Information Research Weblog

The Weblog

It seems that my suspicions about the lack of general interest in the IR Weblog are confirmed :-) I've been contributing very little over the past month and so far no one has asked, Where are you?

New issue of the journal

The latest issue, Volume 10 No. 1, is now on the site. This one has the first batch of papers from the Information Seeking in Context conference, held in Dublin last month. The other half will be published in the January 2005 issue. I finally got round to checking on what logs were available on the server and discovered that, since, the 8th October (which is when the analysis software appears to have kicked in) there have been about 280,000 hits on the InformationR.net site - most of which are on the journal. This is considerably beyond my own estimates from the various counters. InformationR.net is the sixth most 'popular' virtual domain on the University's servers.

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP)

VoIP appears to be building up nicely. I finally got round to using it, along with colleagues in the AIMTech research group at Leeds University Business School. The voice quality, using Skype, is generally pretty good - not quite as good as the best landline, but good enough considering that it's free. I've also tried the SkypeOut service, which connects to landline numbers pretty well anywhere in the world and to mobile phones in some. You can connect to landlines in Western Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand for 1.7 Euro cents a minute (£0.0118 or $0.02129) - mobiles cost a good deal more. Connection with landlines can be variable - sometimes connection is lost and in one case there was no voice connection at all. No doubt, with the interest being expressed, these problems will get ironed out.

Of course, governments and the big telecomms companies get very edgy over VoIP - here's a communication process where they may not be able to make any money, unless they REGULATE. Naturally, it is the USA where these concerns are raised.

It had to happen: "Boingo, Vonage Sign VoWi-Fi Pact"

Google again

A couple of things about Google - first, you'll find a review of its e-mail service, Gmail, in the latest issue of the journal. Secondly, I'm also trying out its 'desktop search' program - this enables you to do a Google search on your hard disc. It also checks your hard disc when you do a Web search - useful for bringing to your attention those items you'd forgotten you'd ever written!

It is very interesting to see how the discussion on the non-existance of KM
is evolving.

However I would like to make a few nuances. The arguments why KM failed are
applicable on ALL other hypes.

1) not really understanding the issue and impact of the 'starters'/theory of
the hype
2) claims of other disciplines/domains of success
3) technology suppliers misusing the hype for commercial purpose

What is the sustaining aspect of Business Process Redesign (BPR)? The
arguments and theory were interesting but in reality a couple of consultants
come in your organisation, mess up your organisation, find out that it
doesn't work how they constructed it on the drawing table and leave. But
nowadays organisations are still changing their way of working and
re-inventing and improving their processes due to (f.e.) the economic
situation, and they always did and always will. Nothing new.

What is the sustaining aspect of Business Intelligence (BI)? Interesting
theory but in reality a database vendor comes in your organisation to sell
you a database (we will put everyting in and give you your market
intelligence and a competitive advantage, yeah sure...) and then leaves
because he cannot solve the problem (carbage in, carbage out he says). But
even now we need 'up to date' information on our performance and
intelligence on our markets and competitor's, we always did and always will,
nothing new.

What is the sustaining aspect of Customer Relationship Management (CRM)?
Interesting that if we know our customer and build a relationship we can
cross sell and up sell, but in reality a vendor or consultant comes in and
sell's you a database with a Call Center Script ("Can I help you with
something else than I just did? For example a car insurance sir?"). And
after a while we find out that real customer intimacy cannot be realized
over the phone or the internet. Putting time and effort in building and
maintaining a relationship with your customer is something that IS
important, but the grocer on the corner already does it over decades, he
always did and he always will. Nothing new.

The issue is that we can go on and on discussing whether KM failed or not,
but beleave me: it did not even exist. Like the other hypes it has been
misinterpreted, claimed by other domains and misused by technology vendors.
The reason why people don't share there knowledge is simple, because
knowledge is power and our organisational structures don't facilitate or
stimulate knowledge sharing. Managers still use the red pencil (cost
cutting) and look for short term solutions that are stimulating their
(financial) situation. Creating a knowledge friendly culture is a long term
project and is not interesting for managers and besides, it cannot be
measured (how can you measure a better solution based on more information?
what is the cost of a retired expert? what does re-inventing the wheel cost?
and so on). See how Anders Moberg is solving Ahold's (a large grocer with
heavy financial problems and some scandals in the past) problems in the
Netherlands : they lay off thousands of employees, sell companies and they
issue new shares/stocks. Quite knowledge friendly, what about our people are
our most important asset?

