Introduction (Toni Wilson – Chair, SLA CI Division)

In this post from another of our Competitive Intelligence Division experts, we focus on a specific industry application for CI. It describes how industries – in this case, the pharmaceutical industry – are continually changing and the important of adapting our CI processes to those changes in order to become and remain future ready.

by Claudia Clayton, Virginia Chapter, Business & Finance, Competitive Intelligence, Legal, and Pharmaceutical & Health Technology Divisions

Last week, I attended the Pharma CI Conference in Parsippany, NJ, expecting to hear a lot about tools of the pharmaceutical CI trade. Instead, all of the keynote sessions focused on the changes in the healthcare industry and how these would impact the way that pharmaceutical companies develop products going forward. In the end, I learned far more about the focus on outcomes in the healthcare industry and why pharma companies should be more aware of these both in and outside of the US.

One of the most interesting presentations was made by a senior executive with Ernst and Young, on Pharma 3.0. Pharma 1.0 was basically the era where pharma companies focused on blockbuster drugs, e.g. those drugs that dominate a category. Pharma 2.0 was the era of diversification, where companies that specialized in cancer drugs expanded into cholesterol medications or expanded geographically. Now we are in the Pharma 3.0 era, where drugs must begin to mirror – at least in part – the outcomes-based focus of the healthcare industry. (To find the report, go to this link or Google Pharma 3.0 + Ernst and Young .)

Here are just a few of the key thoughts in the report, which I believe apply to SLA members and those information pros that engage in or support competitive intelligence:

• Connecting information and developing insights: Companies now need to connect information across disparate sources, to involve IT management in strategy development, and to remove information silos.
• Build and operate multiple, simultaneous business models: Diverse customers and markets call for diverse business models, done in a systematic and scalable way.
• Collaborate in new ways and with new partners: The report calls for “radical collaboration” with very different partners, using customers and other stakeholders as “co-creators” and attracting non-traditional partners.
• It’s not about you: Ernst and Young tells companies they must stop pitching and start engaging – based on emerging communities and enhanced desire for personal value.
• Disrupting the value network: Incentives, metrics and standards in pharma need to be tailored to health outcomes. Although this relates specifically to the pharma industry, the principal applies to any industry that is impacted by others in our increasingly connected world.

So, if you are looking for insights, trying to provide relevant value to your clients, and interested in taking advantage of industry or product disruption rather than being negatively impacted by it, read this report. Then spend some time thinking about how to bring your programs into a 3.0 world.

Claudia Clayton is Managing Director of ViewPoint, a strategy, consulting and research firm established in 1993. She leads the competitive intelligence activities of ViewPoint on behalf of major US corporations in multiple industries. Claudia is a committed and hard-working volunteer, primarily serving the members of SLA’s CI Division and the Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP). She won SCIP’s Catalyst Award in 2007 in recognition of her commitment to the CI profession. Claudia was the CI Division’s 2011 Conference Chair and currently serves as the CID’s Membership Chair as well.

by Sandy Malloy, San Francisco Bay Region Chapter, News Division

David Meerman Scott, a marketing strategist whose work I see all the time, wrote a post on his WebInkNow blog, “Apple Is Not Different,” in which he opines that no product or company matters outside the context of the problems they solve for the user.  Says Scott, “What your buyers do care about are themselves and they care a great deal about solving their problems (and are always on the lookout for a company that can help them do so.)”

Substitute “patrons” or “customers” or “clients” or “users” for “buyers” in this statement and “librarian” for “company” and you have a situation that we librarians should take to heart.

Scott cites Apple as an example of a company whose products are considered cool.  But even the coolest products are only as good as the problems they solve.  Sleek design?  That solves the problem of “ho, hum, I have a computer on my desk”; in other words, boredom.  The “it-factor” of being a member of the Apple tribe?  That solves the problem of needing to feel a sense of community or belonging.  Lack of viruses?  Congratulations, you’ve saved the trouble of buying and maintaining a lot of external virus detection software.

