by Anne Rogers, Minnesota Chapter, Food, Agriculture & Nutrition, Knowledge Management Divisions

The dictionary definition of a value proposition is “a clear statement of the tangible results a customer gets from using your products or services.”  We as information professionals can use value propositions to:

1. Develop a better understanding of our unique skills, expertise and capabilities;
2. Define and articulate how those skills, expertise and capabilities can deliver direct value to the organizations for which we work (have a clear value proposition).

I believe that, as a profession, we have a tendency to focus on the traditional and too frequently overlook or undervalue our most unique and transferable abilities. During a project to evaluate scientific reference service, I had a key client, a chemical engineer, tell me that one of the most valuable services we provided was to help him refine and express clearly the research/business problem he was trying to solve. We’d been thinking about reference interview skills as a means to an end, not a value added capability in itself. And guess what? The ability to work with individuals or teams to facilitate creation of a clear, actionable problem statement is a critical skill applicable in many areas. I’ve used my reference interview skills over when working with teams to create business project charters and in defining challenges for innovation idea campaigns (a ‘wisdom of the crowd’/collective intelligence activity). In a recent Future Ready 365 Blog post by Amy Maule,Extreme-Embedded-Librarian, she points out that employers are looking for adaptable people and she is “appreciated most for my adaptability, constantly inventing and re-inventing my job. The skills that make you a good librarian could help you to stand out elsewhere in your organization–you just need to reinvent your job in a way that lets you shine.”

Thinking about your skills, expertise and capabilities from a ‘value proposition’ approach can help you understand and communicate where you add value in your organization, as well as potentially help identify new opportunities where you can leverage your abilities.

Anne Rogers is Director, Research & Knowledge Services at Cargill, leading a team of business and technical information specialists providing information research and analysis services. She is also responsible for a global idea management service, as well as knowledge capture and sharing initiatives to support Cargill’s Research and Development organization.  Prior to joining Cargill, Anne spent twenty years at The Dow Chemical Company, where she held various positions in knowledge and information management.

Anne was born and raised in Nashville, Indiana, obtaining a B.S. in Chemistry from nearby Indiana University, Bloomington, followed by a Masters in Library Science with a specialization in Chemical Information, also from Indiana.

by Molly Hagen, Minnesota Chapter
by Liz Scheibel, Minnesota Chapter, B&F and Legal Divisions

We have found that Information professionals and Librarians are extremely welcoming to and excited for new people entering the profession – everyone wants to help! We are so grateful for the help and advice we received during our school years, and that support continues now as we are both in our first professional jobs.

Everyone wants to help new info pros, but are you ready to help? Do you know what fresh MLIS grads in your SLA chapter and in introductory level professionals in your department need from you? We’re a profession of planners and organizers. Have you planned how you will help new people and gotten your resources and ideas for doing so organized?

As new information professionals who are just becoming “old” enough to look back, here are four ways we believe you can give to the future of our profession:

1. Network with newcomers, over and over again. New people are important! Take some meaningful time to get to know them before recruiting them for something beyond basic membership or simple attendance. Learning about their skills, interests, and goals means that when the time is right, you’ll be able to ask your new colleagues to do something that is appropriate for them – and they’ll be more likely to say yes and do a good job.

2. Be the best mentor you can be. Signed up to be a mentor? Good for you! Your work has just begun. Study up and research it – read about it, meditate on it, talk to others who have done it and find out what made the relationship successful. Prepare like you would for a job interview. (Calling Minnesota Chapter members: as the chairs of our Chapter’s Mentoring Program, we’re here to help.)

3. Help connect classroom education to real world work. A good conversation starter with a student (or someone doing an internship) is asking them what classes they are taking or what they are studying. Keep the conversation going by describing how you use that kind of training or information in your real work. Making the connection between the classroom and what someone in the field actually does is one of the hardest things about making the jump between being a future information professional and a current information professional. Help them connect the dots.

4. Don’t just get them jobs, make them jobs. A key to being future ready is to avoid assumptions that hold us back, and one of the most devastating assumptions we make is that we can’t control job creation. Too often our assistance for job seekers stops at referring them to open positions, helping them network, and, at best, creating temporary positions or internships. It’s a tough economy for new people; many good ones are looking for their first break. Have you ever brainstormed about what you would do with an additional employee in your department? Have you sat down and made the plan – the job description, the qualifications, the proposal to management? Have you ever thought that another area of your institution, or even another institution altogether, could use an information professional, and then tried to make it happen? If you want to help new people in your field, create someone a job. It’s the thing they need the most. Then enjoy reaping the rewards of having a brand new information expert in your midst – his or her energy and fresh ideas will inspire you to even greater heights.

