaeian & Rouhollah Bagheri’s paper exploring knowledge networks, a means by which to with which to support knowledge sharing and creation.  Entitled Modelling the Factors Affecting the Implementation of Knowledge Networks, the paper looks at the state of research around knowledge networks, and draws out the success factors in their implementation.  Next is a paper by Antonio Muñoz-Cañavat entitled Competitive Intelligence in Spain: A Study of a Sample of Firms. This paper reports on a survey of Spanish firms to explore the ways in which they approach the challenges of competitive intelligence, and reveals the degree to which benchmarking and SWOT analysis still factor as significant tools in real world corporate settings.

Our final article this issue comes from Cerys Hearsey as part of the Out-of-the-Box strand of tech-related articles. In her paper Cerys explores the growth of Artificial Intelligence in the workplace. Also in this issue is Martin White’s Perspectives column, which this issues addresses the role of meetings, remote working. information culture and collaborative information seeking.

We hope you enjoy reading this issue which can be found at http://journals.sagepub.com/toc/bira/current

 

Automation and AI – What does the future of work look like?

Author: Steve Dale BIR Editorial Board Member

Our news and activity streams are buzzing with articles, blogs, analyst reports and social media hype around the topic of “AI”. It’s a fairly loosely defined topic that covers an enormous spectrum of disciplines, from big data and predictive analytics, to machine learning, natural language processing, automation and robotics. Depending on who you listen to, it’s either the most important technological breakthrough since the invention of electricity, or it heralds the end of civilisation as we know it! Extreme scenarios are most certainly fantasies and should be discounted. The most likely outcome is neither extremely negative nor extremely positive.

What tends to focus our attention are the stories about how AI and “intelligent” machines are replacing roles, jobs, or even professions. What is the real truth behind these stories?

There is no doubt that workplace automation is becoming more widespread, and today’s AI-enabled, information-rich tools are increasingly able to handle jobs that in the past have been exclusively done by people (including tax returns, language translations, accounting, even some types of surgery) – automation is destined to have profound implications for the future world of work.

McKinsey recently reported that 30 percent of activities for 60 percent of occupations are now technically automatable.

Recent advances in robotics, machine learning, and AI are pushing the frontier of what machines are capable of doing in all facets of business and the economy. Physical robots have been around for a long time in manufacturing, but more capable, more flexible, safer, and less expensive robots are now engaging in ever expanding activities and combining mechanization with cognitive and learning capabilities—and improving over time as they are trained by their human co-workers on the shop floor, or increasingly learn by themselves.

Massive amounts of data that can be used to train machine learning models are being generated, for example through daily creation of billions of images, online click streams, voice and video, mobile locations, and sensors embedded in the Internet of Things. The combination of these breakthroughs has led to spectacular demonstrations like DeepMind’s AlphaGo, which defeated a human champion of the complex board game ‘Go’ in March 2016.

New milestones are being achieved in numerous areas, often with performance beyond human capabilities. In 2016, for example, Google’s DeepMind and the University of Oxford applied deep learning to a huge data set of BBC programs to create a lip-reading system that is more accurate than a professional lip-reader.

There are numerous examples of how machine learning is being used to augment human decision making in healthcare, aircraft maintenance, oil and gas operations, recruitment, insurance claims processing and law. There is barely a sector that is not engaged in some way in exploring the use of AI and automation technologies to improve productivity or accuracy.

One of the more practical roles for AI over the past few years has been to automate administrative tasks and decisions. Companies typically have thousands of such tasks and decisions to perform, and it was realized that if they could be expressed in a formal logic, they could be automated. A key feature of this type of automation is machine/deep learning and robotic process automation (RPA) – which, contrary to its name does not involve actual robots; it makes use of workflow and business rules technology to perform digital tasks.  The technology makes it relatively easy to automate structured digital tasks that involve interaction with multiple information systems.

So, what does all of this new technology mean in terms of jobs? Most analysts are agreed that whilst many routine tasks and functions – both physical and cognitive – are being automated, this does not necessarily mean that we are heading for mass unemployment as the machines take over. Perhaps one of the most extensive research programmes into the impact of AI on jobs and skills has been undertaken by Nesta. It has published its findings in the report:  The Future of Skills: Employment in 2030. Well worth a read. The report highlights that:

  • skills that are likely to be in greater demand in the future include interpersonal skills, higher-order cognitive skills, and systems skills.
  • the future workforce will need broad-based knowledge in addition to the more specialised skills that are needed for specific occupations.
  • dialogues that consider automation alone are dangerous and misleading since they rarely take account of globalization, an ageing population and the rise of the green economy.

