Saturday, April 5, 2003

librarians and re-intermediation WHY COMPLEX INTRANETS DON'T WORK AND 'LIBRARIANS' DO: RE-INTERMEDIATION. Part of the job of a Chief Knowledge Officer is to understand the knowledgeculture, the collective knowledge behaviours, of the organization you work for. A phenomenon I have observed over the past decade is that such behaviours tend to evolve as the employees learn more, and as the tools available for learning and research become more complex. In the typical company, roughly 20% of employees have a 'self-service' knowledge culture. They do their own research using both the intranet and the public Internet, and do their own analysis of what that research tells them. At the other end of the spectrum, another 20% (generally older, more senior employees) have what I call an 'intermediated' knowledge culture. They assign subordinates to do both the research (the accessing and distilling of relevant knowledge) and the analysis (interpretation and reporting of its meaning) for them. The remaining 60% fall in between, usually preferring a librarian, subordinate or administrative assistant to do the research, but putting their own spin on the results and packaging it themselves. When people join a company right out of university, they usually eagerly join the 'self-service' knowledge user constituency. The people retiring tend to be 'intermediated' knowledge users. These two trends comprise the phenomenon called dis-intermediation. You would expect therefore that, over time, the curve above would shift to the left. However, what I've observed is that as young employees move up the ranks, and the opportunity-cost of their time increases, they move quite quickly to the middle category and ultimately, if they trust their subordinates, to the 'intermediated' category. As a result of this tendency, which I call re-intermediation, there is a remarkable equilibrium of knowledge behaviours in most companies. In the decade since their invention, intranets have generally become much more sophisticated, with the addition of advanced search tools, portals, community-of-practice spaces and collaboration tools. Much of this sophistication has been added at the behest of 'self-service' knowledge users. But as they become 'intermediated' users, we have observed that the administrative staff assigned to do research find some of these tools too complex. This leads to two unexpected results: disuse of some of the more powerful intranet tools, and an acceleration of the rate at which the less tech-savvy new employees(overwhelmed by the complexity of the intranet) move to the middle category. Aggravating the situation, while the ability of employees to leverage knowledge leads to an increase in revenue per employee, it also prompts a reduction in proportionate intake of new recruits, and hence a reduction in the company[base ']s leverage (the ratio of junior to senior employees). And, in an effort to monetize the value of this leverage, many firms reduce the administrative/professional staff ratio, expecting that self-service productivity tools should enable professionals to get by with fewer administrative assistants. Can you see what this is does to the overall dynamic of the knowledge culture? The scarce but overworked administrative assistants can quickly learn the power of the more complex intranet tools, but because they are not professionals themselves, nor directly involved in the task that the research is wanted for, lack the context to be able to make effective use of some of these tools: Like the librarians of old, they know what knowledge is wanted but not why. At the same time, the few new recruits see an incredible opportunity to become indispensible knowledge gurus in the organization, and clamour for even more sophisticated and complex tools to improve their productivity. But then, as they quickly advance, they shift to the middle category and leave the burden of basic research to others. And that isn't the end of it. The middle-category and 'intermediated' knowledge users now start to become dissatisfied with the quality of the research they are receiving from overworked, context-deprived assistants. These dissatisfied users try to reassume responsibility for their own research, but often find the tools, with which they are no longer familiar, too complex to do so. A solution to this is to re-intermediate: employ full-time specialized researchers with sufficient business knowledge to understand the context of user requests. They can quickly become 'power' users of the complex intranet tools they have at their disposal. But this isn't the 'self-service' model that many businesses had expected would result from the knowledge economy. It's actually remarkably similar to the old intermediated knowledge model of hard-copy libraries staffed by generalist librarians. Under such a model, relatively few intermediaries become the prime users of the intranet (just as they were the prime users of the hard-copy libraries). Even with some dissatisfied senior employees re-learning how to do their own research, the ranks of the 'self-service' intranet users are unlikely to exceed the 20% level of the heyday a decade ago. To some extent, knowledge culture has come full-circle. It's an interesting dynamic, and one that will undoubtedly continue to change, and challenge the ingenuity of intranet designers and managers for years to come. [How to Save the World] 3:38:05 PM

