by Jan Sykes, President, Information Management Services (Illinois Chapter, Knowledge Management and Leadership & Management Divisions)

We’ve seen earlier Future Ready posts recommending that information and knowledge professionals apply principles of design to our work. This idea was reinforced this week in a keynote presentation at the ILA (Illinois Library Association) conference by Duane Bray of the design firm IDEO. He noted that they often found that people in the trenches have some of the best insights into user behaviors, emerging trends and new ways of working. Are we, as information professionals, actively observing and engaging our colleagues in conversations that help us identify emerging practices and opportunities? Or, do we use our extremely busy schedules and full work load as justification to continue our “business as usual” mode? In order to develop new and creative, user-centered ways of making business information readily available to our clients, our antennae must be sensitive to changing signals in our environment.

Mr. Bray described several emerging behaviors they have identified in recent work in the education and healthcare sectors including: human multitasking, mediated conversations (engagement and reliance on input from our social network), melding of online and offline worlds, and leveraging of collective intelligence (ratings and commentary offered by others across a range of products and services, e.g., YELP reviews). Most of us would probably acknowledge seeing these same behaviors. The challenge is to transition our mindset and our service models to incorporate this reality. It is critical for us to do so to remain relevant and competitive. While we may feel we are caught up in whirlwinds of change, I like the concept of small-scale, rapid prototyping to test new services or products within our control and within our respective communities. In collaboration with diverse small groups of clients and colleagues, new tools, technologies, and resources can be quickly tested. Failure on a small scale is an inexpensive learning experience and helps us refocus our planning and energy in a direction that is likely to have a more positive outcome. Successful prototyping lays the groundwork (and business case) for an expanded implementation. More importantly, such work helps us move with added confidence into the future.

Jan Sykes has over 20 years experience in the information industry. Currently, she leads Information Management Services, Inc., an independent consultancy.  Her work is focused on information and knowledge management projects, including needs assessments, content portfolio reviews, contract negotiations and strategic planning activities. Prior to beginning her own consulting firm, Jan was Senior Director of Client Services Consulting for Knight-Ridder Information, Inc.

Jan is active in SLA: she was president of the IL chapter in 2002 and chaired the Association Nominating Committee in 2005. She served on the Board of KM-Chicago and also on the Board of Trustees for the public library in her community.

Info-entrepreneurs, represented by the Association of Independent Information Professionals, stand out as innovative, forward thinking, and client focused information professionals.  This series of posts delivers future ready solutions and strategies from current and past presidents of AIIP.  As industry thought leaders they have much to share about staying ahead of the curve and delivering cost effective solutions to clients worldwide.  In this insightful series of postings readers will learn how to create a job for life by listening for opportunity, watching for changes, stretching to acquire new skills, finding a balance, planning for the long term, and drawing on your strengths. — C.S.

by Cindy Shamel

My livelihood depends upon successfully engaging a target market willing to pay cash money for my products and services.  Today I have an established client base, but sustainability requires strategic and ongoing monitoring looking for gaps and opportunities.  To maintain or increase revenue, I systematically seek to balance my client base with the proper mix of products and services.  Sometimes this means identifying a new target market to serve with existing services.  Other times it means developing new products or services for an existing clientele.

How do you identify new target markets or services to offer?  Track, watch, lurk, and pay attention.  As Susanne Bjorner suggested in yesterday’s blog post, insight often “comes when observing an activity, industry, or practice far removed from the area we are working in.”  Here are a few of the resources I use to keep the ideas flowing.

Track the Trends – It Keeps You Ahead of the Game

Follow ReadWriteWeb for insight and analysis about the internet industry.  Launched in 2003, RWW has become “one of the most popular technology blogs in the world.”  Reading this blog regularly could help you manage client expectations, develop new products or services, and anticipate the “next big thing.”

MarketingProfs delivers a range of marketing resources including five articles each week written by experts from all across the marketing field.  The site offers case studies, how-to articles, guides and reports.  This site helps me stay on top of marketing trends and tools.

Watch for Weirdness – It Helps You Think Laterally

Boing Boing delivers a steady stream of pointers and stories about technology, gadgets, science, business, and at their own admission, weirdness.  Boing Boing offers up a world outside the information profession, helping to trigger new ideas.

Lifehacker offers “tips, tricks, and downloads for getting things done.”  You never know what kind of work related idea might spring from a Lifehacker tip or trick.   Keep an open mind. Recent postings included “Ask a dumb question to spark a conversation with a stranger” and “The best web browser for Android.”  Surely I need not elaborate on the value here.

Lurk on LinkedIn – It Facilitates Learning from Others

What are your LinkedIn connections saying?  Find out by going to your LinkedIn Home page.  One of my connections just posted something about 70,000 students flocking to a free online course in artificial intelligence.  Do I need to offer online training?  Are students a good target market?  Should I start paying attention to artificial intelligence?  Maybe.

Are there LinkedIn Groups with members who might shed light on my clients, products, or services? No doubt.  One of my “industries of interest” has a group with over 25,000 members.  Hmmm, better check the buzz and see what they’re saying.