Perhaps the last word on where AI and automation is having (or will have) the most impact should go to Gil Press at Forbes, who identifies the sectors and functions as follows:

  1. Customer Self-Service: Customer-facing physical solutions such as kiosks, interactive digital signage, and self-checkout. Improved by recent innovations such as better touchscreens, faster processors, improved connectivity and sensors. A prime example is the experimental Amazon Go convenience store.
  1. AI-Assisted Robotic Process Automation: Automating organizational workflows and processes using software bots.
  1. Industrial Robots: Physical robots that execute tasks in manufacturing, agriculture, construction, and similar verticals with heavy, industrial-scale workloads. The Internet of Things, improved software and algorithms, data analytics, and advanced electronics have contributed to a wider array of form factors, ability to perform in semi- and unstructured environments, and the “intelligence” to learn and operate autonomously.
  1. Retail and Warehouse Robots: Physical robots with autonomous movement capabilities used in retailing and/or warehousing. Amazon deploys this technology throughout its warehouses.
  1. Virtual Assistants: Personal digital concierges that know users and their data and are discerning enough to interpret their needs and make decisions on their behalf.
  1. Sensory AI: Improving computers ability to identify, “understand,” and even express human sensory faculties and emotions via image and video analysis, facial recognition, speech analytics, and/or text analytics.

He goes on to say:  “There is no question that we will continue to see in the future the same disruption in the job market that we have witnessed in the last sixty-plus years of computer technology creating and destroying jobs (like other technologies that preceded it). The type of disruption that has created Facebook and Tesla. Facebook had a handful of employees in 2004 and today employs 20,000.  Tesla was founded in 2003 and today has 33,000 employees. Whether AI technologies progress fast or slow and whether AI will continue to excel only at narrow tasks or succeed in performing multi-dimensional activities, entrepreneurs like Zuckerberg and Musk…will seize new business opportunities to both destroy and create jobs. Humans, unlike bots and robots (now and possibly forever), adapt to changing circumstances.”

One thing we can be sure of: the rate of change will continue to accelerate, and if we wish to remain relevant in our chosen professions, we need to identify and refine the skills that can’t easily be automated. Whether that’s a shrinking or expanding environment remains to be seen.

Information Professionals Are Fantastic! – My Key Take Away from the 2017 Business Information Survey

Denise Carter, DCision Consult

I’ve just spent part of my Sunday afternoon sitting in the garden in the sunshine reading a book about conducting systematic reviews, an exercise I did for pleasure and which I enjoyed because a) I joined the dots on a few separate pieces of information I already knew and b) I learnt new things.

After just over thirty years of working in information I’m happy to say to that I still find information as interesting today as I did when I started out, and I still love learning more.  That’s why I find it also such a pleasure to conduct the primary interviews for the Annual Business Information Survey. The overwhelming majority of the interviewees have been working for more than a few years for their organisations, and I am continually struck by their continued enthusiasm both for their current roles but also for the wider knowledge and information disciplines. That is a truism across all the different industries.

I have seen myself when I was an information manager for a pharmaceutical company,  in an industry where staff turnover was particularly high it was certainly true that in our company those working in information roles were all long-serving employees – 15-20 years being a good average. Information was not high on the organisation agenda – when our company was acquired by another the information units were not assigned to any of the acquisition work streams that were deemed critical by the senior management to ensure that the company remain efficient during the acquisition process.  What I saw however was all of us with information roles who already had developed an informal working relationship in our original company, join together and take the initiative to reach out to our counterparts in the new organisation and propose solutions to issues the company had failed to recognise, and also to start to explore the new organisation and understand the new opportunities that may provide us.  I also witnessed people on much higher pay grades than myself and my colleagues halt projects, delay decisions because “no-one had told them what they should do” because their reporting structures were disrupted and they were temporarily without a “boss”.

Conducting the interviews I see very clearly that commitment to the organisation and the strategic objectives of the organisation is common across all information professionals.   They are completely committed to the work they do, convinced of it’s value and full of creative ideas of what else they could add or do.

One of the interviewees in this year’s survey spoke of the particular challenge of a corporate merger and the company splitting into three business strands, and the potential concern that their team may get assigned to one strand only rather than providing a service to the whole organisation.   They wanted to make sure they remained central to the activities and but knew they wouldn’t get any more resources but their answer was simply to “get on with it and do it”.

The 2017 Business Information Survey contains many such examples of the dedication and professionalism of the information professional.  We as a profession need to get better at letting people know how great we are. I’m hoping this year’s survey is a contribution to that effort.

BIR Annual Survey 2017 now available

We’re very pleased to announce that the BIR Annual Survey is now available on the journal website. The BIR annual survey is the longest running survey into information management and knowledge management in the commercial sector in the world. This year there has been a significant change to the scope and methodology of the survey, making it more comprehensive than ever.  We’re very grateful to Denise Carter of DCision Consult Sàrl for undertaking the research.

