Abstract
How does knowledge and information flow in and out of your organization? This question has become central to knowledge management in the digital age.
Arguably the ultimate knowledge management scenario is to manage and derive value from all communication channels within an organization. However, the proliferations of communications and information platforms over recent years – from social media tools like Twitter and LinkedIn to remote telephone call centres – have complicated this aspiration for many organizations. In many ways, we are further away from understanding and capturing the information flowing in and out of our organizations than we have ever been.
The worldwide management consultancy McKinsey calls this drive to derive value from coherent information technology architecture ‘sequencing your tech transformation’. It is one of the recommend six steps they quote to successfully digitize your business. Others include the identification of the customer journey and the steps involved in a ‘good’ customer experience, a continuous and improving development process constantly upgrading and improving – organizations need to find ‘the right 80 per cent a customer is happy with’ to acquire and develop talent further internally. You can find more in the full article, ‘Speed and Scale: Unlocking Digital Value in Customer Journeys’ – http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/operations/speed_and_scale_unlocking_digital_value_in_customer_journeys.
This development of the digital customer journey could create reduced cost, better customer satisfaction and quicker, more accurate services. This theme is explored in one of the papers in this issue entitled ‘Modelling Customer Knowledge Management’.
Digital data and information are hugely topical right now as we struggle to cope with and develop innovative value from the massive data and information banks technology has provided us with.
There are organizations that have developed software; particularly for the retail sector market to manage and integrate data and information from the many communication channels we have, storing it all in the one place. Still obtaining value from these ‘knowledge’ systems is not as straightforward as gathering and storing information. Properly categorized information with appropriate information architecture and taxonomy structures are what turns this mass of information into valuable reusable knowledge. These systems then need care and attention, ensuring that the structures stay fit for purpose will ensure that these systems still perform and give an organization a competitive edge.
Successful social media adoption and the added value that comes from it is still very much a Holy Grail concept in many organizations, as security concerns can stifle creativity and interaction with the end customer or even stop it completely. This is something that is analysed and explored further in another of our articles – Social Media Adoption. The golden rule, however, is a system and its information is only as good as those that use it – that is, those that add and maintain information as well as those that search, query and use that information. If the information is old, incorrect, invalid or unsuitable then it is not fit for purpose for the audience who need it. Eventually people will stop using the system, and it and the value it holds will become outdated and obsolete. Knowledge management particularly can be greatly enhanced by technology through facilitation of new people to people connections, but ultimately it is still very much about the people.
The article examining the information and search challenges of the recruitment industry written by Tony Russell-Rose and Jon Chamberlin goes into some interesting detail on searching, acquiring and managing the information needed for recruitment professionals to make successful matches, but this only happens when combined with people to people connections. In a study completed jointly by Business 360 and TFPL in 2013 entitled, ‘The Rise of Professional Networks as a Resource’, industry leaders and senior information professionals across all sectors were interviewed to discover their usage of and opinions on the value of electronic and people to people networks. An interesting point that came out was that although the usage of electronic networks might assist in making connections, in terms of resourcing talent, extra face-to-face connectivity was needed. This face-to-face contact was a way to validate whether a person was indeed suitable for a role within an organization. For example, a recruiter/resourcer in an organization may find people on an electronic network, but someone who knew both the person and the resourcer/recruiter and had met them previously would need to vouch for them. This validation gave a person hiring trust in the results of a candidate shortlist.
Even with all of this technology to assist us, there is still something fundamental about person-to-person contact. Information and knowledge systems may be a way to bring different information and knowledge sets together for recruitment professionals but this is just part of a good recruiter’s toolbox.
BIR’s Best Paper Prize 2015
We are pleased to announce that the winner of the best paper prize for 2015 is Jacqueline Beattie, Content Management Division Lead and Thérèse Ahern, Technical Librarian - Neftex Exploration Insights, Landmark Software and Services a division of Halliburton. The paper was consistently the most highly scored paper in the review process under took by me, Luke and the Board. We found that its highly practical approach highlighting the real benefits of embedding information and content management skills and services into business processes and workflows worked well and enabled clear transferable lessons to be taken away and re-used. An excellent, well written paper.
The paper which appeared in the September 2015 issue and is entitled Embedding library and information management techniques into business processes: A case study, is available for free download for a limited time.
Overview of the issue
With this issue we welcome Denise Carter to the Business Information Review team. Denise has taken over the research of our annual survey of information and knowledge leaders and has provided us with some interesting trends and highlights to consider for the year ahead. In addition to the annual survey, we explore essential factors to consider for organizations to adopt social media successfully, see how knowledge management can be applied to enhancing service and product provision meeting customer needs better and becoming better connected with the end customer and see what challenges recruitment professionals face in terms of search and information management.
Business Information Survey 2016
This issue sees the publication of the 26th Annual Business Information Survey. First appearing in July 1991, the survey is the longest running continuous systematic overview of the delivery and use of business information services and sources in the UK and worldwide. In its first incarnation as the then Business Information Resources Survey, it aimed ‘to provide systematic planning data on the use of business information resources in UK libraries and information centres’ (Smith, 1992). For the first few years, the survey migrated around the publishing year a little, but for the past 15 years or so it has appeared every March. Over the years, much changed both in the context of business information work and in the focus and methodology of the survey. The dropping of ‘resources’ from the title in 2007 perhaps reflects some of these changes. The move from a questionnaire-based approach to interview methodologies a year later again maps out the changing nature of the business information world, a shift in priorities and perhaps a shift in the size and nature of the profession.
