Category Archives: Business Information Review

BIR call for editorial board members

BIR is seeking members to join its  Editorial Board, alongside the Co-Editors of the journal. Responsibilities of the Editorial Board include:

Encouraging submissions: Encouraging quality submissions to Business Information Review helps the journal to grow in quality and reputation. As the journal is substantially based on commissioned content, an active member of the board would proactively speak to colleagues within their networks and regions to commission quality content for the journal. Please consider submitting a paper yourself to the Journal and actively encourage those you work with to

Suggesting special issues, ‘hot topics’ and review articles: Hot topics and/or review/special issues can attract more readers and citations to the Journal. If you spot any trends or areas that might help raise the profile or benefit Business Information Review please let the editors know your suggestions or submit  your own for consideration. If you know of any colleagues best suited to a ‘hot topic’ or theme, please reach out to them to see if they would be interested in participating or curating a special issue.

Encouraging usage of the Journal: Encouraging your faculty, students and other professionals to use the Journal helps librarians to decide to retain/subscribe to the Journal at your

Encouraging your institution to subscribe to the Journal: If based at an institution and it does not already subscribe, please recommend Business Information Review to your Subscriptions ensure the Journal’s commercial success and increased circulation means increased usage and citations.

Participating in board meetings: By attending board meetings we can work together to develop the Journal. Your attendance at each meeting, feedback and experience as an editorial board member are central to informing decisions about the future of the Journal. If you cannot attend please send your feedback to the Editors or

Promoting the Journal at conferences: If you are attending any conferences and would like to take copies of the Journal, or promotional business cards, please contact the Publisher and they can arrange for these to be sent to Networking with colleagues and those in similar research and professional fields about the journal is imperative to the development and proliferation of Business Information Review.

Applications are welcome from well-networked practitioners and academics in the field of information provision and management. Those interested in submitting an application should send an up-to-date CV with a statement outlining their reasons for wanting to join the Editorial Board. Being a member entitles you to a gratis online subscription to the Journal.

All enquiries, expressions of interest and applications should be directed via email to:

Claire Laybats and Luke Tredinnick, Co-Editors

Email: businessinformationreviewj@gmail.com

BIR September Issue

Our latest issue sees the publication of the 2019 Business Information Review Annual Survey. The BIR Annual Survey is the worlds’ longest running research into trends within the business information sector. Since 1991, it has provided an invaluable guide to emerging issues, changing technologies and professional values. The 2019 survey is the fourth written and researched by Denise Carter of DCision Consult. Some of the key themes that have emerged in this year’s survey include the following.

  1. The challenges of new and emerging tools and technologies and ensuring organizations have the right skills to manage these effectively.
  2. The potential for Information Professionals to become the organizational strategic advisor for data and information across the whole organization.
  3. Whether Information Professionals still view themselves as subservient in organizational relationships, and whether they feel their role is to answer queries reactively or to proactively provide data that provoke new discussions and questions.
  4. The integrity and ethics of data: where data come from, how it is manipulated and whether good ethical standards in data management will become fundamental in the future.
  5. The increasing importance of information literacy.

The BIR Annual Survey has now been running for 29 years. From its inception, it was recognized that the survey might reveal useful longitudinal data about trends and changes in the profession. However, aside from a brief review of the first 10 years published in 2000, no comprehensive review of the surveys has taken place. The second paper in this issue addresses this gap. The first of a two-part review of 29 years of the annual survey, it explores in particular the way in which technological change has been tracked by the research over time, and what this reveals about the role of emerging technology in the profession. The second part of this review will be published in the December issue.

Our third paper, this issue was written by Eddie Collins and Delphine Phillips of Integreon. Entitled ‘Automation – It Does Involve People’ the paper explores the benefits of Robotic Process Automation – software that can be used to mimic repetitive administrative tasks that traditionally require human intervention, such as data transfer. The final paper is entitled ‘The Impact of Business Intelligence Through Knowledge Management’ and was written by Wassila Bouaoula, Farid Belgoum, Arifusalam Shaikh, Mohammed Taleb-Berrouane and Carlos Bazan. The paper explores the uses of Business Intelligence tools in Knowledge Management.

