Abstract
Business Information Review’s 2012 Annual Award
In March 2012, Business Information Review (BIR) announced an annual award for the author of the best paper published each year. The prize is £100 and £100 worth of SAGE books or journal subscriptions for the author. We are delighted to announce that Martin White of Intranet Focus Ltd. is the winner of the 2012 award for his paper ‘Digital Workplaces: Vision and reality’, published in our December 2012 issue (BIR 2012, 29(4): 205–214).
In considering the 2012 articles the Editorial Board were looking for:
originality and breakthrough thinking;
professional relevance;
impact and stimulus to practice;
quality of writing and readability;
durability of the content.
We considered each article published in 2012 carefully, using these criteria. Martin’s article was truly a tour de force, providing an in-depth analysis of the development of the IT landscape over the last ten years and the influences that are stimulating the evolution of the digital workplace. The digital transformation of organizations and integrated access and use of internal and external information is now an exciting reality – and an opportunity for information professionals.
BIR and social media
More than 33,000 individuals visited the BIR pages on SAGE journals in 2012 viewing an average of 2.2 pages per visit. Visits came from over 170 countries. Access via hand-held devices is steadily increasing and the BIR site is now friendlier to mobile devices (see http://m.bir.sagepub.com). Traffic to the BIR blog is growing: http://birjournal.blogspot.co.uk/ as are followers of @BIRJournal. BIR is also now indexed in SCOPUS, Elsevier’s abstracting and indexing database.
The 2013 Business Information Survey – Add value or die: The fate of corporate information services
The 2012 ‘Business Information Survey – Let’s integrate – information services, content, technologies and collaboration’ (BIR 29(1): 9–28) reported a ‘good deal of positive thinking’ as information and knowledge managers sought to add value to their businesses as well as manage costs closely. Staff and content resources were stable; search and data mining capabilities were being pushed; analytical skills were being enhanced; service style was judged to be proactive and innovative; mobile provided opportunities to expand tailored information delivery; service managers were continuing to improve their position in the company’s value chain.
‘Add value or die’ is not just a title – it is a signal. The 2013 survey more than demonstrates how information professional life in the corporate sector is changing as the fortunes of organizations fluctuate. The survey also evidences how changes in personnel at the top can switch support for the information function from ‘on’ to ‘off’ overnight; and the more removed the head of the service is from the senior management and Board, the more vulnerable is the service.
This article deserves reading, close attention and re-reading. Detailed comparisons of its illustrations with the reader’s own environment will reveal areas of risk that need to be monitored and assessed – and the approaches and attitudes that can help deal with them. There are still success stories from pursuing new and imaginative ways of adding value, sometimes well outside traditional IS/IM boundaries e.g. determining how to assess profitability of different types of work in the legal sector. Interestingly social media are not playing any significant role in information delivery and there is no evidence of involvement of information professionals so far in Big Data projects. A few respondents are increasing staff – but more are losing FTEs, and these job losses are also extending to offshore and outsourced teams. However, offshoring is now well entrenched in many organizations: relationships with suppliers have evolved into partnerships; and the mix provides time for ‘home’ personnel to undertake more strategic activities.
So why does the survey alarm more than it celebrates?
many information services are being downsized;
the value of information services is being challenged even more;
serious senior management scepticism of the traditional centralized information services model;
the embedding of information functions in the business is leading to professional isolation;
the impact that offshoring of ‘less sophisticated’ research and intelligence work is having on reducing the supply of experienced people for management and senior management jobs;
the fact that senior opportunities go to non-information professionals; and finally
the first signals that the current generation of new and recent graduates see themselves as self-sufficient in information research and management.
These insights suggest that the business information world, whilst not yet in final crisis, must face up to reinvention, transformation or experience demise.
Good articles have staying power!
Editorial meetings always review the pattern of article downloads for the previous year. We will examine the 2012 figures in a couple of months’ time. For 2011 (see Table 1) the top six downloads are shown.
The top six downloads.
The articles by Byrne 2005, 22(1): 53–59 and Tredinnick 2006, 23(4): 228–234, have featured in the top downloads continually since 2010. Tredinnick updated his forecast in an interview with BIR in March 2011, 28(1): 49–52 when he highlighted the importance of Web 2.0 technologies as providing ‘opportunities for genuine creativity and collaboration including wikis, open source and app market places’. These tools would ‘demonstrate the hidden creative potential of users and add genuine value to products and services’.
Tredinnick also mentioned the advantage to be gained by opening up proprietary data sources to third parties to exploit them creatively in ways which the organization could not envisage but which would add value to its services. He warned, however, that technology cannot transform a management culture into a participatory one in which the creativity of all employees can be realized. And despite the availability of social tools within organizations, in how many has Enterprise 2.0 taken a real hold and collaboration across the enterprise been transformed? Martin White’s 2012 article suggests that this may be about to happen.