Why did this KM hype start? Because (a.o.):

- people are reinventing the wheel, (this is expensive and time consuming)
- our society is becoming more knowledge intensive (products are complexer,
time to market is shorter, the value of a company is no longer based on
tangibles but more intangibles)
- we have less people to do the work (ageing of the society)

The professor in the article has studied so called KM success stories, I
agree on the outcome but I really don't need a study to conclude the same.
What I would like to see is a study on companies that disappeared due to
lack of managing their intellectual assets. Any idea why March 1st
(consultancy firm, thousands of employees) went bankrupt in a couple of
months....? I think it would be interesting to see what the common
denominator is of organisations with success and companies with failues, it
might be how they handle information and create and maintain a knowledge
friendly culture and infrastructure...

After we are done arguing that knowledge management failed we will find out
that knowledge was important and it will always be, nothing new.

And on your last remark Tom, very funny, last week I was confronted with a
manager that stated: "Knowledge Management is gone, all the issues of the
hype are becoming 'common practice'". So common sense management here we
come!

Best regards to all!
Wido Bosch

My thanks to Bob Robinson for drawing my attention to a feature in today's Financial Times, which is fortunately openly available on the Website. It's an article by Michael Earl, Professor of information management at the University of Oxford, called Tantalised by the promise of wisdom. In it he notes:

Yet nearly 15 years on, the promise of knowledge management has yet to be realised. There is a dearth of outstanding success stories, where original goals were achieved or sustainable value was created.

It is not unusual to visit companies claiming knowledge management successes only to find some worthy efforts lacking any lasting impact. More often, a company has simply relabelled a new IT application as a knowledge management initiative.

In a 1998 article in the Sloan Management Review, I reported on the work of 20 chief knowledge officers at large corporations. Sceptics may not be surprised to know that most of these CKO positions no longer exist. More than half had gone within two years of our study. In other words, knowledge management is tantalising. It still appeals to many, but success is elusive. Even defining it is not easy. Perhaps this is because knowledge management is concerned with an intangible and, in some ways, invisible asset.

He describes a study of forty companies, through which seven schools of knowledge management were identified: the 'systems' school, the 'cartographic' school, the 'engineering' the 'commercial' school, the 'organisational' school, the 'spatial' school and the 'strategic' school. He also terms the first three, technology oriented and the last three, behavioural. I'll leave it to you to explore the article for the detail.

The article is relatively brief, so one does not expect close analysis of the schools; that may be in whatever paper is published on the research. However, it is notable that the first three are all, in essence, information management schools, involving databases and/or intranets, the 'commercial' school is concerned with intellectual property rights and intangible assets, and the first two 'behavioural' schools are all about sharing information within the organization, while the 'strategic school' is about defining the business as a knowledge business - which is, perhaps, closer to the 'commercial' school than to the other two 'behavioural' schools.

The reasons for the disappearance of the CKOs are interesting:

Our study of CKOs revealed broadly skilled people with loose job descriptions and CVs rich with experience. They were usually appointed by the chief executive but had to define their own role and work out the company's agenda for knowledge management. Their roles combined the skills of an entrepreneur, consultant, technologist and designer. Most did not keep their job for long, often due to a change of CEO, sometimes because an early victory was declared over knowledge management or because they were headhunted by management consultancies.

I wonder when we're going to hear about 'common-sense management'?

Having recently published a new issue of Information Research, I thought it was time to find out how the ranking by 'hits per month' was standing. So here's the latest table. We see that some very recent papers appear to have struck a chord, while some of the oldest papers are still going strong.

T.D. Wilson The nonsense of knowledge management      Issue 8.1 Total hits 39553 Months active 24 Hits per month 1648.04

Terrence A. Brooks The nature of meaning in the age of Google      Issue 9.3 Total hits 5204 Months active 4 Hits per month 1301.00

Jannica Heinström Five personality dimensions and their influence on information behaviour       Issue 9.1 Total hits 9090 Months active 9 Hits per month 1010.00

P. Riding, S.P. Fowell, and P.C.M. Levy An action research approach to curriculum development      Issue 1.1 Total hits 16507 Months active 19 Hits per month 868.79

Chun Wei Choo Environmental scanning as information seeking and organizational learning      Issue 7.1 Total hits 19950 Months active 33 Hits per month 604.55

France Bouthillier and Kathleen Shearer Understanding knowledge management and information management: the need for an empirical perspective       Issue 8.1 Total hits 12594 Months active 21 Hits per month 599.71

Zita Correia and Tom Wilson Scanning the business environment for information: a grounded theory approach      Issue 2.4 Total hits 11000 Months active 19 Hits per month 578.95

Paul M. Hildreth and Chris Kimble The duality of knowledge       Issue 8.1 Total hits 11984 Months active 21 Hits per month 570.67

Kalervo Järvelin and T.D. Wilson On conceptual models for information seeking and retrieval research       Issue 9.1 Total hits 4819 Months active 9 Hits per month 535.44

Terrence A. Brooks Web search: how the Web has changed information retrieval.      Issue 8.3 Total hits 7452 Months active 15 Hits per month 496.80