Best Paper Prize 2018

We’re pleased in this issue to announce the winner of the Business Information Review Best Paper Prize 2018. The prize is awarded to the research or professional paper judged by the editorial board and editors as the most successful, interesting or relevant over the course of the preceding year. A number of papers stood-out over the course of the year, including Mark West and Delphine Philips’s ‘Exploring the future of Business Information Services in the financial sector’ published in March, 2018, and Hal Kirkwood’s ‘The current state of artificial intelligence and the information profession’ published in March, 2018. However, the 2018 Best Paper Prize has been awarded to Andrew Lambe, Fiona Anthoney and Jo Shaw’s paper ‘One Door Closes, Another Opens: Surviving and Thriving Through Organizational Restructure by Ensuring Knowledge Continuity’ published in December, 2018.

The paper addresses the experience knowledge continuity and organizational memory during NHS England’s organizational restructuring in 2015. It recounts the approach taken by the Knowledge and Intelligence team of the Sustainable Improvement team at securing organizational knowledge following the Smith Review of Improvement and Leadership Development in the National Health Service and its consequences, charting the stages in the migration of content, the development of new retrieval tools and the development of a new knowledge service. It provides an interesting and highly relevant case study, and we are very happy to award it the BIR Best Paper Prize 2018.

BIR Annual Survey – Key Themes 2 : The information professional as a strategic advisor

Another of the key themes from this years’ BIR annual survey brings up the increasingly important aspect of the information managers role as strategic advisor to the organisation. We have all seen that information and mis-information can have a huge impact on an organisation’s operations and strategy, now with the increasing need to gain value from data and bring together internal and external data and information everything just got a lot more complex.

We have long talked about the importance of the information professional to the organisation but in this perfect storm of information and data it’s time to take those ideas, skills and knowledge to the next level.

Corporate strategy is key and core to the organisation but what is that strategy built on? Market data, competitive intelligence, internal research and development data, financial information and news to name just a few.  The information team with their wealth of experience, knowledge and skills in research, information management, information and data literacy are more than qualified to play an important role in ensuring that the right information (read reliable, trusted and validated) is available to those developing and planning the corporate strategy and that that information is kept up to date and relevant to help evolve the strategy as needed.

Technology is a closely linked partner in effective information management and information professionals are increasingly required to have skills and knowledge to assess what technology and automation services are appropriate for their departments to operate in increasingly demanding environments. A number of organisations I have spoken with recently are considering intelligence tools or add ons to existing systems to help optimise their workload ensuring that they can concentrate on providing the best value add service to the organisation.

So with advising on and management of information sources and licensing, introduction of data content management, challenges around gaining benefits from an increasingly vast source of unstructured content and considering what technology and when to implement it to enhance effective information management I think it is fair to say that information professionals can indeed be considered as strategic advisors to the organisation.  The challenge sometimes is communicating the importance of the information professionals skills and knowledge to executive leadership so that they also see information professionals as a key strategic advisor to support and facilitate their objectives and goals for the future.

Find out more about what our respondents thought on this in the annual BIR survey published in September.

BIR Annual Survey key themes 1: the challenges of new tools and technologies

The Business Information Review Annual Survey (BIR) is the world’s longest running survey of trends in Information and Knowledge Management within the commercial sector. Now in its twenty-ninth year, for almost three decades the survey has provided invaluable insight into the ways in which professional practice and the commercial context has changed. This year’s survey is due for publication in the September issue of Business Information Review and was produced again by Denise Carter of DCision Consult. It is proving to be one of the most interesting and important we have published.

Each year in the run-up to the publication of the survey, we pick-out a handful of key themes for discussion in the BIR Blog. The information and knowledge management profession has been caught on the cusp of a perpetual technological revolution that has fundamentally changed how information work is done. These changes are reflected the first of our key themes from the 2019 BIR Annual Survey: the challenges of adapting to new tools and technologies, and the emerging skills required to manage these effectively.

