The PwC Canada Knowledge Management Group is recruiting for a Manager on our Knowledge Management Operations team. To read the role description and apply online, please go to: https://www.pwcrecruiting.com/ifs/hr/RMS_External.nsf/JobPosting/BD85F8A95721635E8525771200460522?openDocument.

Campus Overload – Got a research paper to write? Friend a librarian.

Spring break is over. April is here. Those end-of-the-semester deadlines are not quite as distant as you think. And chances are your to-do list includes at least one research paper.

Ah, college research papers — it takes most students all four years to figure out how to complete them quickly and accurately (especially through hang-overs or Red Bull jitters).

Your secret weapon? The college reference librarian.

No, seriously. And here are some reasons why:

They can help get you started, even if you don’t understand your topic.

As soon as you get a research paper assignment, stop by your library’s reference desk and ask for help, says Barbara Fister, academic librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College in Saint Peter, Minn. “The reference desk is an underutilized site for one-on-one individualized help,” she said. “And if you’re not on campus, chances are there’s a chat reference.”

Understanding the assignment is half the battle, says Beth Mark, instruction coordinator at the Murray Library at Messiah College in Grantham, Penn. “We often work with students to either narrow the research topic or broaden it,” she says. “A topic that is too narrow won’t produce the results needed for the student and a topic that is too broad oftentimes overwhelms the student with thousands of results.”

They are Google experts.

Let’s get this straight: Most reference librarians do not hate Google. They just get frustrated when students think a #1 hit means a reliable source.

And if used correctly, search engines like Google can be beneficial, said Priscilla Atkins, library head of reference and instruction at Hope College in Holland, Mich. Plus, Google offers more advanced search options, like Google Scholar and Google Books. Reference librarians can show students how to do that.

“Googling is not a cause for dismay,” she says. “I don’t know anyone who doesn’t use Google; but in 2010, it’s still the case that reference books and scholarly articles provide the most authoritative information on most topics.”

But when Googling, students need to take a hard look at the source of their information.

“Think about your sources being your expert witnesses: if you were in court and your expert witness showed up in jeans and flip-flops… do you think the jury would be impressed?” Fister said. “Pick your expert witnesses with an eye on not just what they say, but what impression they’ll make on your audience.”

But don’t think that being tech savvy alone makes you a good researcher, cautions Donna Miller, a librarian at Lebanon Valley College in Annville, Penn.
“A cook can be wonderfully adept with the gadgets found in today’s kitchens, but nevertheless whip up dreadfully tasting meals,” says Miller. “It’s very easy to conduct awful information searches, yet be quite proficient with technology.”

They have access to information you didn’t even know existed.

Most college libraries give students access to online tutorials, online research guides, electronic databases and electronic journal subscriptions. Susan McClintock, head of reference at Meredith College in Raleigh, N.C., said a librarian can help you figure out which ones to use.

“We want them to understand that research is like being a detective. Just looking is not enough,” she says. “To solve the case you need to look in the best places for the clues. Then you need to analyze the results to make sure you have solved the case.”

I think he’s right. A few excerpts:

Q: Can there be too many of these codified pieces–too much information?

Yes, there can be too much information in the sense that there’s too much to absorb, but you can never have too much knowledge. That’s one of the differences between information and knowledge. Who would ever say they have too much knowledge of something? Would you want to go to a doctor who says, “I know too much about your illness?” You want people who help us in our lives–doctors, politicians, economists–to have a lot of knowledge.

Q: So, where does that leave information professionals? The common perception is that they bring information into the organization and it gets passed up the chain to the top, and along the way it gets filtered and distilled into knowledge.

I would disagree with the chain scenario–I don’t think that’s an accurate description of what happens. I think people at the top of organizations make their decisions based on all sorts of things, but information wouldn’t be at the head of the list. I think they make decisions based on peer knowledge–asking their bankers, their lawyers, their peer executives within the firm. They may read some things, perhaps an article or report, but generally, by the time something’s in print, they already know it. It’s old news. There isn’t that much in print that’s new for business executives.

That’s why librarians don’t have the–what’s the right word here?–the position, the respect, the authority that maybe they think they might, because what they’re dealing with is stuff that’s not absolutely essential to the running of the firm. If it was, it would make a big difference.

Q: It sounds like you’re saying that information professionals need to move away from procuring and maintaining content.

I coined a phrase years ago that I think is useful here: If you have a dollar to spend on either information or knowledge, spend it on connection rather than capture. That’s really an important slogan. You’re much better off connecting people, helping them find one another, than on capturing material. I’m not talking here about university libraries or public libraries–if you run the library at Harvard, you want to capture everything in different forms. I’m talking about organizations.

Q: So, 10 years from now, will we still be talking about information workers and information societies?