V. Mistry and Bob Usherwood Total quality management, British Standard accreditation, Investors in People and academic libraries      Issue 1.3 Total hits 9414 Months active 19 Hits per month 495.47

Maija-Leena Huotari and T.D. Wilson Determining organizational information needs: the Critical Success Factors approach      Issue 6.3 Total hits 18498 Months active 39 Hits per month 474.31

Sirje Virkus Information literacy in Europe: a literature review      Issue 8.4 Total hits 5152 Months active 12 Hits per month 429.33

Kirsti Nilsen The Library Visit Study: user experiences at the virtual reference desk      Issue 9.2 Total hits 2312 Months active 6 Hits per month 385.33

Barbara Niedźwiedzka A proposed general model of information behaviour      Issue 9.1 Total hits 3021 Months active 9 Hits per month 335.67

Joyce Kirk Information in organisations: directions for information management      Issue 4.3 Total hits 20602 Months active 63 Hits per month 327.02

Leonard J. Ponzi and Michael Koenig Knowledge management: another management fad?      Issue 8.1 Total hits 6826 Months active 21 Hits per month 325.05

Shrianjani Marie (Gina) de Alwis and Susan Ellen Higgins Information as a tool for management decision making: a case study of Singapore      Issue 7.1 Total hits 10054 Months active 33 Hits per month 304.67

Wallace Koehler A longitudinal study of Web pages continued: a consideration of document persistence      Issue 9.2 Total hits 1797 Months active 6 Hits per month 299.50

Bo-Christer Björk Open access to scientific publications - an analysis of the barriers to change      Issue 9.2 Total hits 1776 Months active 6 Hits per month 296.00

The decision of Google to get into e-mail has provoked mountains of comment - mostly relating to the advertisement policy. The strategy appears to be that GMail will use automatic analysis of the text of messages to put ads at the side - much as Google now does for searches. CNN.com has a longish article on the subject, while ZDNet UK reports that the UK's Information Commissioner has been presented with a claim that the policy of retaining even deleted e-mail would infringe the UK's privacy legislation. Today's Guardian Online reports that GMail is now open for testers - however, that's not evident from the GMail site, which simply records your e-mail address to send you more information.

The Google news alerts are an excellent source of information on all kinds of things. I have two running at the moment; one for VoIP and the other for developments in wi-fi. Some items from the former may interest others:

One wonders if the powerful communications industry in the USA will actually allow this one to happen: "Legislation was unveiled Friday that would classify voice over Internet Protocol as an information service, releasing it from telecommunications regulation." (RCR Wireless News)

I mentioned Skype some time ago: here is a less than totally enthusiastice review from SFGate.com:

Trying it out, I found Skype to be a simple to use service that felt more like an instant messenger program with a strong integrated voice-over-Internet protocol functionality. But it's no substitute for a telephone.

And, finally, a useful account of what's going on from The Mercury News.

There's so much hype and counter-hype that it's difficult to figure out what the future may hold: my guess, FWIW, it that VoIP is on a roll and that the world of telephony is in for a revolution - a technological optimist would probably say two years, a telecomms exec. would probably hope for fifteen before it hits, so eight to ten years is probably a reasonable estimate for the time by which VoIP will have a significant share (say 30%?) of the market.

Visiting World Wide Words recently I discovered that not only is an RSS feed now available for it, but that it also uses a different kind of aggregator I hadn't seen before called KlipFolio. Naturally, I had to try it. I don't find it any improvement on my usual aggregator, NewzCrawler, but others may enjoy the rather quirky mode of presentation.

For a different perspective on information systems I recommend an article in this week's New Statesman (immediate access if you are a subscriber, otherwise £1.00 for 24 hours access). It's not about information systems directly, but about the problems of a shortly-tob-be-released prisoner. To get accommodation, he needs his National Insurance Number, but to get that - yes, you've guessed it - he needs an address. As he points out - he's in prison, under his real name, his fingerprints and DNA on file - why can't the prison authorities simply confirm his existence and allow his number to be delivered to the prison? The prisons are run by the Home Office, the National Insurance system by a branch of the Treasury - joined up government? Given the regular failure of IT projects in government, I guess we'll have to wait a long time before anything is joined up.

Of course, joined up action is problematical when we have politicians who can't do joined up thinking. Comedy show of the week was Tony Blair trying to justify his actions on Iraq - he seems to have a very selective memory. It seems that the famous "WMD" and the "immediate threat" to Britain that convinced the credulous MPs in the House of Commons (but no one else that I've ever met) were not the real cause - for Tony the real cause is now the removal of the oppressor. If this was his main attempt to regain voter trust, I don't think he's made it. It's positively embarassing to have such a hypocrite at the helm - and one who seems to think that the electorate is made up of unthinking idiots.