In 1991 when the first Annual Survey was published, adapting to technological change meant incorporating online financial and news databases (such as ICC British Company Financial Datasheets and Reuter Textline) and CD ROM services (such as FAME and Kompass). At that time only 30% of respondents were using any CD ROM services, and the numbers using online databases were dwarfed by those using traditional resources. Although information management in the commercial sector had been exploiting online resources for over a decade by 1991, it was still heavily dependent on traditional paper-based resources. The explosion of digital information since the early nineties has fundamentally changed the ways in which information work is done, diversifying the very ideas of source and resource, and increasingly requiting critical and analytical skills in the evaluation of information. The BIR Annual Survey has borne witness to these changes, and over the past five years we have also tracked the impact of emerging technology on information work, exploring fake news and post-truth, and emerging technologies such as Virtual Reality and blockchains.

The challenge of adapting to new tools and technologies emerges as a strong theme in this year’s survey, particularly in relationship to emerging Artificial Intelligence tools. But the survey also reveals how technological change is demanding new skills and competencies from information professionals and knowledge managers. No longer merely the custodians and gatekeepers of authoritative printed resources and online databases, information management has adapted from managing resources to managing both the context within which information and knowledge discovery can take place and the quality of the information on which commercial decisions are made. As the very idea of source and resource changes through the emergence of alt data and big data, the survey reveals both the changing ecology of information work and the emerging skills required to manage information in the workplace.

Luke Tredinnick

June 2019 issue now available

We’re pleased to announce that the June 2019 issue of Business Information Review is now available. This issue contains the normal mix of professional and research articles, focussed on information and knowledge management in the commercial sector.

The first article in June’s Business Information Review was written by editorial board member Denise Carter and former editor Sandra Ward. Exploring the implications of the Hawley Report originally published in 1995 but recently reappraised for its potential contribution to commercial information management strategy, the article reports on the updating and development of Hawley’s original recommendation for a modern information context. Entitled Information as an Asset – Today’s Board Agenda: The Value of Rediscovering Gold, the paper traces the ways in which the information landscape has been transformed over the last 20 years, from connectivity, to the growth of artificial intelligence, and the redevelopment of the Hawley Report for contemporary contexts. The authors write:

“Our report is intended to be transformational and a wakeup call. It provides our view of the benefits from managing information with flair, a set of principles that Boards would do well to adhere to; and a checklist to enable boards to consider the extent to which they are delivering and promoting the effective management and use of information assets.

The publication of Information as an Asset: Today’s Board Agenda by the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) in February 2019 is an important landmark in commercial information management, as out first paper makes clear.

Our second article was written by Paul H Cleverley and Simon Burnett from Robert Gordon University in the UK and addressed the topical and important subject of enterprise search solutions. Entitled Enterprise Search: A State of the Art, the paper reports on interview research conducted with 18 participants from a range of backgrounds into challenges for enterprise search and future directions for development. The paper develops a four-level model for enterprise search use cases that ‘could be used to reframe how enterprise search is perceived, influencing strategies, deployments and conceptual models’.

The third article for June 2019 is entitled The Innovation Ecosystem and Knowledge Management: A Practitioner’s Viewpoint. What does Innovation Mean? Witten by Rosemary Nunn from I&K, the Information and Knowledge Agency, the paper explores the meaning of innovation in organisational contexts, and the link between innovation and Knowledge Management. The paper explains how to map the innovation ecosystem within the organisation, and uses case studies to map the impact of knowledge management on innovation.

Our fourth paper was written by Paul Corney, founder of knowledge et al, a UK-based KM consultancy, and a Knowledge & Information Management Ambassador for CILIP. The paper illustrates the importance careful planning plays in creating the right environment for face-to-face collaboration and learning, and outlines 10 virtual facilitation success factors.