We know experienced professionals in our field are generous with their time and knowledge. Hopefully, these thoughts will spur some future ready thinking and planning on how to put that generosity into action! After all, being future ready means being ready for the future members of our professional communities.

Molly Hagen is the new Learning Center Associate at Thomson Reuters in Eagan, Minnesota. She graduated with her MLIS from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2010. She can be reached at molly.hagen@thomsonreuters.com, or on Twitter @mollyhagen.

Liz Scheibel started her position as Librarian at Lindquist & Vennum PLLP in Minneapolis, Minnesota in April of 2010. She graduated with her MLIS from St. Catherine University in 2011. She can be reached at escheibel@lindquist.com, or on Twitter @emcscheibel.

The authors are members of the Minnesota Chapter of SLA and are the new co-chairs of the chapter’s Diversity and Mentoring Committee. They are available to provide mentoring connections to local information professionals, as well as sparkling conversation for information professionals new and old.

by Dru Frykberg, senior librarian for the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development, Minnesota Chapter, Advertising & Marketing, Business & Finance, Government Information Divisions

Warnings of a possible new recession surfaced this month amidst unimpressive job growth, declining consumer spending and a tanking stock market. Meanwhile, I recently returned to work after a three-week layoff, the result of Minnesota’s government shutdown.

I really didn’t need more reasons to take this Future Ready stuff seriously – I was already a convert.

I made what I considered a smart move to librarianship in the mid-1990s – when the Internet was soaring and so was our economy. I left journalism for a career offering more regular hours, better pay (really), and plenty of job openings.

Today, I still believe library work was the right choice, especially when I see news jobs and organizations disappearing. In fact, a recent issue of my alumni magazine devoted itself to how journalists can better prepare for mid-career transitions.

Information professionals should be planning and preparing for career changes, too, whether that means adapting to new demands in our current jobs, making ourselves more indispensable within our organizations, or considering transitions to related and high-demand fields.

A U.S. Department of Labor tool, mySkills myFuture at www.myskillsmyfuture.org, aims to help by providing a bridge to new careers based on a job seeker’s work history.

mySkills myFuture is about to celebrate its first anniversary. The Obama administration encouraged its development to prevent a double-dip recession by helping those in low-demand or vanishing professions find new jobs.

Here’s how mySkills myFuture works: Enter your current or past job and you’re presented with occupations requiring comparable skills. Submit “librarian” and these matches with especially bright outlooks are suggested:

• Market research analysts
• Public relations specialists
• Personnel recruiters
• Training and development specialists
• Instructional coordinators
• Employment interviewers

From there, you can learn about the recommended careers, find job openings and discover how to prepare for these new opportunities.

I’m not saying we all should become market research analysts. But perhaps some of us can use mySkills myFuture, and similar resources, to get ideas for additional training to make ourselves more marketable.

I work with market research analysts and this information makes me want to pick their brains even more to learn how I can boost my analytical skills. Not only would this help me provide clients better results and insights, but it would increase my value within my organization and in the job market. In this climate of doing more with less, I might just keep my job by working as both an information professional and analyst.

We should also partner with these types of professionals within our workplaces to learn from them, tout our expertise and services, and together produce good work.

That’s what I try to do with my public relations colleagues. I provide research for our staff writers, and occasionally I research and write articles. But who knows, in the future my agency or the labor market might demand information professionals with public relations skills, and this ongoing experience will help keep me employed.

And let’s take the results from mySkills myFuture a step further and promote SLA to these professionals who have occupational skills and interests similar to our own.

Dru Frykberg, president-elect of SLA’s Minnesota Chapter, is a senior librarian for the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development. She has spent more than 15 years working in government, academic and public libraries. She has a bachelor’s degree in journalism and criminal justice, and a master’s in library science from Indiana University in Bloomington. Contact her at dru.frykberg@state.mn.us.

By Qin Tang, Minnesota Chapter, Transportation Division

In the last few years, I have learned a great deal about what makes a great leader through intensive reading on leadership, attending workshops, interviewing leaders and witnessing a true leader in action. That leader is – Tom Sorel, Commissioner of the Minnesota Department of Transportation, where I serve as a librarian. I would like to share a few things I have learned.

Let’s start with the basics of what leadership is about.

In Leadership Challenge, authors James Kouzes and Barry Posner say leadership is not about position or title, power or authority, status or wealth, being a CEO, president or a hero. Leadership is about relationships. It is a relationship between those who aspire to lead and those who choose to follow. It’s about character and what you do.