It already sounds old hat. Yes, there was a time when information was a hot topic, and it was very exciting, but the costs kept dropping. No one foresaw everybody having personal computers; no one foresaw Google. Information transactions have become ubiquitous, transparent, and almost cost-free. No one predicted this.

And, to be honest, a lot of the information hype was generated by vendors with a commercial aim. I remember when everyone was saying that if you get the right information to the right person at the right time, it will give an organization a tremendous advantage. That’s just not true. I had an economist model that for me, and it would give them some advantage, but there’s just not enough information out there to make a big difference. The real advantage lies in using knowledge better and in innovating. That’s where information professionals should focus their efforts.

The entire interview is available online at “You Can Never Have Too Much Knowledge“, SLA Information Outlook, December 2009.

The author of a new book talks about the secret lives of America’s favorite — and endangered — disciplinarians.

Behold the stereotypical librarian, with her cat’s-eye glasses, bun and pantyhose — a creature whose desexualized persona and desire for us to be quiet has fueled generations of wild sexual fantasies. But there’s bad news for those of you with a shushing fetish; as Marilyn Johnson explains in “This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All,” the uptight librarian is a species that’s rapidly approaching extinction.

A new generation of young, hip and occasionally tattooed librarians is driving them out. They call themselves guybrarians, cybrarians and “information specialists,” and they blog at sites like The Free Range Librarian and The Lipstick Librarian. They can be found in droves on Second Life, but also outside the Republican National Convention, dodging tear gas canisters and tweeting the location of the police.

Johnson, a former staff writer for Life magazine, and author of “The Dead Beat,” a book about the fascinating world of obituary writing, delights in refuting our assumptions about librarians, while making a rock-solid case for their indispensability at a time when library systems are losing an average of 50 librarians per year. Who else is going to help us formulate the questions Google doesn’t understand, or show non-English speakers how to apply for jobs online, or sympathize with your need to research the ancient origins of cockfighting? Librarians, Johnson argues, are one of our most underappreciated natural resources.

Read the entire review at Salon.com.

“To ask why we need libraries at all, when there is so much information available elsewhere, is about as sensible as asking if roadmaps are necessary now that there are so very many roads.”

- Jon Bing, Professor of Information Technology Law, University of Oslo, Norway

We give a lot of talks and presentations about the ways and places companies and their employees learn the fastest. We call these learning environments creation spaces — places where individuals and teams interact and collaborate within a broader learning ecology so that performance accelerates.

During these discussions, it’s inevitable that somebody raises their hand. “Wait a minute,” they say, “isn’t this just knowledge management all over again?”

It’s an understandable concern. Knowledge management, after all, was probably the hottest topic in management in the 1990s. “If only our company knew what our company knows” was the mantra in those days. With knowledge becoming the most important factor of production, surely competitive success awaited those companies that could effectively manage what their employees knew.

But we all know by now that despite massive investments and a lot of highly motivated people knowledge management in some instances didn’t yield all the benefits it could have. The best KM systems succeeded at capturing and institutionalizing the knowledge of the firm. But for the most part the repositories and directories remained fragmentary and the resources didn’t get used. The folks with the knowledge were often reluctant to put what they knew into the database. The folks seeking the knowledge often had trouble finding what they needed.

Moreover, in their quest to capture what the firm already knows, most knowledge managers lost sight of the fact that the real value is in creating new knowledge, rather than simply “managing” existing knowledge. In this fast moving world, what we know — our “stocks” of knowledge — depreciate faster than they used to. So we’ve got to keep creating new knowledge in order to keep pace.

Most of us, as individuals, know this. That’s why we’re not keen to spend time entering our latest document into a knowledge management system. We know we’re better off engaging in the interactions and collaborations that create new knowledge about how to get things done.

In these circumstances, the last thing the world needs is another knowledge management scheme focusing on capturing knowledge that already exists. What we need are new approaches to creating knowledge, ones that take advantage of the new digital infrastructure’s ability to lower the interaction costs among us all — ones that mobilize big, diverse groups of participants to innovate and create new value.

We’ve found in our research into environments like World of Warcraft (WoW) that new knowledge comes into being when people who share passions for a given endeavor interact and collaborate around difficult performance challenges. Most long-time gamers, for instance, figured it would be months before anybody made it all the way through the many difficult performance “levels” involved in The Burning Crusade, the World of Warcraft extension released in 2007. But a French player named Gullerbone did so little more than 28 hours after the extension was released. His accomplishment made headlines in the gamer world.

Gullerbone succeeded by taking advantage of the tools and resources available to him (and his “guild” of teammates) in the vast creation space that has emerged within and around World of Warcraft. Creation spaces emerge from a careful recipe of participants, interactions, and environments blended by insightful designers. And they succeed where knowledge management fails.