And now for something completely different: anyone interested in words will enjoy the Collect Britain site's feature on dialects. People are often astonished by the variation in accent in the UK, but remember the waves of invaders - Celts, Romans, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Vikings, Norman French - all leaving traces behind. Plus internal migration, of course - the Scots who moved to Ireland ended up with an accent that is neither Irish nor Scots, but Ulster!

An interesting item on wireless in the public library from LIS News.com

...and a longer piece on IT in public libraries from D-Lib Magazine

Turning to the University sector, I picked this up from Seb's Open Research - a couple of courses at Prince Edward Island University are using Weblogs as resource pages and communication. Here's one on 'Networking, knowledge and the digital age'.

And here's an interesting one! I initiated a debate on the JESSE list some time back on the extent to which Web citation was beginning to overtake journal citation as a performance tool. I then found that this had been picked up by a couple of researchers (Vaughan and Shaw, Bibliographic and Web citations: what is the difference? JASIST, 54(14), 2003, 1313-1322) and now ISI is getting together with NEC: Thomson ISI and NEC Team Up to Index Web-based Scholarship

PHILADELPHIA & LONDON & PRINCETON, N.J.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 25, 2004--Today, Thomson ISI and NEC Laboratories America (NEC) announced their collaboration to create a comprehensive, multidisciplinary citation index for Web-based scholarly resources. The new Web Citation Index(TM) will combine a suite of technologies developed by NEC, including "autonomous citation indexing" tools from NEC's CiteSeer environment, with the capabilities underlying ISI Web of Knowledge(SM). Thomson ISI editors will carefully monitor the quality of this new resource to ensure all indexed material meets the Thomson ISI high-quality standards.

During 2004, Thomson ISI and NEC will operate a pilot of the new resource to receive feedback from the scientific and scholarly community. Full access to the index is projected for early 2005.

When fully operational, the new resource will be a unique content collection within ISI Web of Knowledge. It will complement the Thomson ISI Web of Science®, and provide researchers with a new gateway to discovery -- using citation relationships among Web-based documents, such as pre-prints, proceedings, and "open access" research publications

OK - that's enough for now - I've got to go off to talk with the people at Orange about mobile technologies.

It's Tom, actually, Rishi - unless you got another message from a Tony :-)

Given the situation you described, with an outsourced IT Department then it would seem that a resolution of the situation is their responsibility, not yours!

As for how you achieve full participation, once a system is designed and installed, that is down to the general management of the organization. If a system of the kind I suggested is approved, given the go-ahead, and supported by management, then management must act in ways to encourage the system's use. With a document management system in place, it would be their job, not yours, to ensure that everyone in the organization used the system in ways that enabled everyone to gain ready access to the shared files.

A couple of days ago, I mentioned Mozilla Firebird as a desirable browser and my liking for it grows. I found that it is delightfully easy in import one's bookmarks from other browsers - IE is very straightforward, but even for Opera, all you need is another very useful open source program, BookMark Bridge. This checks what bookmark files are one your system and then merges them under the desired system. There's some tidying up to do, but it works very effectively.

A list member, Carol Cahill, draws my attention to a couple of items worth looking at:

• PC magazine Feb 17 issue has an article about the value of public library subscription databases "Your library online" by Janet Rubenking
• Today's Seattle Times has an article about Joe Janes' new ischool class on Google: "Google for a grade: UW class to study popular search engine"

A good read from Peter Jasco of the University of Hawaii on the ups and downs of 2003.

...and some guesses from various persons about what 2004 might hold for us.

Finally, IST Results e-bulletin has the following item:

• Need help navigating the Internet? Maybe Mayva can help. Mayva, the first implementation of the AsAnAngel project, is a conversational and customisable virtual assistant for Internauts and cellular phone users.

Having used the news aggregator, NewzCrawler, for some months now, I finally decided, when the evaluation period came to an end, that I can't live without it - and the $24.95 seems a modest price to pay. It isn't perfect, but then what software is?

The need for a news aggregator, assuming that you still haven't cottoned on to the need, is the increasing popularity of RSS feeds that provide the raw material for aggregators. A recent development at Yahoo! makes RSS feeds available for news searches. For example, if you want to pick up every mention of Tony Blair (heaven forfend) that occurs in the news sources covered by Yahoo!, use this URL in your aggregator. Read about this development at Jeremy Zawodny's Weblog

My aggregator now has links to fifty news and information sources - it's continually growing and continually being weeded as I find new things and get rid of dross - of which there is much!

From Column Two comes a link to a story about the use of a Weblog, using Movable Type, as a hospital Intranet. The story includes a paragraph that tells it all about systems design generally - great for those that grow up with it, hell for anyone else:

The old Intranet had been in place for many years and for the most part, probably because they had to and had grown accustomed to it, people were happy with it. To a new user coming in it was a nightmare, but to those who had learned the eight click path to get to Human Resources, it was fine.