Do you believe you should create a brand for yourself?  Remake your image?  Market your library?  SLA’s Alignment Project gives you tools to do all these things, and they are important, but mean nothing outside the context of understanding your clients and how you are going to solve their problems.

So, it’s not “my library.”  It’s YOUR library (you, my client) and I’m going to do my best to understand how you want to use it.  Do you want it on your desktop?  In your pocket?  Would a regular email newsletter help you do your job?  What about tweets of new articles that are available?  A spreadsheet of leads?  What can I do to help you get new business, or satisfy regulators, or help you look good to your boss?

Even the language barrier cited by SLA alignment research speaks to connecting with our clients.  When we use their language, we say that we understand the organization’s business or at least enough of it to be on their wavelength when it comes to solving problems for them.

As a group, we librarians or are a very service-oriented group.  But we can also be proprietary about what we know and the resources to which we have access.  In promoting ourselves and our libraries in terms of resources and our own knowledge, we are, in marketing-speak, touting features.  What we need to be touting are benefits.  To quote Mr. Scott once again, being aware of “what’s in it for me? [the client]“, we are “addressing real problems rather than reverse engineering a benefit based on the feature set. ”

Sandy Malloy is Senior Information Specialist at Business Wire, a Berkshire Hathaway company, the San Francisco-based distributor of press releases where she has worked for almost 22 years.  She received her MLS from the University of Southern California and has been an information broker, public librarian, academic librarian, medical librarian and sales representative (though not all at the same time.)

Introduction (Toni Wilson)

There are several themes running through this week’s blog articles from the CI Division experts.  One is that competitive intelligence is inherently forward-looking.  Another is that marketplace insights can be developed by observing and understanding patterns in the information we collect.  Related to the latter is a very important theme – that informational professionals are uniquely qualified to do this, ultimately creating value for the end users, clients and organizations we serve.  In today’s blog, Anna Shallenberger offers practical perspective regarding filtering the facts we gather to provide insights and need-to-know results.

Intelligence – be it regarding competitors, markets or any other area – is inherently forward-looking. And yes – research and content is necessary to feed the intel engine that empowers future-readiness.  Many Info Pros possess untapped skills key to delivering great intel (CI, MI, etc.) services, abilities they may not realize organizations need. The challenges are to apply them effectively and visibly.  YOU have to believe, because in a world where “Perception is reality” – people won’t buy what you’re “selling” without that confidence.

So what are these secret super-hero powers? Is it all about statistical number crunching and PowerPoint presentations? Certainly not, although a certain base proficiency in these areas is preferable. And, of course, our data collection and synthesis skills have value, not to mention our expertise in validating sources. It is the talent to both battle the swollen inflow of inputs AND partner in delivering those targeted Aha’s and So What’s.

It takes an effective balancing act – levering the wealth of information content and methodology our “researcheritis” yields with the right filter – while smartly triangulating the significance of that which has made it through.

Is it the same idea as actionable intelligence? Not precisely. Think of it like a souped-up version of the kid’s “Lite Brite” toy where content is the pegs and you have a big bucket of them in front of you.  The more pegs, the higher the resolution of the image, and the better the insights, right? Again, not exactly.

You don’t need to use every peg. Some should shine brighter (weigh more heavily) than others.  You can arrange them in a variety of designs that make sense in the moment. But the future ready Info Pro sees patterns based on triangulating, drawing on the wealth of otherwise useless trivia rattling around in our mental hard drive.

Yes, our content gathering skills have great value. But let’s consider our content filtering abilities, and how access to all the data we’ve seen in life empowers us! LIS professionals offer a unique ability to TRIANGULATE between all the information and ASSESS meaning.  Internal and external sources – gathered by ourselves or others. Teaming up on the analysis and impact of the intel. Because it’s that piece that makes organization most future ready.