	Tuesday, February 25, 2003

journalists and librarians and information disintermediation Scott Rosenberg's piece about the Davos reporter who got caught saying what she really thinks. [Scripting News] I hadn't heard about this particular row (American readers might want to substitute flap or controversy for "row"). I found Scott's post more interesting for its discussion on the role of journalists in this world of blogs and information disintermediation. If journalists have a role in "digging out" what certain public figures "really think" about particular issues, I wonder if there's a parallel with librarians... Something special about the good old-fashioned face to face interaction between a librarian and the library user is that it often helps the library user clarify what she or he was really looking for in the first place. Of course, this can also happen over the phone - although it seems more difficult. I can't even imagine Virtual Reference software could put the spontaneity and free-flow of real conversation into toneless text messages. Maybe I'm wrong here. 10:24:35 PM

	Friday, February 14, 2003

article in Searcher about the digitial divide in legal research Slashdot has reported (& discussed in typical Slashdot style) an article in Searcher magazine by Melissa Bar called "Democracy in the Dark: Public Access Restrictions from Westlaw and LexisNexis." It is a very interesting and well-written article that highlights the important issue of public access to the law. In my biased opinion, this article has one major flaw, which is that it seems to totally ignore the role of law libraries - particularly academic law libraries and court libraries. I can only speak for the academic law library where I work. Although we mainly exist to serve our students, faculty and alumni, we never turn anyone from the public away who needs help with legal research. We are trained to help people find what they want or need without crossing over into the area of unauthorized practice of law. At the risk of blowing the profession's own horn too much, I say that the the assistance of a good law librarian - who is armed with a standard collection of printed materials and the resources available on the "free web", including the Legal Information Institute, West's FindLaw and LexisOne - will usually do a much better job for the pro se patron than free access to LexisNexis or Westlaw. The printed sources aren't all bad. They are very strong with the older materials, which Ms. Barr uses as an example, and they make it more difficult to fall into the full-text infoglut trap - where the few pearls are hidden in a tonne of garbage. Law libraries should do a better job of communicating all this to public libraries. I know that some of the professional associations, including the Minnesota Association of Law Libraries are already doing some work in this area. None of this is to say that I don't have my issues with LexisNexis or Westlaw - or think that they're perfect, altruistic companies. But now there are more free electronic alternatives (or cheap ones, like VersusLaw) available for legal research. They don't have the all the fancy bells & whistles of Westlaw or Lexis, but they still offer the public access to primary legal materials that would have seemed unthinkable 15 years ago. 1:00:26 AM

	Wednesday, December 11, 2002

Quint's perspective on information disintermediation I haven't read Information Today for all that long, but I have enjoyed Barbara Quint's columns. This month's column is particularly interesting. Clearly, intermediated searching has passed its prime. No longer does a search require a searcher[~]at least not a professional one. On the other hand, the appetite for answers, not research, continues to grow. Witness the rise of digital reference as exemplified in the library-based 24/7 services that are under development around the land. Even mighty Google has launched Google Answers, its own "Ask-A" service. However, I would bet that the use of quality-filtered services, such as those with human interveners in place, will rise. As end users start interacting with the Web, they will experience euphoria from the delusion that all their information needs have been solved for now and evermore. However, with the dawn, sad sobriety can wake these users from their fantasy world and leave them unsure and wary about the "iffiness" of too many answers to too many questions. I predict that one lesson will remain learned: End users will continue to believe that failure to search the Web effectively leaves them in danger of being blindsided by ignorance. So if they perceive online information[~]i.e., the Web[~]as both essential and difficult, the demand for quality-filtered, critically examined services should rise. The idea that the web has solved society's information needs "for now and evermore" is indeed a delusion. I'm not sure if I share Barbara Quint's optimism that people will inevitably wake up from this delusion. 8:25:52 PM