Online Information

Think big Don’t fear the figures. Grasp them, love them and use them

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Get the knowledge Canny use of the web could give your sales force the edge

BizTechReport.co.uk

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In this together

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There is now little your punters can’t find out about you November 2011

AnProduced independent distributed andadvertising publishedsupplement

by Lyonsdown who intake The Guardian on behalf of Lyonsdown, who take sole responsibility for the contents. sole responsibility for its contents

Drowning in data?

Turn online information into business success

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Business Technology

November 2011

an independent report from lyonsdown, distributed with the guardian

an independent report from lyonsdown, distributed with the guardian

November 2011

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Online information – in this issue

Knowledge could be your comptitive edge The key to great knowledge management is an organisation’s ability to filter out the valuable from the mundane

By Marc Beishon

Publisher Bradley Scheffer brad@lyonsdown.co.uk Managing Editor Lucie Carrington lucie@lyonsdown.co.uk Editor Marc Beishon Creative Director Martin Nolan studio@lyonsdown.co.uk Sub Editor Amy Dickson amy@lyonsdown.co.uk Journal Assistant Natalie Luketic natalie@lyonsdown.co.uk Project Manager Marc Morrow marc@lyonsdown.co.uk For more information on any of our supplements please contact us: Telephone: 020 8349 4363 Email: info@lyonsdown.co.uk Online: www.lyonsdown.co.uk

biztechreport.co.uk Cover: Lucy Ward

Data, in all its various forms, is now so important in organisations that analysts rate it as a major competitive advantage.

McKinsey Global Institute (MGI), for example, says that analysing large data sets – or “big data” – has the “potential to transform economies, delivering a new wave of productivity growth and consumer surplus”. MGI charts a world where a torrent of information emanates from transactions, sensors and social media that is “beyond the ability of typical database software tools to capture, store, manage and analyse”.

The rise of multimedia, social media, and the “internet of things” will continue to fuel exponential growth in data for the foreseeable future and it will be those organisations that manage to extract the most value that will be the winners. For example, MGI estimates that using big data can boost a retailer’s operating margin by more than 60 per cent, if used to the full.

Organisations have been grappling with data mountains for some time.

They have been applying increasingly sophisticated data mining and business intelligence tools, and now enterprise search to deliver insight that is taking in unstructured and informal information such as that generated by social media.

Integrating a wide range of external sources from formal databases to LinkedIn, Twitter and a myriad of other web sources are becoming essential, although many firms are yet to develop a

so-called “social CRM” strategy.

As science writer James Gleick observes, it is filtering out useful knowledge that is the challenge.

Interestingly, it is not necessarily a new one. In a fascinating look at the history of information Gleick notes that earlier times also saw panic about new technology – for example the telegraph.

Relatively new, is the science of information and one job function that seems to be secure is that of the information professional given that making sense of the data explosion will be on the agenda for many firms.

Couple information science with issues such as copyright, privacy, mobile access and the changing nature of work and it would indeed seem that information has become a commodity to be relegated to the cloud and data centres.

How the workplace and the way we use information changes will no doubt be determined by the younger generations X and Y, who will almost certainly carve out now types of job when today’s conventional knowledge workers are no longer needed. As Graeme Codrington, a future work specialist, notes: “Computers will continue to replace those who only use their brains for repetitive tasks – no matter how complex those tasks might be.” He even has lawyers, accountants and doctors in mind and fully expects a new digital generation to be riding an information wave in very different ways in his lifetime.

59%

The annual increase in the volume on online information worldwide Page 5

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The number of languages monitored online by Dell to provide marketing intelligence Page 9

800bn The gigabytes of data currently flowing round the world Page 10

$100

The value of free apps offered to BlackBerry users to compensate for October’s network crash Page 13

Contributors Marc Beishon is a technology, science and business journalist covering IT and telecoms, sales and marketing, healthcare and general business for corporate audiences and consumers.

Marc has worked on IT and healthcare magazines and on New Scientist.

Tim Buckley Owen is news editor for FreePint’s VIP magazine and LiveWire blog, which help expert users keep up-to-date with business information developments and products. He also runs training courses in information skills.

Elspeth Hyams is a contributing editor to the Chartred Institute of Library and Information Professionals publication, Update, and a freelance journalist specialising in change management and the information society.

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November 2011

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Industry view Burlison Photography

A modern twist to an old tale Libraries must embrace new opportunities such as eBooks to become resource centres offering cutting-edge technology to sustain visitor numbers and attract new users Reinventing libraries was on the agenda when prestigious speakers from around the world gathered at Axiell’s high-profile symposium in London in November. The conference demonstrated that libraries will remain at the heart of our reading experience although this could now be on a smartphone, eReader or, of course, a physical book.