Read the rest.

Jakob Nielsen, the usability guru, has a nice piece on 'information pollution' as his first 'Alertbox' of 2004. Much of what he recommends was recommended by David Allen and myself following our project on 'information overload' - in fact, 'information pollution' is a significant element in overload, in our view. Worth reading, and noting!

Three more of my old papers are now available, adding to the growing archive – I’ve no idea when I’ll get everything converted, but I’m getting there!

Information management. The Electronic Library, 3(1), 1985, 61-66

The relevance of theory and a new approach to library structure, by D.A. White & T.D. Wilson (1984) Libri, 34(3), 175-185

Environmental monitoring and information management in county planning authorities, by T.D. Wilson & I.M. Masser (1984) In: H.J. Dietschmann, ed. Representation and exchange of knowledge as a basis of information processes. (pp.271-284) Amsterdam: North Holland.

Paul Miller attempts to disentangle portals, gateways, and other linguistic confusions in the latest issue of Ariadne. However, doesn't the definition of 'Gateway' as:

"...collections of links and pointers to content of value, mostly elsewhere on the Web, and generally within a single defined topic or small set of topics. Their defining characteristics are that they are primarily a collection of descriptions of resources, rather than the resources themselves, and that the bulk of those resources tend to be held elsewhere and belong to others. Typically, the resources being described tend to be Web sites."

sound like a 'directory', 'guide' or even a 'catalogue'? In analysing the hits on Information Research, I've come to the conclusion that what I've previously labelled as 'Directories', 'Guides to resources', and 'Library catalogues' are all doing essentially the same thing - listing and providing links to resources.

On this basis, what would the guide to research methods be?

I suspect that 'gateway' was invented by techies who had never seen a catalogue :-) I'm not referring to Paul here, since he is obviously trying hard to disentangle the semantic confusion, but to the originators of the term. Does anyone have any recollection of its first mention?

I should add, that Paul's definition of 'portal' as involving customization, does strike me as a useful distinction to make.

Tom

Readers of Information Research will recall Terry Brooks's special issue on the semantic web. Another contribution to this topic is found in Oryon Update - the newsletter of the consultancy group in the Netherlands "Oryon KMD".

The author of the piece appears to have a somewhat restricted definition of 'understanding' - apparently, he believes that 'understanding' is reached when the computer can be programmed to interpret the instructions on a Web page. Not my definition of 'understanding' :-)

Has anyone pointed out to Microslop that, if an email is a business record, it needs to be kept for 6 + 1 years, well it does anyway in the UK, and I think the US has the same legal period of liability.

Kind regards

Stephen Etheridge

This is actually from Wido Bosch:

The difference in a knowledge worker and a traditional worker is the main resources he or she is using to perform his or her job. Toffler wrote in 1980 a book, called "the third wave", in which he argues that we moved from the agricultural age in the industrial age and that we now are moving from an industrial age into an information age. In the industrial age the main source for a worker was his labour skills, phisical work. Of course he had to use his knowledge to perform but the physical element of his work was larger than the knowledge part, which made him easier to replace (see for this the power industrial giants had in managing their human assets). In the third wave, information age (or knowledge society as you wish), for a lot of employees the main resources for their work is their knowledge, their brains. These so called knowledge workers form the largest part of the value of the organization nowadays. In defining the value of an organization we used to sum up the assets (capital, machines, physical assets, and so on) but nowadays the organizations value is much higher but with less physical assets. Cap Gemini Ernst & Young for example is an organisation which has a high value but they have no assets (they lease everything). When their employees walk out the door at five and don't come back there is no organization left. And unfortunately a traditional worker in the sence that I mean it is easier to replace than a knowledge worker.

Last example, industrial companies are outsourcing the work which has low knowledge intesivity to countries with lower costs on loans, but they leave the knowledge intensive work in the western world. Philips is stating that they trade knowledge and not goods. Knowledge intensivity is increasing enormously. For more informatoin on knowledge workers and the shift in thinking in this area I recommend the following books: "The knowledge creating company" by Nonaka and Takeuchi, "weightless wealth" "Value based knowledge management" and "Zero space" by Tissen and research performed by Gartner, Xerox and McKinsey. The book "weightless wealth" might be a good start since it is easy to read and provides a good profound insight in the evoluating economy/society.

I agree with you that for all work, no matter how mundane, some knowledge is required but I disagree with the statement that this obviates the term knowledge worker.

