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.

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.