Work–life balance still preoccupies a significant proportion of the population – both female and male. Byrne provided sound advice to help individuals identify the challenges preventing individuals from achieving the balance that they want between work, home, friends, hobbies and other commitments that they either want to make or which are impossible to avoid. Creating a personal life plan to deal more effectively with the balancing act is a practical step to moving life forward. As information professionals we face twin challenges – avoiding destructive stress in our lives – and enabling our organizations and colleagues to deal sensibly with the management of information in order to avoid stress-creating overload. If we manage a team, a third set of responsibilities is added:
to shape the allocation of work and work processes to deliver what the organization needs;
to understand the skills and the drivers for each team member; and
to support their operational efficiency and their performance development so that they deliver to their maximum potential.
In this context the concept of ‘good work’ is very relevant.
A 2012 Work Foundation Report ‘Good Work, High Performance and Productivity’ 1 examined the themes underpinning the meaning of work in a post-recession economy and the view that ‘good work’ is the route to developing the ‘productive capacity of a more highly qualified workforce in an era of high unemployment and high job insecurity’. Key characteristics of good work:
Flexibility – giving employees scope to manage their time better, including the balance between life at home and at work.
Autonomy – providing a level of discretion and self-governance over how they do their job.
Employee voice – involving employees in decisions which affect them, and in how they can improve their work and the effectiveness of the organization.
Development and personal growth – offering the opportunity to learn new things and pathways to progress in their working life.
All these factors will aid individuals to achieve work–life balance and fulfilling work lives.
Coaching
Diana Nutting, BIR 29(4) and Sue Edgar, BIR 29(3) both dealt with the challenges of developing a career as a business information professional. The 2013 survey highlights the highs and lows that can beset even the smartest information manager and the most impressive information service. Developing strategic relationships with the organization in order to identify new information opportunities; securing support for these; facing downsizing as businesses look to cut costs; driving and supporting teams through significant change; facing redundancy are just some of the regular challenges in a rapidly changing business environment. No wonder then that in the past year we have noticed a number of events for information professionals dealing with the value of coaching as an aid to personal and performance development.
As professional life becomes more complex and change is a constant companion, access to an independent and objective sounding board can pay good dividends. This is where coaching can fit in. As Lesley Trenner explains in this issue of BIR, the professional coach can enable an individual to think about a problem they are facing, ‘identify and implement new ideas, get “unstuck” and make improvements’. A coach will draw on knowledge their client already has so that they think through their specific challenges for themselves with a trained, trusted, confidential, and dispassionate individual. If you are lucky enough to work in an organization that has recognized the effectiveness of coaching and will fund it, this seems a development opportunity not to be missed. If not there are many accredited coaches that you can turn to if your work situation is problematic or your career stuck.
Website assessment: A researched case study
The importance of ensuring that websites meet the needs of their users goes without saying. Yet we continue to encounter ones that do not. Ahmed and Rahman provide a useful review of the definitions of Web usability and the approaches used to measure it before reporting on an evaluation of their own University’s website. Whilst the University of Dhaka’s site is not as sophisticated as that of many other academic institutions, it is important that it meets the needs of its principal audience – the students. Ahmed and Rahman give a clear account of the methodology they developed following desk research and of the results of their survey. The research reinforces the importance of taking the user perspective when designing the content, navigation and architecture of websites and that usability studies are essential for success.
Information morality
We are delighted that Roger James will continue to write for BIR in 2013. Stimulated by the focus on ‘Big Data’, Roger reflects on the worlds of the Frequentists and of Bayesian methods with their very different approaches to the theory of probability. Frequentist methods use data to confirm certainty; Bayesian methods use data to reduce uncertainty. If we use frequentist thinking with ‘big data’ (waiting for a single piece of confirmatory – yes/no evidence) on any real world context rich information then we will by chance get what we expect (no doubt here!). This is likely to lead to false positives and erroneous conclusions. More data is not always better. Bayes tells us we must also actively consider and collect evidence for other interpretations of the information (what is reasonable!).
For information scientists there are two challenges – first, should we be developing professional skills to help our clients make ‘reasonable’ judgements and second, in our information supply do we provide information tuned to confirming what is already known (the frequentist ideas) or do we provide information which overturns convention and radically changes priors (the Bayesian philosophy)? We have a new role – that of aiding organizations to interpret data. ‘We ignore the importance of context at our peril’.
The take home message is to read ‘The theory that would not die’ (McGryne) or Nathian Silver in ‘The Signal and the Noise’.
Correction – Editorial December 2012 – The value of research to practice
Please note that there is an error in the Editorial concerning the funding of DREaM and RiLIES. The DREaM project was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). Both the RiLIES projects were funded by the LIS Research Coalition (rather than the AHRC).