I also do not think that knowledge optimalisation (or the use and sharing of knowledge) should be narrowed down as a function for HR only. Since knowledge management is about creating a culture in which people act and behave based on the fact that they recognize that sharing knowledge implies increased value adding, because sharing does not mean dividing but multiplying. If I share 1 dollar with you, we both have 50 cents, if I share my knowledge with you we both have this knowledge and I don't lose 50%. So when we create and stimulate a culture in which knowledge sharing is common and accepted, organizations can create a differential advantage. But to achieve this, new ways of organizational structure is needed. To share knowledge people need to have trust, a common goal or shared ambition, high attraction to the company, and a fitting rewarding system (amongst others..), but they way we organizate now we lack all of these aspects (due to short sighted management, rewarding systems based on hours in the office, lack of trust due to reorganizations and so on). It is in this context that I mean that we don't structure our organizations well, or in other words, we don't structure our organizations to achieve sustainable advantages.

Focussing on only staff knowledge is too narrow, since (as you state) for all work knowledge is requires, so it would be a focus which is too limited. Secondly, focussing on HR implies that they are responsible for knowledge sharing, which will lead to institutionalisation (not invented here syndrome).

When I posted this issue I was concerned on two things, the place (is IR the right platform to talk about KM) and the form (these topics require face to face conversations since there is yet no consensus on knowledge managemement and the basic assumptions and paradigms). Seen the nature of the discussion now, I assume face to face conversation would increase the benefit and seen the number of reactions (1) I feel confirmed in the fact that this topic does not fit the nature of this platform, which is IR.

In sincerely apologize for the inconvenience I caused.

Many Regards, Wido Bosch

And was in reply to:

Hello Wido,

Firstly, I was wondering if you could clarify for me the difference between a knowledge worker and a traditional worker? It seems to me that most jobs, no matter how mundane, require some knowledge to perform them, obviating the need for the term 'knowledge worker'.

I don't think there is a need to restructure organisations to make knowledge management successful. Knowledge Management (or Knowledge Optimisation as I would prefer to call it) should just happen in organisations that that are committed to a particular governance model that includes optimising the knowledge held by their staff. Ideally it would happen through the HR area, just as training usually does,

Bob Jackman

It's interesting to see how, at the technology end of the 'km' spectrum, 'knowledge management' has seamlessly segued in 'content management' or, sometimes, 'enterprise content management'. What does this mean? Two things, probably - first, the tech boys have finally figured that, in their bailiwick, 'km' brings them more scorn than cash and, secondly, that it won't be too long before the money men are asking, 'What is 'content', other than data and information?' And, before you know where we are, the next big thing will be 'information retrieval' - what comes around, goes around :-)

You've probably all read this one already, but it was new to me today. The School of Information Management and Systems has had a project runnning to calculate how much 'information' is produced and/or distributed annually. Their current estimate is that:

Print, film, magnetic, and optical storage media produced about 5 exabytes of new information in 2002. Ninety-two percent of the new information was stored on magnetic media, mostly in hard disks.

What's an exabyte? Here's a definition from SearchStorage.com:

An exabyte (EB) is a large unit of computer data storage, two to the sixtieth power bytes. The prefix exa means one billion billion, or one quintillion, which is a decimal term. Two to the sixtieth power is actually 1,152,921,504,606,846,976 bytes in decimal, or somewhat over a quintillion (or ten to the eighteenth power) bytes. It is common to say that an exabyte is approximately one quintillion bytes. In decimal terms, an exabyte is a billion gigabytes.

Or, as the authors of the SIMS report put it:

...five exabytes of information is equivalent in size to the information contained in half a million new libraries the size of the Library of Congress print collections.

I knew there was too much of the damned stuff!

Interesting item Graham. One suspects that this is another case of, "We've done it because it can be done." rather than something arrived at after discussions with e-mail users. Your points about needing to build RM processes into the use of these features is an important one, but one fears that, as with so much in organizations, it will be left to the individual users to do what they like with them. In all probability, most won't bother. The dreadful thought is what spammers might do with them! Think of a possible hack that prevented you from deleting!

Microsoft are making sender control over emails more easily available. Records Management (Archival) interests could be compromised.

It's been a little while since the last posting here, because I've been in Lisbon for a week, with very little in the way of Internet contact - just a few minutes on the hotel connection.

However, here's an interesting site, brought to my attention by Current Cites - where you will always find something interesting.

The site is that of the 2003 Dublin Core conference It's interesting for two reasons - the content, of course, but also the mode of presentation, using Siderean's proprietary "Seamark" navigation system.

This sounds very interesting. It certainly describes me.

I've mentioned Michael Quinion's site previously, World Wide Words. This is from a section of the site entitled Turns of Phrase and refers to recent terms, or at least they were recent when the article for the word was written. Some of the words are "ancient" (i.e. up to seven years old).

The one that caught my attention today was Technorealist, which our words guru describes as something along the lines of someone who doesn't believe in techno-utopianism (that technology is good and will solve all ills), nor are they a neo-luddite (one who sees all technology as retrograde and evil).

And there's a site for technorealism!

Moderates of the world rejoice (if you can be bothered). And that's one of the problems, isn't it? Being "balanced" is not exciting or sensational, and doesn't tend to attract those with an abundance of energy.