Our final article for June was written by editorial board member Denise Carter, from DCision Consult, Geneva, Switzerland. Entitled Real World Experience: Lessons Learnt From My Experience of Bringing a Fully Outsourced Library Service Back In-House, the paper reflects on the ways in which early professional experiences can have an important and continued effect on our working lives. We are very grateful for Denise in contributing this paper.

You can access the issue here: https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/bira/current

 

Call for papers: The Connected Workplace

Contributions are invited for a themed-issue of Business Information Review on the topic of “The Connected Workplace” to be published in December 2019. The issue will explore emerging technology in the workplace, with a particular emphasis on human issues and the impact of technology on Information and Knowledge Management in the commercial sector. Topics of papers may include:

  • Virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) or mixed reality (MR) applications in business environments; remote working facilitated through VR/AR. Training and skills requirements around VR/AR.
  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) in commercial settings; how AI is changing professional roles; training requirements around AI; the ethics of AI in commercial contexts.
  • Intelligent automation reshaping the way in which work gets done.
  • Collaborative software and cloud based systems in the workplace.
  • Technologically enhanced distance learning; implementing flexible working spaces; virtual offices and virtual organisations.
  • Gamification of the workplace.
  • Machine learning in business contexts

We also welcome contributions on any other aspect of emerging technology in the workplace. All papers should address the professional requirements of Information and Knowledge Management as it pertains to practice in the commercial sector.

Expressions of interest in contributing to the themed issue should be sent to the editors (via l.tredinnick@londonmet.ac.uk) by 15th May 2019 Papers should be between 3000 and 6000 words in length, and the deadline for submission of completed papers will be 01st August 2019.

About Business Information Review

Business Information Review (BIR) is published by Sage Journals and addresses information and knowledge management within commercial organizations. The journal features papers by professional practitioners and LIS researchers in equal measure, and has a strong record of encouraging and developing practitioner research. The journal also promotes evidence-based professional practice and encourages the sharing of professional expertise and experience. We aim to:

  • Report on best current practice in business information provision;
  • Evaluate business information resources and anticipate new forms of resource;
  • Highlight new professional developments and trends;
  • Scan the horizon for longer term developments.

For over forty years Business Information Review has helped develop the careers and practice of commercial librarians, information and knowledge managers, and to promote the commercial libraries, information and knowledge management sector.

Business Information Review publishes a range of different kinds of article, including:

  • Professional articles sharing professional expertise and experience
  • Research articles reporting on research projects or findings
  • Opinion articles discussing an emerging issue or controversy
  • Out-of-the-Box articles addressing technological developments

Initiatives articles addressing changing contexts of professional practice

If you are interested in writing for Business Information Review, or would like more information about the early career prize or the journal then do please contact the editors Claire Laybats and Luke Tredinnick via businessinformationreviewj@gmail.com

2018 a year of welcome, congratulations and goodbyes at BIR

We are just in to 2019 and already we are looking at papers and planning for the end of the year! Reflecting on how quickly things move along I thought it would be good to look back at what had happened at BIR in 2018.

It certainly wasn’t a dull year.  We had a number of editorial board member changes and were pleased to welcome Hal Kirkwood to the team who has just taken up the post of SLA President for 2019 in addition to his work with BIR and his day job as Bodleian Business Librarian at Oxford University.  We’d like to wish Hal all the best and congratulations in his new post as President of SLA.

Congratulations are also due to a past editor of BIR, Sandra Ward.  Sandra was awarded CILIP’s highest honour, an honorary fellowship in recognition of her work and many contributions to the information profession throughout her career.  In their November newsletter CILIP said “ We are also delighted to announce that Dr Sandra Ward has been recognised by CILIP for her many contributions to the Information Profession throughout her career and particularly for her fantastic contribution to CILIP’s Knowledge and Information Management Project and the launch of the Knowledge & Information Management Special Interest Group”. Congratulations Sandra from all of us here at BIR.

Thanks should also go to our board members who have retired from the board this year, Martin White and Penny Leach for their support and contributions to the journal.