Anna F. Shallenberger is an experienced researcher, educator, author, strategist & consultant, Anna Shallenberger, aka the ClosetLibrarian, was recently recognized in Best of the Business Web.  At SLA 2011 , she is a panelist  for “Integrating with Sales & Marketing to Capture & Deliver Intelligence.”  At the Intelligence Café, Anna will lead a discussion regarding Unique Information Sources & the Deep Web.   She was also a spotlight panelist @ SLA 2010 and served as conference planner for the CI Division.

Juliane Schneider, Academic & IT Divisions

I’ve been a cataloger/data wrangler for much of my admittedly weird career.  I’ve never worked in a basement (always ground floor), but I speak MARC.  I can tell you that, after hearing the despairing pleas of thousands of dietary voices, MeSH has recently changed the heading “Cookery” to “Cooking.”  “Fleas” are now “Siphonaptera” which is quite the evocative term.

After 15 years of being all tech-servicey in a web startup, insurance library, medical center, religious headquarters, and publisher, cataloging is still about to be dead, our jobs are about to go away any second, and we remain undervalued, even by our fellow librarians.

Ah, Tech Services.  We are the emo band of librarians.

We make resources easily discoverable, available, downloadable and deliverable, and when we do our jobs well, we become invisible.  But–BUT–the LMS-es we deal with are becoming obsolete for our users.  No longer must they wade into separate libraries to use disparate databases; here at Harvard, 70+ libraries are in one catalog. Our fancy new Aquabrowser delivers Googlized results, but I can’t find what I want in there, and I’m the one who cataloged the stuff!

Here is our Opportunity!  We could work with the reference staff to create smaller, savvier, discoverable bits of resources tailored to local users. To do this, good cataloging is crucial to create the crosswalks for the records to go wherever the information needs to be presented, in a way that makes sense to individual users.

As Metadata Librarian what I really do is run around and find interesting things to do/cause trouble. My goal: projects that could involve Tech Services in an ‘embedded’ fashion.  Countway Library is sandwiched between  the Center for the History of Medicine, one of the premier historical medical collections in the world, in the basement and the Center for Biomedical Informatics, on the top floor.  The one thing I desperately want to do is to take the resources from these three places – past, present, and future – and make connections.

Another project, Tech Services as content producers.  This is probably my favorite paper ever:  http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000361.  They took an article on tropical disease, added semantic links to the uBioPortal, and used the raw data from the authors to create geospatial and serological mashups (they call it ‘Data Fusion’ – sexxxay!). This is the kind of thing that Tech Services needs to add to their repertoire. It will make the faculty happy (up that ‘cited’ number with more dynamic publications!), it will make administration happy (our repository is better than their repository) and it will make us happy, because it is visible and makes a connection with people outside Tech Services!

A last project I’m working on is to place QR codes on the ends of stacks that, when scanned, will list the books shelved there.  For once, the user can access a true shelflist of our resources, and instantly know what is on the shelf, and what is remote.  I call that sexxxay, but maybe it is really just geek cataloging.

Juliane Schneider is the Metadata Librarian for Countway Library, Harvard Medical School.  In addition she works with the Center for Biomedical Informatics, the Center for the History of Medicine and Administration on projects from creating a Curriculum Management System to creating an autism ontology.  Currently, she is Chair-Elect of the Academic Division and Secretary of the IT Division.  In the past couple of years, she has a program planner, so she’s looking forward to SLA 2011, where she won’t have to worry about A/V and room setups!  You can connect with her via juliane_schneider@hms.harvard.edu, or on Twitter @JulianeS.

by Sara Batts, Europe Chapter, Legal, Business & Finance, Leadership & Management Divisions