Visitors are taking their expectations of technology to the library – and libraries must be prepared.

Allen Weiner, of US technology consulting group Gartner, talked of ‘learning, dreaming, connecting, creating’ as the cornerstones of the library offering and how libraries are moving towards next generation resource centres that offer cutting-edge technology, show people how to acquire and transform information and facilitate content foraging.

Libraries should be creative incubators; laboratories to explore new ideas; reading rooms to borrow books in any media; offer

opportunities to meet up, tweet up and collaborate; and a content creation centre where editorial content can be created without big infrastructure.

The CEO of Irish eBook distributor, ePub Direct, Gareth Cuddy, covered the rise in the use of eBooks over the past four years.

In the US, eBooks already provide about 20 per cent of publishers’ revenues and is predicted to be around 50 per cent by 2014. The UK is around 12 to 18 months behind the US, but already eBooks provide UK publishers with about 5 to 8 per cent of their revenue.

Cuddy envisages physical books becoming valued objects and purchased more as gift items, but confirmed that the act of reading is very much to stay with us but in the e-form. However, patrons are still visiting libraries – eBooks bring new users to the library and one of the key metrics for libraries going forward could be based on digital loans of eBooks. Crucially, technology developments are also helping libraries to reduce

Gert Poulsen, deputy librarian of Copenhagen Business School

costs: it costs libraries €8.50 to get a physical book on to the shelf, compared with just €1.30 for an electronic book.

The perspective from Denmark was similar: Copenhagen Business School’s deputy librarian, Gert Poulsen, described the process of e-transformation in his library and the impending eBook tsunami: eBooks are easy to access and purchase and cheaper than physical ‘pBooks’. The recession and associated cost pressures are helping to drive eBooks by changing behaviour faster than otherwise. Their book budget has almost doubled from €72k in 2010 to €133k in 2011 and the eBook budget now represents about 45 per cent compared to 55 per cent for pBooks. Correspondingly, pBook loans have decreased by 45 per cent over the past five years while eBook use has grown by 75 per cent.

Poised to help libraries to meet these opportunities and challenges – and already being used by many customers across Scandinavia and the UK – are Axiell’s own

technology solutions. Axiell is a leading technology and services specialist for public libraries, archives and museums across the UK and in Europe. One of their solutions is Arena, a customisable 24/7 library web portal. It offers the knowledge curation tools essential for the new era that allows the user to read, categorise and recommend large and growing amounts of content – both the pBook and the eBook material – and invites user involvement through ratings, comments, sharing favourite quotes and tags.

Blending physical and electronic documents in the library catalogue is also facilitated by Axiell’s other solutions, which is essential for libraries to ensure all stock is fully discoverable and used. Axiell’s Culturenet portal brings together all local information into one easily searchable interface to make them more visible to the public and get the most out of our information assets. www.axiell.com/london

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Online information Intelligent moves

When it comes to online information, it pays to think big. Effective use of data is just a culture shift away

Big data With worldwide information volume increasing at a minimum of 59 per cent annually, analysing large datasets will become a “key basis of competition”, says management consultancy McKinsey. But technology analyst Gartner warns that today’s information management practices are not up to the task of handling it.

What you know counts

By Tim Buckley Owen

Barely a decade ago, online information for business was niche territory, occupied by corporate librarians and techno-geeks.

But developments such as the BlackBerry, Facebook, Twitter and most recently the iPad have transformed the landscape.

“Staying ahead of the competition requires deep and focused market insights, strong and collaborative relationships within the organisation and with clients and suppliers, and a high degree of flexibility in a mobile and distributed workforce,” says Ceri Hughes, global knowledge business leader at accountancy firm KPMG. Hughes adds that supporting knowledge sharing “may require a culture shift, and not just a set of enabling technologies”.

It also increasingly requires specialist staff. “Employers are particularly keen to employ professionals with industry knowledge and IT and project management experience as well as analytical and writing skills,” says Darron Chapman of TFPL, a recruitment agency for information professionals.

Their role is to make sense of the huge amounts of data enterprises now have to deal with – so called “big data”. “Big data comes not just

in enormous volumes but in many types including audio, video and the text on web pages,” says Will Reilly of IBM. “It also comes at you quickly because it is created around events as they unfold.”

Reilly cites Watson, the computer that took part in US game show Jeopardy earlier this year, as an example of a system handling “big data”. Similar technology is also helping one energy company find the best site for wind turbines, while another, in the securities industry, is using it to execute more than 100,000 transactions a second.

