The SLA Board recently adopted a very ambitious strategic agenda with five elements that will guide decision making by the Association’s leaders. These five strategic agenda elements are: (1) annual conference, (2) professional development, (3) creating a richer volunteer experience, (4) opening new markets, and (5) growth through diversity. By adopting this strategic agenda, SLA leaders are prepared and resolved to make decisions, solve problems, forge judgment, and plan forward.

In this Future Ready 365 Blog Post, we’re examining strategic agenda Item 4: “opening new markets.” Each element of a strategic agenda must support the organization’s mission and be results-focused. This one certainly is. Part of SLA’s mission is to strengthen its members through learning and networking initiatives. One of SLA’s historical strengths has been its ability to bring together its membership around learning opportunities and networking initiatives, whether locally, regionally or internationally based. For a number of years SLA leaders have envisioned the need to “build a bigger tent” in order to expand these opportunities and initiatives – that is, to welcome members whose role in the information industry may not be defined as traditional or whose world view may be different from that of North America. And expansion of membership is definitely something that is measurable. As your 2012 President, I have a personal stake in the success of this one, because in my vision for SLA’s future, I forecast a membership increase of 15%.

During 2012, your Association leaders will be looking at a number of issues that put focus on this vision by looking at both internal and external factors that either promote or inhibit the opening of new markets. We will examine the impact of our current fiscal structure, our governance structure, our geographic structure, our marketing structure, our technology structure, and our collaborative structure on our ability to accomplish this goal. What does our current internal and unit-related fiscal structure do to further this goal? Is our current governance structure flexible enough to work in new markets? As an international organization, are we maximizing contemporary geographic organizational structures to best serve our members and those yet to join SLA? Will our current marketing efforts reach these new markets? Are we maximizing new technologies to reach and serve these new markets? Can we leverage collaboration among SLA’s current units and with external groups and organizations to maximize our support for members in these new markets?

These are but a few of the questions that will be examined as we envision SLA’s future through the lens of strategic agenda Item 4: “Opening New Markets.”

Brent Mai is SLA’s President, 2012.

The Challenge of Information Overload & the Opportunity of Abundance

by Charlie Davidson, CEO, Attensa

In Part I of this post, I called out the “Opportunity for Information Professionals in an era of Information Abundance.”  I also explored the many challenges created by the ubiquity of information and why traditional information services and tools struggle to address the problems and opportunities of information abundance. Chiefly, this struggle occurs because current information gathering and delivery tools were designed in and for a paradigm of information scarcity rather than information abundance.

In conjunction with this shift from scarcity to abundance, the role of information professionals is evolving as well. Alexander Feng, director, strategic research at the dd+p group and chairman of the Pharmaceutical & Health Technology Division at SLA, offers a wonderful perspective on this in his essay “Corporate Librarian 2.0: New Core Competencies” (PDF). He observes, “the core role of information specialists is changing from information gatekeeper to information guru.” Feng believes this can empower librarians to become both “information enablers” and “knowledge creators.”

Information professionals are uniquely positioned for this important new role by virtue of understanding myriad information sources and how information maps to organizational objectives. What is missing, however, are the processes and enabling technologies to empower them.

The best part of this evolution is that it does not require radical changes to company processes or worker behavior. The basic notion is to implement a simple framework with four essential elements:

• An aggregation engine that unites digital sources inside and outside the organization.
• An automated way to rapidly capture and organize information into topics relevant to the organization and its people.
• Content delivery options that span offices, geographies, viewing devices and more.
• Analytics that report how information is being consumed to drive content recommendations and purchasing decisions.

These elements are described in the graphic below.

These four elements form the foundation of a solution that is robust enough to deliver on the promise of exploiting the abundance of information available today — and capitalize on the changes to come. These innovations will bring immediate value to your organization by extracting new and untapped value from the information already flowing through it. You can learn more about this here.

A question I often get asked is: “How do information professionals get started sponsoring these needed changes?”

Here is the good news! The business justification for these projects and the ROI are straightforward and provide impact across different roles in the organization. You will find many friends and supporters to help make your business case. In our work with customers across various industries, common interests have emerged between information professionals, knowledge management professionals, marketing and sales operations, CIOs and senior technology professionals.

Effective information management generally goes to the heart of many corporate initiatives and the connections between your initiative and other roles in the organization will be mutually beneficial. For example, knowledge management professionals gain insights into the intellectual assets of the organization and are able to effectively connect people, information and processes. CIOs and technologists harvest greater value from existing technology and communication assets. Marketing and sales operations professionals can grow revenue more effectively and empower better customer relationships.

Of course, the ultimate value accrues when the people across the organization receive more relevant and timely information about the topics that matter to them so they can find prospects, monitor competitors or industries and keep clients satisfied.

