A survey conducted by SLA and Dow Jones has confirmed what many information professionals have suspected – that bad information is bad for business. The survey found that the dangers of unreliable information on the free web include making bad business decisions, missing opportunities and wasting time double checking facts.
You can see the press release and the report here.
More ammunition the next time someone tells you there’s no need for information professionals in the age of Google!
Rory Cellan-Jones continues to uncover the costs of government websites in his blog. In his latest piece, he tries to unravel just exactly how a website (Business Link) can cost £35 million pounds a year to run.
Take some time out to read not just this article, but [some of] the many readers’ comments: from website developers who quote considerably less for the same work; from those who attempted to introduce freeware solutions inside government (to no avail) and those small-and medium-sized providers who lost out to the ‘big boys’ when bidding for government projects.
As we are all aware, the days of freespending on large projects should be well and truly behind us. In our September issue we will be publishing an article about cloud computing and its potential, not just to help organisations contain costs but also to help them build organisational capability.
CILIP has announced the appointment of Annie Mauger, who will take up the post in November 2010.
I attended the excellent Library and Information Science Research Coalition conference at the British Library this week. The well designed programme enabled both audience participation and expert input from speakers. The one-minute madness strand really made an impression and demonstrated yet again that we should all be ready to share important messages in as punchy a way as possible (elevator speech anyone?).
Delegates used the opportunity to share information about their research interests and to find others who had similar interests or who could provide help and support. Most impressive was the ability of almost everyone to speak for exactly 60 seconds without the need for the Chair’s 2010 version of ‘the gong’ – the i-phone vuvuzela app – to hurry them along.
Oriole Newgass, the author of A candle in the wind or a beacon for the future: professional associations facing an uncertain future has asked us to correct her contact email details.
Oriole can be contacted at: oriole@legal-im.co.uk.
On the eve of the budget, tonight’s (live broadcast) Dispatches programme How to save £100billion should be interesting indeed. Release your inner Chancellor by playing Chop or Not and follow the debate on Twitter at #chopornot.
Congratulations to Dr Geoff Walton who has been named SLA‘s European Information Professional of the year. The award acknowledges Walton’s work on information literacy.
For those looking for an example of poor information management practice, how about the Department for Education’s announcement about the closure of QCDA?
The first thing you might notice is the poorly formed URL, one which surely won’t survive any future changes in the content management system.
Then you might realise that the PDF has been published with no metadata. In addition, it has been scanned but not OCR’ed so cannot be indexed by Google.
So much for the principles of open linked data!
Gary Hamel, the author of Competing for the Future (and co-creator of core competencies) is featured on the BBC’s World of Business podcast this week. In his wide ranging conversation with Peter Day, Hamel suggests that organisations can ‘buy knowledge’ relatively easily these days and that they need to focus more on how they can attract and support the creative individuals that can give them a competitive edge.
Interestingly enough, in June we are publishing an article by Sara Smith and Scott Paquette that discusses the connection between knowledge management, chaos theory and organisational creativity and innovation. The article looks at how Pixar and Google support creativity, knowledge creation and innovation.
In the e-world (and the physical world) information overload is a a challenge all but the incredibly well organised and technically literate can find difficult to overcome. Acknowledging that we don’t have to read everything we are sent helps. Refining the way we organise the stuff that we really will want to get back to is a great aid to productivity.
Alexandra Samuel’s Harvard Business Review blog entry alerted us to Evernote as an example of a tool designed to help people with their personal information management challenges. Tools that help us create a searchable list of items and people that we don’t want to forget and (more importantly for those of us with failing memories!) can help us remember the context in which we first met them) are an interesting development.