We have also added to our awards section, encouraging both those starting in their career as well as the more experienced members of the profession to develop their skills and knowledge and write for the journal and be considered for one of our annual best paper prizes.  We will shortly announce the winner for 2018’s best paper prize and are actively encouraging early career professionals (first or second jobbers) to submit papers to be considered for our Early Career paper prize (launched at the end of last year) which we hope to be assessing towards the end of 2019.

Emerging technology and content buying

Author: Penny Leach, Associate Director, EBRD, and BIR Editorial Board Member

Please note this post contains the personal views of the author and are not connected with her employer.

Emerging technology and innovation are impacting content buying – and selling – in multiple ways.  This was the conclusion of a lively session held at the SLA Conference this year.  The situationis evolving rapidly, with varying levels of appetite and capacity to optimise the exciting opportunities.  As is so often the case, collaboration between multiple parties is more likely to lead to success, makingthe most of harnessing data in ways thatfree human intelligence for more value-add activity, and create appropriate commercial models.  However there are challenges and concerns – the fear of unknown costs, of loss of control over proprietary content,of missing out (and being disenfranchised) due to a lack of knowledge or resource and appropriate infrastructure, raising both private and public sector concerns.

The SLA Conference this year was held in Baltimore in June.  The Conference is a great way to meet other information professionals and other members of the information community from across the globe and build better connections in person.   Every year the SLA Leadership & Management Division’s Content Buying Section brings together an experienced panel representing different approaches in thecommunity of content of vendors and buyers, to provide reality-based insight.   This year the panellists were Amy Davis, Senior External Content Advisor at EY; Tim Baker, Global Head of Innovation at Thomson Reuters (now Refinitiv); and Bill Noorlander, Director of BST America (Conference sponsor).

The panel focussed on four emerging technologies that are creating content and new ways of deriving value from content: the Internet of Things (IoT); Data Analytics; Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Robotics Process Automation (RPA).  Early on, the largely buyside audience was reminded that content is not normally for sale but rather is leased for specific purposes – hence the complex contractual terms that are needed to protect all parties (content creator, provider and user).

Several themes emerged from the discussion,and from audience questions during the interactive session.  Generally the new content and technologiesare seen to enable several kinds of ‘smarter’, such as better client experience when deploying more visual and user-friendly products, more machine-ready data that customers can use in their own apps, and more efficient companies using their own data effectively to reduce cost (automated processes) and add value (e.g. finding more content to enrich products).

There is increasing usage of sensor-based devices in personal, industrial and civic applications (IoT).  This is creating new and extremely high volume data streams to add to the fast-growing mass of structured and unstructured data that isalready part of our digitised world.  This data ‘exhaust’, as a by-product of core businesses, offers opportunities for monetisation – for example in the financial sector– but with caveats that (as ever) mean ‘free’ is not really the case.  These alternative data sets are messy, fragmented, lack standardisation and history, and are hard both to use effectively (signals can be weak),  and to price.   For vendors, it is costly to develop and maintain new commercial offerings where client needs might be very specific.  There are hurdles, too, around data privacy and ownership, and legal terms such as the definition of users.  ‘Bots’ for example, one of the tools created by AI and an example of RPA that can free humans from repetitive tasks, may be prohibited by legacy contracts.   And just how do you count ‘eyeballs’ and fingertips?

On the buy side, the panellists concurred that it is better if multiple stakeholders are at the table – information professionals familiar with content licensing and the concept of reference interviews to articulate data needs, IT, procurement, legal advisors, and of course, the business process owners – to determine the requirement, negotiate new or amended license rights, match price to available budgets, and finally but not least, implement the new tools.

New players are emerging- new intermediary service companies such as data  ‘wranglers’ as data science and analytics skills (e.g., Quandl)  and new roles such as Chief Data Officers (CDO). More tools are needed to commoditise processes to reduce development costs and to deal with challenges.  Blockchain for example may help with the tracking of data elements.  As ever, watch this space!