Charlie Davidson is the CEO of Attensa, an enterprise software company solving the problem of information overload for businesses and professionals. He serves on the Steering Committee for the Information Overload Research Group and is also a member of the Oregon and Washington State Bar Associations. Charlie can be reached at charlie.davidson@attensa.com on Twitter @CharlieDavidson or  at +1 971.340.2000 ext. 100.

Hello from the nation’s capital!  DC/SLA is excited to be contributing all of this week’s FutureReady365 posts (thanks to our future-thinking Communications Secretary, Chris Vestal).  We are a diverse community of 800+ information professionals, with members from D.C., Maryland, Virginia, as well as 30 other U.S. states and 12 countries.  You’ll see this diversity reflected in the range of future ready ideas presented in posts throughout the week.  We hope our posts will spark some thought and conversation and, of course, your comments. Most of all, we want to help keep the spark of the FutureReady blog alive  – a spark that’s become a fire, gathering us around it to brainstorm our way into the future. — Mary Talley, DC/SLA President (2011)

by Laura Soto-Barra, Washington, DC Chapter, News Division

Three years ago, I attended a presentation at the Knight Digital Media Center; Prof. Ernest J. Wilson III, Dean of the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California welcomed us, NPR leaders attending a seminar in his campus on planning our digital future. Dean Wilson’s main idea was to encourage us to prepare for the future by understanding the digital environment and transform ourselves to accept the disruption. It was then that I learned that that there is a capacity gap in e-leadership that needs to be closed. He said e-leaders are the innovators and early adopters that spread new technologies in their communities and organizations and that e-leaders are scarce. According to Dean Wilson, it is not easy to find the right kind of talent to provide e-leadership and he lists the competencies needed in this new environment as SAKE: Skills, Attitude, Knowledge and Experience.

Translating these competencies for the library field, I believe that there is enough talent among information professionals that makes us e-leaders in our organizations; I’m afraid that we have not been able to unleash that talent because we don’t want to fail or because we don’t have enough confidence in our skills. In this digital workplace there is space for failure. Do a search on “failure:” and you will see how much these days people are talking about it. “Fail fast,” they say and you will learn. Let’s take a look at SAKE.

For Future Ready, we need communications Skills that go beyond a reference transaction or a training session; we need to share ideas and concepts and listen and be able to change our behavior after capturing what we have heard. Librarians know how to do this but we need more flexibility in our concepts. How many times do we alter our procedures when a new librarian arrives in the team and suggests new ideas? We need political skills to navigate an organization to put words into action. This is what we have heard from Steve Abram for decades: work without a desk and walk and talk; Laurence Pruzak told us once in an SLA conference, that librarians engender trust and that we should take advantage of that talent by talking to people.

The Attitudes competence Dean Wilson describes is the description of a librarian: we are passionate, have empathy, our intellectual curiosity has no limits and we know about tenacity in face of opposition and failure; we are constantly asking for inclusion. But something difficult for us is to have high tolerance for ambiguity. Our training is based on rigid concepts and our practices demand consistent accuracy and rigor in applying rules and standards. Can we keep standards and accept ambiguity? We have to take risks and accept that all around us, the environment is inconsistent, contradictory, unstructured and unexpected.

Our professional training gives us Knowledge: we know theories and concepts and have a deep understanding of how to translate and migrate manual practices to digital workflows. We have adopted technologies for decades but now everyone searches, tags content and creates metadata. Go beyond the comfortable and understand web development. Continue traveling as a hobby and participate in multicultural networks that allow you to know people different than you. Cultivate networks outside your library world and apply the new knowledge in your library.

Finally Dean Wilson mentions Experience as a requirement to fill the capacity gap; this experience is obtained by working in different environments, organizations and settings. We should not apply ourselves the label: “academic,” “legal,” “public,” “special”; we are information professionals whose training is transferable. Experience is obtained by taking risks, by moving to work in different cities and different organizations.

If you are a library manager you have tools to prepare your staff to be Future Ready. Prepare budgets that allow travel so that your staff go to conferences and get training; sacrifice collections or furniture for your staff’s training; be creative, inclusive and transparent by designing meaningful jobs that reflect your team’s skills and give them autonomy to modify your practices. Predicate and advocate for SAKE and read John Berry’s article who recommends seeking out the new librarians. That column impressed me and I understood that the new librarians are better prepared than me to close the capacity gaps in e-leadership in the very near future.

LS-B is NPR’s Senior Librarian. She is a Chilean-Canadian-American librarian who has worked in many library settings. She has first hand experience in that information science skills are transferable and highly valuable, that libraries are libraries are libraries, and that you have to re-locate to find the best jobs. Her last two jobs have been in newspapers in Jacksonville, Florida and in Syracuse, New York; in both newsrooms –as well as at NPR–she worked with highly competent and smart librarians, obtained strong management support, job satisfaction and professional rewards.