The fact is, everyone can be a leader. You are a leader in some way even if you don’t hold an official title in the organization. You are the most important leader in your organization, in your family and your life. Learning leadership skills is everyone’s business. Leadership opportunities are everywhere.

To be a better leader and a future ready leader, we need to move away from the traditional leadership styles that are individual-centered and to a more relationally oriented style – transformational leadership, democratic leadership, servant leadership and collaborative leadership.

This new approach to leadership means rather than having a hero who tells us what to do, we need a servant who inspires us, empowers us and helps us do the work ourselves. Leadership is shifted from “power over” to “power with.”

A true leader is a transformational leader, not a transactional manager. A transformational leader helps his or her followers become self-empowered leaders and change agents. Transformational leaders can articulate vision and values clearly so their followers, the new self-empowered leaders, know where to go and what to do.

In The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, author John Maxwell says: “To lead tomorrow, learn today. Leadership doesn’t develop in a day. It takes a lifetime.”

Starting today, cultivate the following characteristics of great leaders:

• Characters – “Leadership is character in action.” – James Hunter
• Competence – Your emotional intelligence is as important as your IQ, if not more important. Hire people who are competent and smarter than you. “Competence is doing the right thing, the right way at the right time.” -Sheila Murray Bethel
• Collaboration – Seek to forge alliances both inside and outside of the organization. “Including colleagues and constituents in decision-making and problem solving strengthens organizations and builds participants’ commitment.” – David D. Chrislip
• Compassion – Create a caring, respectful, people-centered culture within your organization. “Take care of your people and they will take care of your business, not just because they have to, but because they want to.” – Lee Cockerell
• Connection – Connect with yourself, connect with others personally, and connect to the world. Forging the bond between people can strengthen teamwork. “Leaders touch a heart before they ask for a hand.” – John Maxwell
• Continued learning – All great leaders are lifelong learners.
• Empowerment – “Only secure leaders give power to others. Leading well is not about enriching yourself, it’s about empowering others. Believe in people and give your power away.”  - John Maxwell
• Humility –Have a humble spirit. Admit mistakes and learn from them. To be the best leader is to be the best servant. Choose service to others over self-interest.
• Humor and fun – Don’t take yourself too seriously. Have a sense of humor. Laugh at yourself so others will laugh with you. Celebrate and make work fun.
• Inspiring and motivational – “Leaders are to influence people and inspire people to act.” – James Hunter
• Mentoring and legacy – “When you invest in others, you gain the opportunity to create a legacy that will outlive you. The best leaders lead today with tomorrow in mind by making sure they invest in leaders who will carry their legacy forward.” – John Maxwell
• Openness and transparency – Openness in mind, heart, policies and dealings encourages curiosity, creativity and innovation.
• Trust – Character and competence are the foundations of trust; trust is the foundation of leadership. When you believe in people, they will believe in themselves and rise to greatness.
• Vision, purpose and values – “Leadership is getting people to want to do what you want them to do because they share your purpose, vision and values.” – Kevin Freiberg

Along the leadership development journey and in your practice as a leader, pay attention to the following pitfalls:

• Having tunnel vision
• Micromanaging
• Demanding perfection
• Having low self-esteem and confidence
• Having emotional insecurity and immaturity
• Making decisions based on emotions
• Acting as a roadblock between upper managers and employees
• Acting differently in front of their superiors and subordinates
• Blaming others for failures and taking credit for others’ successes
• Making assumptions without fact-checking
• Reacting negatively to criticism.
• Showing favoritism
• Being rules-oriented rather than people-oriented

Learning about leadership skills from reading and attending classes is important; learning from other leaders is equally as important. Both good and bad examples can teach us valuable lessons.

But what’s even more important in this process is application and practice. We become better leaders by applying our learning, knowledge and experience to our everyday lives. To become better leaders, we must be willing to change and grow.

Wherever you are in your organization and in your life, start the leadership journey today with the first step. Be the leader you were created to be and be future ready.

Qin Tang is a librarian at the Minnesota Department of Transportation. After graduating from college in China, she studied in Germany for five years on a scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Service receiving her MA in German. She came to the U.S. in 1991 and fell in love with libraries as she spent countless hours reading and using the Madison Public Library to learn English. She received her MLIS from the University of Wisconsin – Madison in 1994. Qin has worked in public, academic, corporate and government libraries. She was profiled in the March 2007 issue of Information Outlook - “A roundabout route to Minnesota”. Qin is also a writer and blogger. Read her article “There is no place like the library” and connect with her via LinkedIn or Twitter @TangQin.

by Margaret Ostrander, Minnesota Chapter, IT & KM Divisions

Sometimes being future ready means growing our roots in new directions. At the core of our professional ethos is a service ethic focused on the needs of our users.