Why? Because these creation spaces, heavily relying on shared network platforms, provide tools and forums for knowledge creation while at the same time capturing the discussion, analysis, and actions in ways that make it easier to share across a broader range of participants. Soon after Gullerbone and his guild figured out how to get through the new performance levels of the Burning Crusade, the details about how they did it soon became widely available in the social media “knowledge economy” surrounding the game — videos, blogs, wikis, etc.

This focus on knowledge creation shifts the motivations of participants. Knowledge management systems desperately try to persuade participants to invest time and effort to contribute existing knowledge with the vague and long-term promise that they themselves might eventually derive value from the contributions of others. In contrast, creation spaces focus on providing immediate value to participants in terms of helping them tackle difficult performance challenges while at the same time reducing the effort required to capture and disseminate the knowledge created.

Creation spaces have the potential to generate increasing returns — the more participants that join, the faster new knowledge gets created and the more rapidly performance improves. They bring into play network effects in the generation of new knowledge. In contrast, traditional knowledge management systems are inherently diminishing returns propositions. Since existing knowledge is by definition limited, it requires more and more effort to squeeze the next increment of performance improvement as existing knowledge gets more broadly distributed.

Here’s another important contrast between creation spaces and conventional knowledge management systems. Knowledge management traditionally has focused on capturing knowledge that already exists within the firm — its systems rarely extend beyond the boundaries of the enterprise. Creation spaces instead focus on mobilizing and focusing participants across all institutional boundaries. Sure, there are lots of smart people within your enterprise, but imagine the power of connecting with and engaging a more diverse collection of smart people beyond your enterprise. That is another source of the increasing returns in creation spaces — participation is not limited by the boundaries of the enterprise.

What is your assessment of the limitations of traditional knowledge management systems? What are the major barriers that prevent them from delivering even more value to the firm? What issues need to be overcome to gain wider adoption of creation spaces as an alternative means of creating and capturing knowledge?

How secure is our civilization’s accumulated knowledge?

It is a question that, in a fundamental sense, transcends many life-and-death concerns (threats of sickness, natural disaster, or military invasion) that prompt us collectively to spend fortunes on insurance, health care, and weaponry. We know that we each individually will die, though we are willing to go to great lengths to delay the event as long as possible. But we have an overarching shared interest that the world of ideas will go on without us: that our descendants will continue to compose music, invent tools, refine scientific knowledge, and write histories, extending into the indefinite future the cumulative, constantly evolving universe of signs, symbols, and skills that have enriched our lives. Cultural death—the passing of the wisdom, artistic creations, and practical knowledge of an entire people, painstakingly built up over many generations—is a loss almost too wrenching to contemplate….

Read the full article at Our Evanescent Culture and the Awesome Duty of Librarians.

Although this case study describes a legal environment, the learning can be applied to any environment.

Life before the FindIt! Portal:

• thousands of structured and unstructured documents
• no centralized enterprise search
• no metadata

Step 1: Defining the Search Scopes – created four basic scopes: people, precedents and research, firm information, client matters

Step 2: Defining Search Requirements – case sensitivity, spelling, pluralization, word stemming, language

Step 3: Define Metadata Standard, including the controlled vocabulary

Step 4: Conduct Content Inventory – determine anything restricted or sensitive

Step 5: Metadata training for content owners – consistent naming conventions, synonyms, categories (also done for French content). Used Resource Description Framework (RDF) as a tagging framework. Developed a metadata tagging tool to add metadata to documents.

Step 6: Content Sources:

Web pages (ASP files) were indexed too. The website was built in frames, which presented challenges for indexing. Similar issues for Javascript links.

Internal blogs using Moveable Type and WordPress were also crawled and added to the index.

Structured data included InMagic Content Server, people directory (SQL).

Used crawl rules to include or keep out particular content and content types.

Best Bets were created based on frequently requested content, common tasks, stats on content usage, and existing “can’t find it” information.

Step 7: Search Interface and Results Display:

• Customized search display.
• Included link for user feedback and problems.
• Used a lot of out-of-the-box functionality, such as “did you mean” and “still can’t find it?”.

Step 8: Search Usability Testing – compare against actual user behaviour.

Having a project sponsor at a senior level in the firm is crucial.

Current Work: content migration into SharePoint; reviewing metadata fields.

Future Work: Faceted navigation, improved search.

How do we break down silos, and improve conversations across and through them?

Top-down communication is working …  but horizontal communication is poor. A chat over a beer (or around the water cooler) is often not enough. The weaknesses continue to be exposed with the rise of Web 2.0.

How do we build on the knowledge and solutions we already have? The ability to take advantage of current ideas and discoveries and use them in new circumstances. At the same time, we need to avoid reinventing the wheel.