Possible solutions and technologies abound. For example, pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca employs linked data technology, enabling its disparate systems to share data to support a project tracking and decision management.

Even traditional sectors are raising their game. Andy Sparkes, of legal information provider LexisNexis, acknowledges that lawyers have not always adapted quickly to new technology. But changing client needs are forcing them to become more productive so LexisNexis now underpins its extensive database of content with applications to support workflow, customer relationship management, case management and document automation.

“Don’t be scared of the abundance of information – turn it to your advantage,” says Bonnie Cheuk, global head of knowledge and collaboration at banking company Citi. “With user-generated information, you can leverage the wisdom of the employees on the front line who are meeting customers day-to-day.”

“Leadership 2.0”, as Cheuk calls it, means focusing on finding ways to see patterns, trends and weak signals and make informed decisions by bundling fragments of information flexibly. But she adds: “It requires a change in mind-set from controlling to cherishing diversity.”

When it comes to control, Martin White of Intranet Focus, a specialist consultancy in enterprise search, believes work is still needed. “IT people have no interest in searching for information; to them a database is columns and rows,” he contends.

“Although each business unit would like to have high-class search, no one department can make a business case and IT has no interest in bringing all the interested parties together.”

The problem is the same in the key trend of accessing information on the move on mobiles, he says.

“Businesses desperately want to empower their sales or service staff

Analytics Established technology companies are scrambling to buy analytics businesses – ones that make sense of the mass of unstructured data in internal documents, emails and, increasingly, social media. Mike Lynch, co-founder of the British firm Autonomy, called it a “momentous day” when his company was acquired by technology giant Hewlett Packard.

Risk and compliance Few companies have the big picture view needed for effective risk and compliance management, says the Economist Intelligence Unit.

Social media Two thirds of bosses in small and medium-sized enterprises say that a graduate’s experience in social media is important to them, according to a recent survey for Salesforce.com. Now less inclined to restrict at-work use of social media, almost half of the firms polled use the tools to interact with customers and prospects.

Cloud computing Google’s guarantee of 99 per cent up-time for its cloud computing services amounts to a “declaration of war” on the corporate IT department, said Roger James of consultancy Computiv.

with mobile content, but IT are transfixed by the security issues.”

Mobile technology, allied to social networking, has also transformed the relationship between businesses and their customers. “The consumers of data are frequently better informed than the producers or disseminators of it,” says Sheila Fahy of law firm Allen & Overy.

For her, the implications are clear. “It’s no longer a matter of why a business needs to take information management seriously. It’s a commercial imperative.”

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Industry view

Changing the management landscape How can companies monitor daily tasks while employees work remotely in an efficient way? Business process management applications could help

Since the industrial revolution, processes have continually changed to better serve a business in the provision of goods or services that a customer wants in the timescales that are expected in the most cost-effective manner.

While all businesses have processes, those that have better knowledge and control combined with the ability to easily change them are the ones that are consistently more successful.

Technology change over the past ten years has fundamentally altered how a customer wants to interact with a company.

Customers are now more likely to use a website, mobile app, e-mail or social networking site than send a letter.

This choice also means that a single channel is unlikely to satisfy all customer expectations, and companies need to be able to seamlessly switch in response to that. The expectation of customer requests being satisfied correctly first Jarrod Poynton

time still remains. This shift is requiring companies to reconsider how they best manage customer interactions and move away from the document-centric model that has served them well in the past.

Many businesses have set up specialist teams to handle each of the different electronic channels available. These teams have grown in response to an organisation’s lack of ability to provide the mechanisms to manage the interaction and transparency that both their staff and the customer require.

For some of these channels, the team that is dealing with the enquiry is rarely doing the work themselves but is focused on ensuring that somebody else in the company treats a request with more urgency, resolves an issue or rectifies a mistake.

Business process management (BPM)-enabled applications are a solution to this challenge.

Irrespective of how a customer tries to engage in the process, the organisation can be certain that the work will be given to staff in the order of priority that is most important.

Service-level agreements

should be more than a measurement reported at the end of the month. A BPM-enabled application actively manages the work tasks and required service levels to meet both customer expectations and to achieve business goals.

Business processes are carried out by people, and getting the work to the right person is part of the challenge for a manager. In many companies, giving work out can take an inordinate amount of time, but with application support the manager can make decisions at the beginning of the day and then focus on adding value by coaching with the knowledge that everybody else in the team will be kept busy with work automatically appearing in their in-tray.