A recent enterprise search implementation at Thomson Reuters provides a compelling case study for keeping users at the heart of everything we do. Just one indicator of what this project provided to users is an astounding turnabout in data points before and after the search implementation – where previously 90% of our users’ experience with search was strongly negative, this trend was flipped to a 90% strongly positive user experience after the launch of our new search.

Our users’ delight can be attributed directly to rigorous user-focused methods of testing and validating the search experience.

User Observation: Design with the user in mind

User observation focuses the interaction of typical end-users with the user interface features of the search engine.  In our case, relevance of search results is not studied in this portion of testing. Instead, the goal is to increase knowledge about how people actually use search results pages, to identify areas that work for users and those that are barriers. User experience testing also opens doors to hear unanticipated feedback from users about their preferences in using an enterprise search tool.

A major tenant underlying user observation is that analysis of what users actually do, versus what they say, provides a more actionable picture into their needs, preferences and stumbling blocks – and thus a sound basis for the design of an easy-to-use system.

After brief warm-up questions, a moderator guides the user, prompting for reactions, thoughts, insights and feedback. While scripted search scenarios provide valuable comparative data across all users, the most robust and valuable information is mined from searches that users come up with themselves. This portion of user observation offered the team clear insights, and a hands-on, real understanding about both the users and their information needs.

Relevancy Testing: Optimizing search results from the user’s point of view

Clearly, the most important thing to determine when looking at any search engine is how valuable search results are to the user.  Actual search behavior of enterprise users formed the basis of carefully selecting a mix of test queries for relevancy testing. The majority of queries were intentionally drawn from the pool of the most common search queries that our users use, found in the “short head” of search logs, but also balanced with queries from the “long tail” and other examples seen in user observation sessions.

Specific information needs of users were associated with each query so that search results could be judged accurately and consistently. Again, these use cases were defined based on real life examples. Selecting a good group of queries for relevancy testing is as much an art as a science, and the search team found this aspect of relevancy testing to be particularly challenging and interesting.

Iterative rounds of relevancy testing were conducted by corporate librarians on the search team, with a variety of scoring methods for each query. Testing results were used to adjust the search engine’s relevancy settings until search results reached an optimized state. The hard numbers provided by the relevancy testing protocol were also critical in gaining an objective view in how relevant search results corresponded to user needs. The numbers also moved us away from the danger of reacting to biased “gut feelings” towards a clear, accurate methodology that accounted for relevancy as users see it.

Alpha Testing: Involving power users

As the launch of the search engine drew closer, a light weight testing protocol involved a core group of intranet power users. Testers were asked to explore the new search environment.  At this point, we were especially excited to find that in 81% of queries, Alpha users were finding what they needed on the first try, and 97% did not experience any technical problems.  These and other data points verified that the user interface design and search results relevancy was meeting – and often exceeding –  the expectations of Alpha users. At the same time, Alpha user feedback uncovered a few issues that were significant to resolve before moving into a broader Beta release.

Beta Testing: Widen the net of user feedback

Close before the search engine went live, a group of 10,000 users were invited to use search in a Beta environment. Feedback gained through focused survey questions revealed Beta users’ experience was also overwhelmingly positive, mirroring that of our Alpha users. The focus at this point was to test the search engine’s capacity for increased, live traffic and to spot any red flags prior to launch. Beta results were also valued by senior stakeholders, as they could see in a quick snapshot of real users’ experience and feedback before the new search tool was rolled out to all employees.

Additional Testing

Further testing critical to an optimal user experience included testing content processing, content permissioning, browser compatibility, performance (speed), and load testing. The methodologies presented here aim to provide repeatable, proven, and practical tactics to test an enterprise search engine so that its relevance, usability, and accuracy can be optimized for a superior user experience.

Margaret Ostrander, MLIS, is an information professional who enjoys connecting people with knowledge through innovative uses of technology.  She is Manager of Search at Thomson Reuters, a provider of intelligent information for the world’s businesses and professionals. She was recently a co-recipient of the Innovation in Action Award from the Minnesota Chapter of SLA, and was named an SLA Rising Star in 2009.  Margaret recently co-presented on User Observation techniques at the Libraries & Technology conference and a MN SLA Chapter continuing education event.  She has published articles on information seeking behavior in the international journal New Library World (2010) and the “Best Young Professionals” issue of Library Hi Tech (2008). Margaret invites you to connect with her at http://www.linkedin.com/in/margaretostrander.