Emerging skills for the information profession – The 4th theme in the BIR Annual Survey

Over the past two years Business Information Review has examined a range of emerging technologies that are beginning to impact on professional practice in the commercial information management sector. These have included smart technology, cybersecurity, Augmented Reality, and Virtual Reality. We have also explore a range of social and regulatory issues associated with emerging technology including GDPR and fake news. The information profession has become closely aligned to technological change, and information professionals have often been early adopters of new ways of communicating, managing, and finding information, data and resources.

The issue that has recurred most frequently over that time, both in the journal itself, and in the conversations that we have with professionals to discuss which professional trends the journal should be addressing, has been the growing place of Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI poses advantages as a tool in information management, but also challenges as a disruptive technology for the profession, business services, society more widely. AI has featured as a topic in the journal in March 2018, December 2017 and March 2017. And it is featured again as a dominant theme in the 2018 BIR Annual Survey, but in two ways.

In July this blog reflected on the ways in which AI is poised to transform information work and business processes. But that change and other associated technological developments pose a different set of challenges for information professionals, implying new ways of working, and an associated new set of skills and knowledge. The final theme in this year’s BIR Annual Survey reflects the ways in which senior information and knowledge professionals in the commercial sector are beginning to tackle these challenges, and confront the changing skills-set of the future information professional.

The BIR Annual Survey is the longest running continuous survey of the needs and working lives of commercial information and knowledge managers in the World. Since 1990 it has provided an invaluable insight into the changing world of Information and Knowledge Management. We like to think of it as an annual snapshot of the state of the profession. Throughout July and August we have provided a taste of the issues that are preoccupying information and knowledge professionals in the 2018 BIR Annual Survey. The final report will be published in the September issue of Business Information Review, and provides a fascinating insight into a rapidly changing profession.

Realising the value of data – Third Theme in our BIR Annual Survey

This is the third in our series of themes from the latest BIR annual survey.  The value of data is something that is constantly being discussed within organisations – How do we make the most of the data we have? How do we realise the benefits?  How do we know what we know? how do we commercialise it?

All are interesting questions and equally important.  Since the rise in popularity of ‘big data’ which started around 2005,   (we have been focussed on collating data for much longer than that but technological advancements that culminated around this time gave rise to the possibilities of gathering and making use of large and potentially disparate data sets), organisations have been increasingly looking at gathering data – on their customers, on their competitors, markets, business environments to name a few.  Within this time organisations have also been trying to figure out how they can realise the value of the data they have gathered.  Even today with advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) organisations are still struggling to assess the value of data.  If it is done correctly it can help inform strategy and investment in future business assets and acquisitions, if it is not then it can be very costly indeed.  There are a number of ways for looking at how to measure the value of data but at this time none are accepted as the way forward.

McKinsey have written articles and conducted research in this area.  They have found that those organisations that are able to leverage customer insights to inform and improve the business are out performing peers by 85% in business growth and sales.  McKinsey note that most organisations find it difficult to realise the potential value of their data because of different technologies, legacy systems and siloed working meaning that data is fragmented all over the place.  It is this situation in particular that hinders organisations taking real advantage of the data they already hold and can lead many into investing externally into research and competitive analysis in order to leverage value from data.

What is the answer?  You the information professional are the key to the answer.  An understanding of search, location and structure of the internal data as well as the context in which it was found and stored is vital to making sense of the wealth of data an organisation holds.  Jinfo reported on the importance of the information professional in Data Analytics – ready your information service (see references below) looking at the importance of source expertise for gathering and analysing external data. In gathering and analysing data context and source are key to providing accurate insights to inform organisational strategy.

Read more about what information teams are considering and doing today to have an impact on data value in our annual research report published in September’s issue.

References

https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/your-data-is-worth-more-than-you-think/

https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/mckinsey-analytics/our-insights/capturing-value-from-your-customer-data

https://www.informationweek.com/big-data/big-data-analytics/how-valuable-is-your-companys-data/a/d-id/1331246

Data analytics – ready your information service https://web.jinfo.com/go/sub/report/2760