Pay Attention to Your Peers – It Provides Food for Thought

Stephen’s Lighthouse by Stephen Abram provides stimulating and innovative thinking in matters related to the information industry.  As the tagline says, “Illuminating library industry trends, innovation and information.”  Stephen’s blog includes lots of graphics, embedded videos, news, polls, and no end of content to get you thinking.

Phil Bradley’s Weblog, coming out of the UK, presents information from another perspective.  Phil says his weblog is where librarians and the internet meet.  A recent posting included something about Easy Notecards, a free educational tool for students and teachers to create, study, print and share interactive note cards.  Hmmm, that gives me an idea.  Gotta run!

Cindy Shamel has operated a business providing information services since 1998.  She served the Association of Independent Information Professionals as president in 2003-2004 and the San Diego Chapter of SLA in 2009.  In 2006 AIIP awarded her the Sue Rugge Memorial Award for mentoring.

Introduction (Toni Wilson – Chair, SLA CI Division)

By popular demand, members of SLA’s CI Division are again blogging for the FR365 effort during the week of September 26, focused specifically on competitive intelligence processes and applications. We are delighted to provide content and an understanding that will help the FR365 audience understand what CI is and how it can be applied to add value across organizations. Helping ourselves and our organizations become future ready is the ultimate value delivered by a productive and successful competitive intelligence program. We hope you will enjoy and apply some of the concepts and practices we share with you during CI Week.

by Toni Wilson, Cincinnati Chapter, Competitive Intelligence Division

A common message mentioned during nearly every CI Division session at this year’s SLA conference was that competitive intelligence is not about our organization’s competitors, but about keeping our organizations competitive. This is an important clarification, but what does it really mean in practice? A couple of topics, to which we can and should apply our CI process, can have the effect of changing a marketplace as a whole – ultimately impacting our organizations and our existing competitors in the future.

One important topic on which we should focus as part of a CI effort is the role of changing technologies. Consider the role of streaming technology and its effect on cable and satellite TV services providers, as a current example. Huge numbers of individuals and families are cancelling their traditional cable or satellite services to depend on online streaming services for entertainment and/or invest in tools that make the process more convenient (I’m personally a fan of Roku). I’m not aware of the statistics, but this trend must be having an enormous effect on the providers of the traditional services. If these emerging technologies are not an immediate threat to these businesses, they likely will be in the future. Did they see this coming? Maybe…if they were future-looking and their CI functions were focused on the emergence of the streaming technologies, in addition to the activities of their established competitors. If not, they must be struggling to respond to these marketplace changes, which certainly impacts their respective abilities to compete successfully. I’d rather be the intelligence practitioner who brought this trend to the attention of my decision makers years ago than the individual forced to explain why revenues are being eroded today.

Competitive intelligence can also help identify opportunities for organizations, in addition to future threats. An obvious example includes the government legislation and regulations that have been created around the demand for environmental protection and the popularity of sustainability. Related laws were developed over a period of time – a focused CI process could easily identify opportunities for new products and services by using published bill- and regulation-tracking information, among other sources. The laws have impacted a number of industries, the most successful of which identified the related opportunities early and created and executed plans to take advantage of them.

While I’m certainly not recommending this, it’s possible that if the only thing we accomplish is to help our organizations understand the technologies and legal or political trends impacting their ability to compete successfully in the future – even if we don’t focus on individual competitors – we will be successful in adding value and making a real and lasting difference into the future.

Toni Wilson is the principal consultant at MarketSmart Research Services. She is an experienced competitive intelligence practitioner, having performed hundreds of projects over the past 20+ years, in a variety of industries and throughout the world. Prior to establishing MarketSmart Research in 2000, Toni was a corporate intelligence professional at LexisNexis for more than a dozen years. She is an expert in sources, tools and techniques for intelligence collection, and frequently speaks to groups and coaches individuals regarding the CI process. Toni is a volunteer leader, prolific author, enthusiastic mentor and professional award winner. She is the current chair of SLA’s Competitive Intelligence Division.

by Michelle Manafy

There is certainly a sense that “kids today” read less and that they have short attention spans. However, technology has actually triggered an explosion of media usage among young people in the last five years – so much so that young people spend about 7 1/2 hours a day consuming media, according to a study of 8- to 18-year-olds by the Kaiser Family Foundation. And, while Kaiser reports that print is the only category of media consumption to lose ground among young people, within the print category only newspapers and magazines declined. Book reading held steady over the previous five years and even increased by a few minutes a day over the last decade. (Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds).

Yet despite their content consumption, young people today can be baffling when it comes to understanding how to engage them in your content products and services as they are also notoriously brand-fickle and their attention — while not at all limited in its span — is fractured among multiple delivery devices (often at the same time).