Career-changing is flexibility in action. It’s being comfortable with the mindset that takes everything you know in one arena, chews it up, spits it out and moves on, adapting your skills and working styles to a new environment. This is my second career and one that, like many, I stumbled across serendipitously. (Saying ‘by accident’ sounds a little harsh, but it’s not far off.) There are a whole host of people’s stories at the Library Routes project and mine’s not unique. What has Future Ready come to mean? For me it’s been about throwing myself in the deep end: connecting with my professional peers via the UK’s BIALL and CLIG and globally via SLA; seeking to learn about new tools, new areas, and new ways of working. We career-changing new entrants bring great attitudes to the Future Ready party. We’re here because we choose to be: this is our profession and of course we’re going to promote our value and our worth. What’s this shy-and-retiring stereotype all about anyway? Whose rules are those to say what is and isn’t an information professional? And we’re not restricted by how things used to be or how we’ve always done things – we want to do what works now, and what will work tomorrow. We have already re-invented ourselves once: in my case from conference organiser to legal specialist; and from non-participant to unit leader – re-evaluating our role is second nature. We’ve been Future Ready since our first day at library school.

Sara Batts is SLA Europe’s president and is also involved a member of several divisions including Legal and LMD. She has been involved with SLA since winning one of SLA Europe’s early career conference awards in 2009 and is one of 2011’s Rising Stars. She’s been Senior Research Librarian in the London office of law firm Reed Smith for three years.

by Christine Carmichael, Nebraska Chapter, Knowledge Management Division

“Bragging isn’t becoming.”

“If you’re good (or great) at what you do, you don’t need to brag.”

I beg to differ! In an era where competition is fierce, we have to toot our own horns. We need to differentiate our skill sets and focus attention on our greatest strengths. Here is how two of my strengths work for me.

Every professor, every student I meet absolutely MUST know what I can do for them. Then I make them WANT me to prove it. I have connections with people because I’ve made it my business to know what they are passionate about. Then I keep an eye out for related things. A well-timed email or phone call with a link relevant to them keeps ME on the radar.

But, making connections isn’t just about building your network. In my daily work, making connections between disparate pieces of information (and sometimes disparate people) is often where I have the greatest successes. This is where serendipity comes into play:

A pair of Marketing students came to me (requested by their professor) for help finding information on golf drivers. Talk about specific! General industry information was fairly easy, but driver rankings were proving to be a challenge. A database search of “ranking” and “driver”, while broad (think NASCAR, not PGA) netted an article in Cigar Aficionado. The students were awestruck! It was exactly what they had been looking for, but they were willing to overlook it because it wasn’t in a place they were expecting.

From Golf to Cigars

I was able to make them see a connection – one they weren’t looking for – between GOLF and CIGARS. (What else does one smoke at the 19th hole?) The students departed repeating one of my mantras: “You never know where a good piece of information will turn up.”

I suppose you could define serendipity as “just waiting for happy accidents.” In 2004, University of Georgia’s Elizabeth B. Cooksey said it was “one’s discovery of something new combined with the realization of a connection between it and something one already knew…” For me (and I have to think for many info pros) serendipitous findings are things I count on in my research process. They are “a-ha moments” writ large.

Am I Future ready? Serendipitously so.

Christine Carmichael is President of the Nebraska Chapter of SLA and Communications Director the Knowledge Management Chapter.

Jill Blaemers,  San Diego Chapter Director; Taxonomy and Social Science Divisions

Cindy Romaine has challenged us each to become future-ready, that is, to prepare ourselves for our desired future. In considering how I want to respond to that challenge, I am reminded of a conversation I had many years ago, with an executive at the company I worked for at the time. He asked me where I wanted to be in five years. The smart, albeit cliché, response would have been to tell him that I wanted to be in his job in three years, but, nope, that’s not how I think. Instead, I told him that, in looking ahead, what I saw was a continuing evolution in how we organize, disseminate, and access information, and that our roles in it were going to need to evolve as well; I wanted to contribute to figuring the whole scheme out. Staking a claim to one particular route to the future wasn’t to me then, and it isn’t now, a viable option for an individual or a company.