I think the problem with this much repeated, so-called hierarchy, is that no one can actually find anything to do with it. It is quoted time after time, often in ways that lead one to think that the writer assumes s/he has invented it, but, in the end, the only parts of the hierarchy that have any practical significance are 'data' and 'information' - in fact, since information is so difficult to define, one could probably remove that and claim that virtually all so-called information systems are simply data processing systems. And no matter who the writer may be, once the hierarchy has been quoted, s/he gets down to the practicalities of data processing or information systems.

Bellinger, et al., who wrote this piece are a prime example of the problem - where does it lead? Nowhere as far as I can see. Or am I being too unkind?

I was forwarded the following link that deals with definitions for various KM concepts.

Data, Information, Knowledge, Understanding and Wisdom are defined separately according to Ackoff, however the author of the article below considers understanding to not be a level but the x-axis, a measuring tool that separates the other four. I didn't delve much deeper than that (and the article probably doesn't say much more than that). I didn't find anything to disagree with.

http://www.systems-thinking.org/dikw/dikw.htm

Grahame Gould has drawn my attention to some discusson on a records management list RECORDS-MANAGEMENT-UK@JISCMAIL.AC.UK, relating to the proposed British Standard on 'knowledge management'. Evidence for how much confusion there is regarding the concept is found in a statement from one Ian Brewer, a marketing manager:

"KM is more about information as an asset whereas RM is about creating a process by which you can store and retrieve information. For example, RM is simply about saying "all of our records on a specific topic are here". He adds that "a records management policy can add to an overall KM strategy".

Note that km is about "information as an asset" - now where have we heard about information being an asset to be controlled and managed in the same way as other assets? From the early days of information management of course. Just as an example, here's a title from the Proceedings of the 1984 annual conference of the ACM on The fifth generation challenge: "Treating information as an asset". 1984 you note - almost 20 years ago, and the BSI imagines it is something new?! In fact, the idea goes back to the Commission on Federal Paperwork of 1977 (which included electronic documents).

It really is astonishing, or is it? We have what appears to be a whole group of people entirely disconnected from information management or records management, who see fit to pronounce on so-called 'knowledge management' without having the slightest idea of what they are talking about. Ignorance rules these days!

John Holgate has drawn the attention of IR-Discuss members to the:

Plumb Visual Thesaurus developed since 1996 in the Princeton University Concept Labs. IMO it's the biggest breakthrough in semantics since Carnap invented 'intension'.

It is interesting that the VT's 'view' of the concept information comes directly from the Princetonian definition:

'a message sent and received that reduces the receiver's uncertainty' (ho hum)

but it also separates out facts/documents/data from 'selective information' (a la Shannon communication theory) and the entropy/ectropy strand beloved of the physicists.

The strange little entity labelled 'info', which is appearing more and more in biology circles is, perhaps fittingly, without a definition.

I suggest you try playing with 'knowledge' and 'experience' for good measure and see how meanings appear to have their own momentum and relationships - like in the world beyond thesauri and dictionaries.

Thanks for that, John.

An interesting item on The Shifted Librarian caught my eye: "When does 'own' not mean 'own'?" It's a cautionary tale about the US library supplier Baker and Taylor who have plans for the electronic delivery of texts using the .pdf format. No problem you think? Well - read all about it for another example of the desire of business to sell you something and hold on to it at the same time.

The same source has a defense of news aggregators. I never realised that a defense was needed: I can't think how I'd scan as much material as I do without NewzCrawler. However, The Shifted Librarian points to an article by one Steve Bell (presumably not the Guardian satirical cartoonist) on a e-zine called Ex Libris in which, among other things, he notes:

RSS and news aggregator enthusiasts will emphasize that these technologies will save you time as they improve your access to news and information. But does the time required to obtain the necessary skills to use them payoff in the long run? I'm suspicious of anyone who claims something is easy and fast to learn and implement, but tells me I need to first read a four-page article that explains how it works.

Read a four-page article? I've installed Newz Crawler and used it for months now without reading anything at all about how to use it. I also used Amphetadesk for a while and that, too, required no reading - you just get on with using it!

Talking of aggregators, I came across an interesting one - SNARF - which lives on your Internet Explorer 'links' bar and which you can pop up at any time - worth a look.