A BPM-enabled application also gives organisations the choice to allow people to work remotely. Recent research has shown that people with longer commutes have higher incidences of absenteeism, however, many service-based organisations still move the people to the workplace.

One of the most common issues raised by managers who are first looking at home working

for processing staff is how will they know that they are working?

The information available from a BPM-enabled application allows a manager to understand which of their staff is achieving what is required and allows comparison with their peers in the team and the wider organisation.

And to bring an organisation’s business process back to the customer, a BPM-enabled application allows a company to send status updates through whatever mechanism the customer or company feels is best, whether that is tweeting, sending an e-mail or letter.

For many companies, a document-centric view of a customer’s interactions has served them well over the past ten years. However, when a document no longer exists, the solutions used to control the process need to change.

Jarrod Poynton is the head of solutions at DST Global Solutions.

AWD, the company’s BPM-enabled application, supports more than 220,000 users in many of the world’s biggest financial services institutions. www.dstglobalsolutions.com/AWD

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Industry view

The power of knowledge Developing knowledge strategy can be a steep learning curve for enterprise managers but a new university programme is on hand to train the experts of the future Managing “what the company knows” is crucial in business today.

But for many managers, ensuring that a company’s intellectual capital is shared and put to best use for developing new can be an uphill battle.

Computers and IT management – by themselves – are not necessarily going to save the day when it comes to knowledge management (KM). Enterprise leadership issues are involved, and company success depends on getting people to share what they know.

Companies need strategies for dealing with these issues simply because there is too much money and staff time invested in information and knowledge for them not to do it right.

While some enterprise leaders might not be exactly sure about what “KM” means (some people

Columbia: creating a breed of information and knowledge people

just refer to it as “working with knowledge”) they are aware that company profits and organisational success depend on how knowledge development and knowledge sharing are managed

(there’s even an acronym - KD/ KS).

This is where Columbia University in New York comes into the picture, with its new graduate programme tackling the “why” of

managing intellectual capital.

Knowledge strategy has been identified by many as a new management discipline, and Columbia’s MS in Information and Knowledge Strategy puts the emphasis solidly on management principles for “the knowledge domain”.

It is designed to develop the knowledge strategists that companies need, with students trained in knowledge strategy and educated to perform as knowledge strategists. The result?

A new breed of information and knowledge “go-to” people in the workplace, people qualified to lead their companies in developing knowledge strategy and ensuring that knowledge strategy is designed to match the corporate business strategy. www.columbia.edu

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November 2011

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Industry view

Blueprint for success Creating an interface that is user-friendly for a diverse audience is challenging.

Effective information architecture design is key to attracting and inspiring users Design for information repositories, digital libraries and research environments should be about more than making things attractive. It should deliver real value by attracting interest, building confidence and inspiring uptake.

When it comes to creating interfaces for finding, creating and sharing knowledge online, the theory of what works and what doesn’t is limited. Usability theory offers a great start but it doesn’t have all the answers. How do you make something user-friendly if the audience is incredibly diverse, and may not understand the value of your resource in the first place?

The answer is simple. Before you can expect people to use your resource you need to inspire them to experiment, to explore and then

build up engagement over time.

The interface layer needs to create a wow factor that motivates people to learn a new application.

An emphasis on designing the information architecture to support different visitors, from the serendipitous explorer to the professional researcher, is also essential. If you think of the design as multi-layered, supporting various styles of use and routes to content, whilst at the same time reducing usability barriers, you’ll be a good way toward designing a resource that is truly valued by all of your audiences.

The functionality and data of an online information resource are usually extremely complex.

A successful design is the result of a collaborative process as the data and technology are hugely influential in the overall user

experience. That’s why we’re working closely with organisations such as LSE, Mimas and JISC Collections to combine our knowledge of persuasive design and online user behaviour, with the expertise of subject specialists, library professionals, and internal technical teams.

Sarah Charlton is managing director of Mickey and Mallory. Sarah is speaking with Ed Fay from the London School of Economics about their new digital library project, at the Online Information exhibition on Wednesday, 30 November, 15:50 to 16:20, Theatre 1. Visit stand 730 www.mickeyandmallory.com

commercial feature

Enterprise Search in 2012 A few predictions for the search engine market Search Technologies is the largest IT services company dedicated to search engine implementation, consulting and managed services. In a recent survey of our executives, the following points of consensus emerged: • 2012 will be FAST Search for SharePoint’s year. We estimate that 70%+ of large companies are now committed SharePoint 2010. As the volume of information controlled by (or accessed through) SharePoint balloons, FAST’s functionality will play

•

•

a key role. FAST remains a highly capable search engine.