Over recent months we have been flagging-up some of the findings of this year’s survey in our posts on this blog. Those issues that have come to the fore in this years research include:

  • What value looks like to different organisations/senior managers
  • Successful strategies employed for measuring and communicating value (up, down and across organisations)
  • Communication methods to reach the right / different audiences in organisations
  • Having the right skill set, what that is, how it is deployed
  • Keeping up to date with professional trends (info and business)
  • What’s on the horizon – info trends, business trends

The full survey results published in the September issue of Business Information Review develop these themes in detail, and are essential reading for everyone in the sector. This year for the first time all CILIP members have access to the survey from the member’s area of the CILIP website; just log-in at the link below:

https://www.cilip.org.uk/membership/benefits/monthly-magazine-journals-ebulletins/online-journals/sage-journals

The September issue of BIR also contains are usual range of articles and columns. Technology unsurprisingly perhaps also features as important in this year survey . This theme is continued through our next article by Virginia Henry entitled People and Tools: Encouraging Rewarding Interaction in the Workplace. Virginia has worked in knowledge, change and learning management for over 14 years. She passes on her insight and expertise in this article that she has developed in getting people to work with technology more effectively. She considers what she has called the ‘humane factor’ and how to incorporate that into successful deployments of technology.

Our third article comes to us from the US. Hal Kirkwood is an associate professor of library science and business information specialist in the Roland G. Parrish Library of Management & Economics at Purdue University, in Indiana, USA. His article, Towards a Unified Theory of Business Information, looks at the importance of business information literacy and its impact on developing key competitive intelligence information to aid critical decision making. He attempts to bring all the different aspects of business information together in one framework to aid effective decision-making through providing an accurate context on which to base those decisions on.

Next, we take a look at the impact of ‘Fake news’, how and why it is generated in an article by Dominic Spohr, Media and Communications student at London Metropolitan University, entitled Fake News and Ideological Polarization. This is an interesting article which offers and exploratory look at the effect technology has had on our intake of news and current affairs, how filtering and personalization of news services has created filter bubbles which ensure that only views we agree with, or are from similar perspectives to ours are fed back to us. The implications of these developments are huge and something definitely worth considering the next time we view news sites.

Martin White’s column on Perspectives this time carries on our communication theme from the survey looking particularly at the use of corporate language and the effects specifically of international local languages. As usual Martin’s column is an excellent overview of the subject and quotes from some interesting research papers on the subject.

You can find September’s issues here.

 

Horizon scanning – the sixth theme from this year’s annual survey

What’s coming over the horizon for the information and knowledge management profession? Our final look at themes emerging in this year’s Business Information Review Annual Survey focusses on horizon scanning.

The BIR annual survey is the world’s longest running survey into business information management. For over twenty-five years the survey has tracked changes to the profession including the growth of online, the rise of the web and the emergence of knowledge management. This year the survey is bigger and more comprehensive than ever, combining in-depth interviews with a wider survey.  Due for publication in September 2017 issue of Business Information Review, the survey has become an invaluable guide to sector trends and developments.

As well as keeping you up-to-date with emerging trends in the sector, at Business Information Review we aim to look ahead at what is around the next corner. Over the last couple of years we have covered issues as diverse a Brexit, information security, artificial intelligence, and the general data protection regulations, all of which threaten significant change in the sector over the next decade.

These are some of the topics that we think are on the horizon, but what kinds of issues emerged in the BIR survey? As a part of the survey we asked about the issues that are on the horizon of the information profession. A range of issues feature in the responses across the sector, some of which were familiar, and some of which were surprising. Find out more in September’s Business Information Review.

Keeping up-to-date with professional trends

The BIR annual survey is the world’s longest running survey into business information management. For over twenty-five years the survey has tracked changes to the profession including the growth of online, the rise of the web and the emergence of knowledge management. This year the survey is bigger and more comprehensive than ever. Due for publication in September 2017 issue of Business Information Review, the survey has become an invaluable guide to sector trends and developments. It is ironic then that the fifth theme that emerges from this year’s BIR Annual Survey is the challenge of keeping up-to-date with changing professional trends and developments.

The aim of Business Information Review as a professional and academic journal is of course to help information and knowledge management professionals in the commercial sector to stay up-to-date with emerging trends in both professional practice and the wider business and information environments, and to encourage the pursuit of evidence-based practice in the business information sector. The very existence of this journal might be thought of as an attempt to address the longstanding challenge of staying up-to-date and relevant in the face of rapidly changing contexts in the information world. Business Information Review is not the only publication that has this aim; a whole body of professional and academic literature exists that contribute to contemporary professional practice. And this is the tip of a very large iceberg. An industry of professional information events including conferences, training, and networking events, and wider business and corporate publications and events all aim to help us stay ahead of the game.