Indexing tools are not enough – technology is not the whole solution. Google is not the whole answer.  We are not faced with an information discovery problem, because indexing can solve that. Search results are abundant.

It’s not necessarily only an knowledge sharing problems; centralized knowledge bases are not the whole solution, either. Centralizing knowledge via knowledge extraction is not the whole answer.

The issue is how to bridge the gap between industries and the differing terminology. Ideally we want to find the right people to talk to, where the meeting of minds produces new ideas and discoveries.

We need to talk about sharing awareness before we share knowledge. We need to know where to look. Everything that we do, we think what we’re doing is unique. We need more peripheral awareness of what else is happening in the organization.

How to Share Awareness?

Search Engine best bets: www.steptwo.com.au/papers/cmb_bestbets

• People want knowledge at the point of need – this is tremendously difficult. Can use best bets to promote and share related knowledge in best bets search results.

Communities of Practice – see Cultivating Communities of Practice by Etienne Wenger

Information discovery can be aided by bringing people together to communicate and share best practices that can be used and built upon.

Using RSS to support peer-to-peer communication  – see www.steptwo.com.au/papers/kmc_rss.

It’s not about the blog – it’s about the communicator.

Communication must be recognized as a business problem, not an information discovery or a knowledge management  solution.  We need a business solution, not a technology solution. Start small, and focus on the people.

When people think of search, they think of Google; simple, give me what I’m looking for now.

The problem with information discovery and enterprise search is much more complex than that. We have many different systems and repositories that need to be accessed.

The idea is that you should be able to find information no matter where it is, and to find information that you don’t know is there. This often requires a discovery process that is not very direct. It’s not that simple; it’s much more complex than “I’m feeling lucky”.

CMS Watch uses a vendor risk profile to evaluate the wide range of tools out there. For each solution provider, Vendor Evolution is measured against Product Development.

Most vendors who historically called themselves search companies are now calling themselves Information Access Platforms – they are trying to integrate with other systems in their clients’ organization. While the marketing message has changed, the core focus remains the same.

Theresa cautions people to be wary of the marketing message – but keep in mind the ultimate window to knowledge does not yet exist. They don’t have access to every repository from one place – yet.

Security is one of the most significant limitations of these systems – who has permission to view what, at the document and repository levels. Vendors are focused on addressing this issue.

How vendors deal with structured and unstructured content is also an important consideration.

Most solutions require a significant amount of tweaking and specialization to make them work the way you need them too.

Non-textual assets present a particular challenge – how do you index and search these assets (maps, images, audio, video, maps, etc.) Search tools have a hard time figuring out how to describe these assets. Metadata is part of the solution; in some cases, OCR and speech-to-text may be used.

Rights management for rich media is also an issue – how to manage the metadata for rights and resuse of these assets.

Auto-categorization is also a trend — using software to index content automatically. These tools are useful but not fool proof (differentiate a picture of Tiger Woods vs. a picture of a tiger in the woods).  It takes time and training, and search vendors continue to develop the technology to be more contextual.

Vendors are integrating standards such as Dublin Core metadata to aid in categorizing information.

User Interface Trends:

Vendors such as Oracle have made their search results resemble Google’s; there was a study that indicated that if your results look like Google, they will trust it more.

Also introducing filters and facets to narrow down the results. The facets must be customized for them to be effective.

Another trend is saving searches over time, so that renewed results are displayed in saved searches.

Coveo produces results that look like Google, but also include other topics the result falls under. Filters are also listed on the left to refine the results.

Theresa’s favourite search results pages is Exalead, which provides a dashboard of results.

Funnelback, a vendor from Australia, provides mashups with other apps such as Google Maps.

Social Search is another trend; Vivisimo is doing the most with social search, but Theresa isn’t sure how many people are using it. The hit list provides you not only with rated search results, but a list of people profiles who may know more about how to find the answer.

Search and Business Intelligence where data is sliced and diced to enable analysis. Tends to be used with structured information such as sales data to help the organization decide what to do next.

Reporting and analytics which provides a dashboard that describes how people are using the search engine.  This information will help you adjust your taxonomy and metadata to improve the search performance. Also provides info when searches are occuring.

Tuning field ratings allows search administrators tweak how attributes and variables are weighted to improve the relevance of the search results.

The importance of Scenarios: you must understand what situation you’re in to determine which tool(s) will work best for you. Structures vs. unstructured information, data, text, multimedia; types of employees, from knowledge workers to informed transaction processors.

Most vendors do not do well in more than 3 areas. Get customer referals and case studies. Try before you buy via 30-day demos that can be tested in your own environment. Make sure the vendor you choose has done work in your industry, with organizations with similar information types, user types, and challenges.