The continuous nature of the annual Business Information Survey provides an unparalleled insight into the changing nature of commercial information work, and the ebbs and flows of technological and cultural change washing over the profession during the last quarter century. The survey has mapped out the rising influence of digital resources in information work through the 1990s, the emergence of the World Wide Web as the dominant delivery platform. The survey has also mapped out the changing trends in the information profession, including the emergence of knowledge management, intranets, extranets, communities of practice and social media. Since 2002, the organization, implementation and delivery of the survey have relied on the dedication and professional insight of Allan Foster, originally in collaboration with Pam Foster but for the last nine years as sole researcher. This by itself represents an outstanding contribution by Allan to the business information sector and to this journal.
This year the survey has passed on to new hands. Denise Carter has undertaken what we hope will be the first of many Annual Business Information Surveys. This year’s survey follows the now traditional methodology established by Allan over the past decade or so. Denise has interviewed information leaders from UK, Europe and US in a wide range of sectors including financial, legal, pharma, science and telecoms. The data gathered has illustrated that for most, stability, particularly financial stability is of the utmost importance. Trends include a focus on social media, linked data and big data to name a few. Internal training is also very popular with a rise in the development of ‘academies’ and ‘universities’. Denise also takes a look at what skills are most important and how the vendor market is operating.
We are delighted to be contributing with the publication of the survey this year to an unparalleled body of research into changing trends within the business information profession and to be continuing the established tradition of annual surveys. Essential reading for the year ahead.
Social Business Adoption: An empirical analysis
Jacob Wood, Assistant Professor of International Trade at Chungnam National University, South Korea, looks at the perceptions of social media usage by organizations and how that can affect their take up and adoption. The article focuses on organizations from South Korea and New Zealand and takes an analytical look at both the benefits and risks of using social media for organizations in order to examine motivations for and effectiveness of use. Using technology adoption theory, they identified several factors by which to measure perceived benefits and barriers to social media usage.
Searching for Talent – Information retrieval challenges for recruitment professionals – Tony Russell-Rose, UXLabs
Tony and his co-author Jon Chamberlin take a look at the challenges faced by recruitment professionals in searching for and sourcing suitable candidates. In particular, they look at the information challenges faced in categorizing and identification of keywords to find candidates to match their skills with the most suitable vacancies. They have interviewed recruitment professionals who have provided insights into information seeking behaviour and information search techniques. The article looks at the complex Boolean searches that are developed, the challenges in using and maintaining them and the types of functionality recruitment professionals’ value within systems. The article concludes with a discussion around the implications for information systems development and a balance that needs to be created between automated information retrieval and the knowledge and expertise contained within the individual professional recruiter on what search terms work best.
Modeling Customer Knowledge Management to make Value Co-Creation
In this article, Ali Gohary and Bahman Hamzelu, Department of Business Management, Qazvin Branch, Islamic Azad University, Qazvin, Iran, review the importance of managing the knowledge of customers in order to anticipate customer wants and needs so as to gain or maintain competitive advantage. They consider how customer knowledge management, knowledge management applied to customer relationship management is highly effective in the development of new products and services but is not in fact well recognized within organizations.
The article reviews the processes that need to be considered as well as exploring conceptual models to gain the most from customer knowledge management. They also explore ‘mass public education’ within customer knowledge management to enhance and develop customer interaction in the service and product development process.
Perspectives
Martin White returns with his Perspectives column. His article reviews papers very topical to this month’s issue and this time looks at the effects of language on search and search behaviour. He considers the use of both modern and colloquial languages and how that affects search results.
Other papers he reviews are the usage of mobile data services for accessing information both generally and also through library services. The need for techniques to develop information sharing between teams working in critical environments and the effects of trust in search results on the assessment of valid results.
Initiatives
Allan Foster brings us an interesting review in his regular Initiatives paper. He starts with a look at the rise of digital partnerships, why they are increasing in popularity and why they are important. He reviews pieces of research, one from EIU and one from IDC. The research articles provide some interesting insights including some very specific future predictions on worldwide digital transformation.
He also covers the value of information, how is it valued, how it is realized and provides some interesting insights from the PwC report in this area. Whilst valuing information is a bit hit-and–miss, it appears that organizations are investing in realizing value, specifically generating revenue from their data. Allan reviews an EIU report in this area. There are other interesting insights from further reviews covering key future trends that could change the information industry, strong growth anticipated for the market research industry and growth of the big data technology and services sector to name a few.
Additions to the Editorial Board
We would like to take this opportunity to welcome Denise Carter of Dcision Consult and Lynn Strand of Outside Knowledge. Denise has a background in competitive intelligence and knowledge management and is based in Switzerland. Lynn has a research and market intelligence background and is based in the US. We are very pleased that Denise and Lynn have joined the board and are helping us widen our global perspective.