I was fortunate to be able to speak at this year’s SLA conference…
The SLA - Special Librarians Association - is a professional organization representing the interests of information specialists around the world. These professionals, known as “Special Librarians”, are:
…information resource experts who collect, analyze, evaluate, package, and disseminate information to facilitate accurate decision-making in corporate, academic, and government settings.
I had the chance to share my views on what the future of competitive intelligence may look like, and the technology and tools that would be needed to support it. Competitive Intelligence (CI) is an fast growing component of corporate and academic research. When done well, it can offer an organization significant strategic advantages. When done poorly, an organization can find itself off balance in the marketplace, wasting resources, focus and time by being totally reactive.
My talk centered on the critical attributes of a modern CI workflow. I summarized them into four key trends:
Information lives in many places - the web; professional services; email; corporate file servers; your own desktop. You need to use a single tool to discover content across all of them. There is no way to effectively manage discrete content silos if you are forced to used a set of disconnected tools, profiles, filters, and taxonomies.
Information discovery needs to center around concepts and context. Once that is established, filtering by more traditional means becomes viable. The concepts and context I refer to here need to be personal. You need to be able to classify and discover content from your own perspective, and organize it into a structure that makes sense for you and your business. “One size fits all” taxonomies don’t cut it anymore - you simply end up seeing the world the same way as everyone else.
Discovery isn’t just about raw information - it’s also about trends. You need to be able to see changes to information over time, and explore the relationships various pieces of information have with each other. Finding trends provides focus and unique insight, and is a key component to maximizing the value of the information assets at your disposal. This is especially true when looking at trends around custom themes or topics that reflect your own interests and perspective.
Establishing a culture of collaboration and information sharing is critical for any modern organization. It needs to exist both internally and externally (with clients and partners). It needs to be more than just a slogan or ideal. It requires an investment in both tools and training. And it also demands a decentralized approach - people need to be able to “self organize” around the work they do and the materials they share to do it. Some of the most timely and insightful information an organization has sits in peoples heads. Giving them a better way than email to share it, discuss it, and preserve it as a discoverable information asset will have a considerable payback.
While this talk was targeted at Competitive Intelligence librarians, the core points I made really apply to any organization that depends on information flow to conduct their business. And these days, that probably covers most of them.
It was clear from the feedback I got after the talk that this conceptual approach resonated.
The need is there for a new set of tools…
I hope to be putting a video of this presentation up on the site a little later. (Now available at The DIGITALedge.TV) Semantic analysis and automated understanding are at the heart of what we do at InfoNgen, and are areas I am passionate about.
They represent the future of the information search and discovery world…
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