But whatever the good intentions of everyone involved in these activities, how helpful are they? What kinds of ways do information professionals stay-up-to-date in their professional practice? What do they find most useful? More importantly, how should you be doing it? These questions emerge as a strong theme in this year’s survey, and the answers to them will be published in September’s issue of Business Information Review.

Emerging skills sets – the fourth theme from our survey this year

Our fourth theme from this year’s Annual Survey is a perennial issue for the information and knowledge management industry: how do you ensure you have the right skills sets, and how do you ensure that the right skills sets are deployed. Over the past thirty years, as digital technology has come to dominate information work in a range of different sectors, the kinds of skills that contribute to professional competency has invariably migrated. At the same time, a large part of what was once considered core professional knowledge has declined in importance, or mutated into different forms. Bibliography, classification and indexing for example may have found new leases of life in resource description and information architecture; nevertheless the changing contexts of some of these newly repurposed professional skills sets require different ways of thinking about the task at hand, its purpose, and how it fits with the wider organisational context.

Information work in the commercial sector is rarely just about core professional knowledge and core professional skills; in the commercial sector information and knowledge professionals are  embedded within other professional contexts that makes professional identity more of a hybrid affair – accounting; finance; banking; pharmaceuticals; law and so on. As we have seen in previous years, of value are often not information skills per se but the ability to integrate those skills within a corporate context by adopting a commercial mind-set and flexible practice. As digital technologies continue to automate key elements of the professions and commerce, employees gain value in those abilities that they bring which cannot be automated.

This year’s survey explores these questions, examining what kinds of skills are emergent in the sector, and how those skills are deployed to add value to information services, and improve organisational effectiveness.

Rich communication, the third theme from our survey this year

Our third theme from this year’s Business Information Review survey of seasoned information and knowledge professionals continues on from the second theme of communicating value.  The third theme is about communication methods to reach the right / different audiences in organisations.  In my last post I touched on the way that it is important to use different communication methods depending on the people involved.  Culture, personalities and past experiences all have an impact on what communication method is going to be effective and successful.

Information and knowledge teams are well aware of the need to meet their customer’s expectations when providing value.  Effective communication in order to understand requirements and set expectations on what an information service can realistically provide is of great importance in ensuring that both full use is made of the service and value is provided. Stakeholder management and in particular stakeholder mapping can really help looking in detail at both those who use the service and those who have an impact on what the service can provide in terms of resources.  Stakeholder mapping will help identify all of those impacting on or using the service no matter how obscure.  Understanding their perspectives, needs and goals can help identify the most effective communication methods to use.  For example communicating with a busy executive that makes key decisions on resource allocation and funding is very different from communicating with team utilizing the service. Demonstrations and presentations may be effective for some end users but not everyone has the same learning style.  Understanding these aspects amongst others in your stakeholder group will help build and deploy an effective communication strategy.

Richness of communication appears as very important in this years survey.  Whilst electronic communications can help reach wider audiences, an ability to use a richer medium can provide a greater impact and an ability to build up more effective relationships.

Discover how face to face communications and relationship building amongst other rich communication methods have helped our survey participants reach the right/different audiences successfully in our survey report published in September’s issue.

 

Business Information Review Survey part 2 – Communicating Value

Successful strategies employed for measuring and communicating value (up, down and across organisations) is the second theme our survey has uncovered this year.  It follows on from the importance of demonstrating value and is a key step in ensuring that value is positively impactful on the organization.  It is well known that in the fight for funding to maintain information surveys and continue knowledge sharing projects the information and  knowledge team must be able to show value to the organization.  In the past this has been a need to provide return on investment proof however, as we have seen from our first theme, providing value is seen as more than just a measurement of value against cost.

When working with organisations I have deployed projects that have gathered case study evidence, provided cost saving services, utlised methods such as the creation and development of expert networks to gather knowledge and expertise quickly for the right project.  Depending on the organization concerned different strategies were more successful than others.  Organisational culture, situation, management teams and past experiences using services from the information and knowledge team by executives and employees all had an impact on what would work well and what wouldn’t.  Getting people’s buy-in to projects top up and bottom down through successful communication of why the project or initiative was important was a very important success factor in ensuring the project or initiative was successful.  Communication tools used included promotional messages around the organization from ‘Q and A’ meetings to posters and email campaigns and demonstrations of value.  Methods used depended on the situation, particular initiative and required impact, how far communication needed to reach to be impactful in the organization etc.

Our survey this year examined a number of different communication methods and how they have been used successfully.  It was clear that there is a place for all communication methods but that depending on the situation, person or group to be communicated to different methods have differing success rates.  There is a clear need for electronic and traditional communication methods especially face to face communication.

Read more on this and discover the detail in the 2017 survey in September’s issue.