In my work on the book Dancing With Digital Natives: Staying in Step with the Generation That’s Transforming the Way Business Is Done (May 2011, CyberageBooks, http://bit.ly/DwDNsite), I came across many valuable resources for ways in which to rethink customer (reader) engagement in light of this generation. One of these is the NAA Foundation (http://www.naafoundation.org), which publishes a great deal of research on the topic of engaging younger readers, replete with examples of engagement strategies being tested by educators and publishers, much of which can be applied outside the newspaper industry.

With regards to the native’s multi-platform tendencies, the NAA suggests that we stop scoffing at multitasking and make it work for us instead. They ask, “Have you ever thought about what kinds of products you might provide that would work well with the other things young people do?” In the information industry, we certainly see an increase of products that integrate information into workflow on a variety of platforms. However when we look to the future, at the digital native, integration will have to go beyond workflow, and integrate the consumer into all aspects of content consumption, distribution, and even creation.

We all see an increase of social sharing mechanisms on consumer and professional information products, and even on public library sites. However, these tactics are only a start. The NAA “Youth Media DNA” report states that, “respondents were more likely to recall reading school newspapers prepared by their peers … rather than newspaper youth content prepared for them.” In fact, UK research firm Capgemini found that for an increasing number of young users, content gets added value from the ability to discuss it collectively (http://bit.ly/e93AJr). These online community dynamics alter traditional patterns of trust: consumers, especially the younger generation, have more confidence in peer-generated or crowdsourced content. So while previous generations might have been loyal to trusted info-brands, younger consumers trust their social lens to focus them on worthwhile information.

When we look forward to creating products and services that will engage our next generation of content consumers, we need to be aware that their different content consumption habits are not a death knell. Rather, if we understand their desire to consume content on their own terms, on a variety of platforms, actively engage with it in a socially mediated way — and even participate in its creation — we can chart a path to engagement that will resonate with this generation of content consumers.

Michelle Manafy is director of content for UK based digital publisher, Free Pint, Limited (www.freepint.com), which provides publications and resources that meet the needs of information professionals. An award-winning writer and editor, Michelle’s focus is on emerging trends in digital content and how they shape successful business practices. She is also the co-editor of and a contributor to the new book Dancing With Digital Natives: Staying in Step with the Generation that is Transforming the Way Business is Done (http://bit.ly/DwDNsite).

by Eric Garland

The Special Libraries Association has chosen, most wisely, for this year’s theme to be “Future Ready 365.” The current moment is not only the perfect time to become future-focused, but moreover, the information professionals of SLA are the perfect group to help their organizations transform their cultures to make this possible. The key is intelligence.

Let us get some terms defined. The “future” is not just an extrapolation of yesterday’s growth trends – it’s a transformative disruption, a non-linear break from the world we know. Our current economy’s success has been based on the availability of endless resources, scarce information, and stable institutions. Tomorrow’s economy will be defined by scarce resources (notably petroleum, potable water, and certain heavy metals), endless information, and unstable institutions; a complete turnaround.

Yesterday’s success was driven by rapidly expanding industrial consumerism, buoyed by a large Boomer demographic and the complete failure of Soviet Communism. Every company, every country could follow essentially the same gameplan. Expand! Merge and acquire! Advertise! Downsize! Securitize! Profitize! Given unprecedented resource constraints, tomorrow’s success will be about each company, country, region, and individual choosing a creative path to transforming how value is created and shared. What’s more, as the financial system begins to strain under the weight of its own internal contradictions, we will not even account for it in the same manner.

Yes, this is a big deal. No, nobody has the answers. I don’t; as librarians, you don’t either. You will, however, begin receiving some very interesting questions.

• What is the business model of the future?
• Who are the competitors we haven’t yet even thought of?
• Who will our customer be in ten years? Twenty? Do we even know who they are yet?
• What are the wildcards, the low-probability, high-impact events that could mean disaster — or fabulous success?

Now that we know what might shape the future, we want to be ready. This does not mean you need to predict the future, but you can very well anticipate it, prepare in advance for your actions, and to act when prompted by events. To meet this high standard, an organization must have a steady stream of intelligence. This is where librarians can be major catalysts. You can become experts in where the best information resides, which questions to ask next, and even who can help answer them. Data is worthless, analysis is king, and insight is golden. As librarians, you can help your colleagues find trend data from the least biased sources and forecasts from the world’s best subject matter experts. You can ask the follow up questions - What does this mean? What information do we need next?  What scenarios are suggested by what we are finding?

Very few organizations create a culture that regularly asks these questions and provides the services that give answers. The ones who do are beating the market, indeed creating their own future. When SLA exhorts you to become future ready, it is declaring itself to be a group of leaders who truly understand what this transformation is about. Their challenge is daunting, exhilarating, and bound to make your intellectual life – and your career – an adventure for years to come.

Accept that challenge.

Author, speaker, futurist and intelligence expert Eric Garland guides leaders of all stripes through a world of chaotic transformation. He watches future trends, competition, geopolitics and everything else. He gives people ways to understand the change and make better decisions. You can read Eric Garland’s latest book, How to Predict the Future…and WIN!!!, follow him on Twitter (@ericgarland, and on the Web at www.ericgarland.co and www.competitivefutures.com.