There seems to be a buzz going these days on the applications of faceted classification - it's a little curious that in the days of search engines and the wide belief that they can solve all retrieval problems (even if the IR researchers do not claim this) the 'information architecture' and 'knowledge management' fraternity should be turning to a method I first learnt about almost fifty years ago. I even sat at the feet of Shiyali Ramarita Ranganathan when he made his farewell tour of library schools in the UK. We had spent two days talking with him (conversation was his teaching method - he let you learn things, rather than trying to teach you) and by the time came for him to give a public address, he had lost his voice. It was a little curious to hear the whispered words of Ranganathan repeated in a strong Scottish accent by the then Head of Department! I still have the sheet of paper upon which he wrote the Five Laws of Library Science and then signed his name in English, Hindi, Sanskrit and, I think, Tamil. I went on to teach the subject for quite a few years - including following a number of well-known British teachers to the University of Maryland for a year because the Dean, Paul Wasserman, felt that there was more to classification than the schedules of the Dewey Decimal and Library of Congress classification schemes. The students in those years - between about 1965 and 1970 - were possibly the only ones in the USA getting that treatment.

Now the Weblogs buzz with the novelty of the ideas that Ranganathan first developed in his Colon Classfication of 1933 - yup, seventy years ago.

Links to chase down:

The Knowledge Management Connection - which is very keen to tell us that faceted classification is "Not just a library science technique", almost as though that would taint it.

Ranganathan for IAs

Faceted Movable Type

Ranganathan's rigorous analysis of the principles upon which all classification is based is contained in his 'Prolegomena to library classification' - but you can find a simplified version here:

A simplified model for facet analysis - I only put this one in because I get cited :-) (Only joking)

A tribute to SR Ranganathan, the father of Indian Library Science by Eugene Garfield - who also met SRR. See also Part II of the tribute.

Was Ranganathan a Yahoo!?

Ranganthan ahead of his century.

Ranganathan and Facet Analysis - an unlikely source, perhaps, but he is creeping in all over the place.

Here's something for those who are involved in, or about to be involved in, setting up a corporate intranet. The Intranet Road Map

Thanks to Column Two for that one.

The Gurteen Knowledge Letter is a useful pointer to things that are happening around the world, if only to remind us how sloppy is the use of the English language. An example is found in a link to Stakeholder interviews as simple knowledge mapping which includes questions such as:

• What information do you rely on during a normal working day?
• Where do you obtain this information from?
• If you have a question, where do you go to find an answer?
• Which sources of news do you regularly read?

Those seem like quite ordinary 'information needs' questions to me - and quite why a selection of staff in an organization should be called 'stakeholders' escapes me.

For some time I have been drawing attention in my quarterly Editorial to the papers with most hits. I only got round to putting counters on the papers in the first three volumes last December, so those papers have been recording hits for a shorter period of time than others. It made sense, therefore to present a list that takes this into account, so here we are. This is a list of the 'top ten' based on a ranking by 'hits per month' since a counter was attached.

Two interesting points emerge out of the exercise: first, as one might expect, the 'knowledge management' issue has an extremely well-hit set of papers, and secondly, apart from this, there are popular papers throughout the series, including one from volume 1 no. 1.

1.   The nonsense of knowledge management, by T.D. Wilson
Total hits 25.7.03 - 14790      Months counting - 9      Hits per month - 1643

2.   Web search: how the Web has changed information retrieval, by Terrence A. Brooks
Total hits 25.7.03 - 3757      Months counting - 3      Hits per month - 1252

3.   Understanding knowledge management and information management: the need for an empirical perspective, by France Bouthillier and Kathleen Shearer
Total hits 25.7.03 - 6020      Months counting - 9      Hits per month - 669

4.   The duality of knowledge, by Paul M. Hildreth and Chris Kimble
Total hits 25.7.03 - 5925      Months counting - 9      Hits per month - 658

5.   An action research approach to curriculum development, by P. Riding, S.P. Fowell, and P.C.M. Levy
Total hits 25.7.03 - 3461      Months counting - 7       Hits per month - 494

6.   Environmental scanning as information seeking and organizational learning, by Chun Wei Choo
Total hits 25.7.03 - 9399      Months counting - 21      Hits per month - 448

7.   Scanning The Business Environment For Information:A Grounded Theory Approach, Zita Correia and Tom Wilson
Total hits 25.7.03 - 2987      Months counting - 7      Hits per month - 427

8.   Student attitudes towards electronic information resources, by Kathryn Ray andJoan Day
Total hits 25.7.03 - 19714      Months counting - 54      Hits per month - 366

9.   Determining organizational information needs: the Critical Success Factors approach, by Maija-Leena Huotari and T.D. Wilson
Total hits 25.7.03 - 9232      Months counting - 27      Hits per month - 342

10.   Knowledge management: another management fad?, Leonard J. Ponzi and Michael Koenig
Total hits 25.7.03 - 3071      Months counting - 9      Hits per month - 341

The final report on the first stage of Project INISS has long been out of print. Now I'm scanning in and creating a Web site for it, since it was a fairly unusual piece of work for the time.

I'm putting up the Chapters as I produce them and you can find the first at http://informationr.net/tdw/publ/INISS/index.html

This chapter deals with the structured observation method used in the research and may be of continuing interest because that method is still relatively little-used.