We each sit in the midst of a constantly changing reality that is the result, at any given instant of time, of a myriad of individual, social unit, and societal-level decisions, small and momentous, all influenced by factors in the natural world. Not to be trite, but change is endemic to the human condition, so to be future-ready, we need to be eyes wide open to its fact and its force.  What we need to focus on is our contribution, as information professionals, to creating whatever that future looks like, and to be ready for that requires a certain mindset, attitude, and action, the point Cindy makes.

To me, being future-ready means many things. Personally and professionally, the minimum requirements are resilience and adaptability. Future-ready means bringing my skills of assessment and analysis to the status quo, as well as skepticism to calls for change for change’s sake and speed for speed’s sake. It means being ready and willing to get my hands dirty today with the hard work of implementing change that makes sense for tomorrow, at the same time scanning and evaluating the external environment for opportunities and threats, all with an eye on the horizon. It means a personal and professional commitment to lifelong learning and the incredibly lofty, yet so critical, goal of achieving an information-literate society in a world where information is seemingly available to everyone while, at the same time, a digital divide persists. Fundamentally, it means a laser focus on doing my best to help connect users with authoritative, accessible, actionable information.

Jill Blaemers is an information industry veteran, currently working independently providing consulting services related to product development of electronic academic reference databases and assessment of user needs and market conditions/opportunities. She serves as a Director on the Board of SLA – San Diego, and is a member of the SLA Social Science and Taxonomy Divisions.

by Ned Potter, Europe Chapter, Leadership & Management Division
by Laura Woods, Europe Chapter, Leadership & Management and Legal Divisions

Libraries and information professionals are stuck in a bit of an echo chamber. We spend way too much time talking to one another, and not nearly enough time talking to the potential users. Potential users who have no idea really what a (future ready) library does, but who would probably come and visit if they did. Some people use an analogy of ‘floating voters’ to describe those currently indifferent to libraries, but I think our offer has changed so much and people’s perceptions of libraries are so far behind, these are people who don’t even realise there’s an election on…

Classic examples of our preaching to the converted often come when the profession or the industry is criticised from outside. When Seth Godin or someone from the national press puts us down, our first urge seems to be to find another librarian to commiserate with. This doesn’t do anything, not really – it’s great to engage the library community by blogging about it, but library blogs tend to be read by other librarians –  we also need to engage the people who heard all the bad stuff about libraries in the first place. We need to fight back in public. In short, we need to take greater control of the narrative arc concerning libraries, and stop letting other people write our story for us.

The presentation below is one used by myself and Laura Woods when we talk about the echo chamber – follow the Prezi through to find out more about the concept, about how it impacts negatively on libraries, and to see some ideas for marketing libraries outside of the echo chamber in future.

Ned Potter works in the field of digitisation at an academic library in the UK; he was named as a Library Journal Mover & Shaker for 2011, and is about to attend the SLA Annual Conference in Philly as a winner of the SLA-Europe Early Career Conference Award. His blog and other presentations can be found at www.thewikiman.org.
Laura Woods is the current Webmaster and Bulletin Editor for the Europe Chapter. Her blog, Organising Chaos can be read at http://woodsiegirl.wordpress.com/.

by Valrie Davis, Florida & Caribbean Chapter, Food, Agriculture & Nutrition Division

Many of us understand that we have moved beyond Web 2.0 and into Web 3.0 – sometimes called the Semantic Web.  But what does it all mean, how can librarians become a part of the effort, and can we take it a step further and, ourselves, become Librarian 3.0?  The World Wide Web, as we know it, is adding a new underlying semantic layer that allows machines to find, share and communicate meaning. Librarians are long familiar with the connections between data – but not how these types of connections might change or become enhanced with machine readability. Librarians have no reason to fear for our jobs (or rather, there is no reason to fear for our jobs as we know it) as there is a role for us in the new world of semantically driven information. We too can shape development and assist in the building of common links between data, resources, and services.  Towards that end, here are 8 easy steps to becoming Semantic Web savvy:

1. Get portable: make yourself and your services mobile.
2. Get social: understand what social networking tools exist for managing and sharing information.  We are becoming increasingly familiar with tools such as Twitter and the Google Suite.  The list grows by the day! (FriendFeed, Collexis, VIVO, Mendeley, BibApp, Scientopia, etc.)
3. Focus on the individual: semantics help build and serve communities, while simultaneously better serving the individual. People join community networks when their individual needs are met.  Web 3.0 is about personalizing the information experience.
4. Provide dynamic content: understand how machines can help deliver content to you. Find the tools that assist you in locating the information your user requires.
5. Widgets and mash-ups:  Identify which widget tools would be the best to showcase on your website. Be your own widget by combining or showcasing your services in unlikely places.
6. Organization: get involved in the underlying organization of information through the development of ontologies and other Semantic Web standards (RDF, OWL, SPARQL, SKOS, etc.).  It’s no longer just for catalogers and programmers!
7. Contextualize your support:  How is location important? Are your users device driven? Subject driven?
8. Filtering: Web 3.0 filters out the stuff that doesn’t pertain to your context – a time honored role of librarians.  Not only are we utilizing the Semantic Web to categorize resources (journal article, book, person, datasets, etc.) but also relationships (author of, employed by, head of) between resources.  These semantic relationships help us filter through the information to identify what we need (i.e., all journal articles written by people employed by University of X).

Becoming Semantic Web savvy isn’t as difficult as you think, and it’s the beginnings of a new and interesting approach to structuring and discussing data.  There are lots of great conferences having these conversations – get involved in the discussion and bring that discussion to SLA!  Additionally, look around and see how much you and your colleagues are already involved in some aspect of Web 3.0. You will be surprised.

Valrie Davis is an Agricultural Sciences Librarian at the University of Florida and the UF Implementation Lead for VIVO, a semantic web application used as the foundation for a national network of researchers (http://vivoweb.org). She has been a member of SLA since 2005 and is the current Chair of the Food, Agriculture, Nutrition Division.

by Adrianne J. Washburn, Texas Chapter, Engineering Division

The Web 2.0 landscape has quickly changed the library’s role as the source for accessing information. With the arrival of Google, Facebook, Twitter, Bit.ly, Blogger, Wolframalpha, StumbleUpon, Digg, Twurl, Flickr, Del.ici.ous, YouTube, Hulu, Pandora, Rollyo, Skype…you might be asking where do libraries fit in?

The library is a cultural icon – this is known. What is not known is how the library will weather in the world changing around it.

Icons (think Madonna!) are not afraid of change. If anything, they embrace change; they seek it out and use it in unexpected ways. While libraries have managed change for years, the rate of change libraries experienced was slow but consistent until the 1980s-1990s. Since the onset of the digital age, the rate of change has exponentially increased.

Libraries tend to mirror the command-and-control organizations they support, controlling the access and organization of information. However, many command-and-control businesses and organizations are realizing there is more risk in clinging to “business as usual.” Businesses are realizing change and adaptation is a must for survival, but moving from a structured and controlled type of organization to a collaborative organization is scary and probably seems risky. What if we lose authority control? What if this collaboration buzz doesn’t work? What if technology fails?

Unfortunately, libraries are losing control and library closures are occurring more frequently. Perhaps what we need is a better understanding of how to balance a command-and-control culture with a collaborative culture. We are more connected now than ever before and yet we are also more isolated. Creating a balanced culture will empower a sense of community that has seemingly been lost.

What are you doing in your library, knowledge center, information organization or research facility to impact the culture of your organization and the future of our profession? Collaboration is about connecting people, sharing information, and using tools to connect and share. What unexpected methods are we using to collaborate and connect people? How are you shaping your organization to be future ready? Let’s hear your comments!

Resources

Rosen, E. (2009). The culture of collaboration: Maximizing time, talent and tools to create value in the global economy. San Francisco: Red Ape Publishing.

Adrianne is a Project Manager for Lockheed Martin Aeronautics, and she is the SLA Aerospace Section Chair for 2011.