The Google Search Appliance will continue to progress from initial point applications within companies towards enterprise-scale deployment.

Solr Lucene, the leading open source platform, will become the search system of choice for many government and media applications. Witness its recent adoption for the government’s new GIS portal and at the Guardian, to name but two.

•

New middleware applications such as Search Technologies’ Aspire framework will emerge to clean, enrich and normalize unstructured data in a sustainably manageable way.

Search Technologies is active in all of the above fields, and we look forward to another year of growth which should see our 300th customer signed and our 100th search engine expert hired.

November 2011

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Business Technology

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Online information

When it comes to the information challenge, the sales force is on the front line. Give your team the ammunition to succeed by getting the data you need, when you need it

By Marc Beishon

In the current economic climate there is one group that stands to make the most difference to the outlook for growth - sales and marketing professionals.

The commodity that can equip them to discover and unlock demand, which could be everything from what cash-rich baby boomers might buy to a possible investment decision in an overseas company, is information.

The challenge is that this business information sector is probably the most rapidly changing of all, whether data is gleaned through traditional sources of intelligence such as market reports and end of year accounts, or sophisticated tools such as web visitor analytics.

But the need to generate more leads and to research prospects means making better use of online.

Much of the bread-and-butter part of research can still be found in official company sources, including websites. But there can be more value in using one of the many fee-based sources, many of which have free parts.

However, it can be a research

Know what data will clinch a deal job in its own right just working out what sources to use, says Karen Blakeman, a consultant at RBA Information Services. The key, she says, is knowing how upto-date is your information.

“A free way of doing this is to monitor which documents are changing on the Companies House site,” she says. Google Alerts and RSS news feeds are also great ways of finding out about the latest events.

For those prepared to invest in heavyweight sales intelligence tools, such as aggregators of diverse feeds from financials

to news reports, data can be displayed to parameters set by the salesperson. They are starting to get rather clever in the way they alert people to trigger events – the happenings that could mean a business opportunity.

Karim Iskandar, vice president international of OneSource Information Services comments: “Targeting organisations that have just received a cash infusion, or undergone a merger or key executive change, could make a difference in turning the prospect into a customer. Craig Elias, in his book SHIFT! Harness The Trigger

Events That Turn Prospects Into Customers, says that selling in this way can make salespeople five times more likely to make a sale.”

He adds that iSell has taken this trigger event theory to heart by pushing the information to sales and marketing people in real time.

Integrating social media such as LinkedIn and blogs into an online research strategy is vital because this is now where much of the business conversation is going on. Those businesses that are accessing this “social CRM” seem to be tapping a rich vein. Take Microsoft UK’s developer and platform evangelist team, which responded to a dip in satisfaction in the technical community uncovered in a usual six monthly survey by starting to monitor the “influencer” community using a tool from online insight specialist Onalytica.

Maxine Cook, insight manager for the DPE team, says: “Traditional market research still has its place, but the addition of online insight gives us information about what people are really thinking right now, because it is observed, not elicited. And why interview hundreds of people if we can find the answer to a question this way instead?”

Not surprisingly, other large IT vendors are also pursuing social media information strategies.

Dell has a “command centre” that finds relevant conversations and is responsible for getting them to the right teams. It monitors the web in 11 languages. IBM has implemented a “listening for leads” programme, with “seekers” used to spot opportunities.

The upshot is that sales teams must put more effort into interactions with a customer base that is busy doing its own research at a level unseen before.

Free and easy A quick guide to meeting the information challenge Silobreaker.com allows you to search news and social media – but that’s just the beginning. It also has a network function that displays relationship between items from a search, which can show some unexpected and potentially valuable results.

Topsy.com is a social web search engine that has buttons for finding experts and trends.

Socialmention.com is another social media search and analysis tool. It’s said to be used by

some UK police forces to keep tabs on the local “mood”.

Zanran.com has been billed as “your source for data and statistics”.

Guardian.co.uk/data is The Guardian’s data store – where “facts are sacred”.

Companycheck.co.uk offers free data and monitoring of UK companies (but credit checks are chargeable).

Bizzy.co.uk also offers free company data, including some European companies, and lists directors for all large companies where they are on the board.

Ebr.org is a gateway to official company data in 23 European countries.

Skyminder.com pulls together company data from a variety of world information. Searching is free, but many documents carry a fee.

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November 2011

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Online information

Search and deploy Whether it’s libraries, business or education, in today’s world it’s not just what you know but how you use it that really counts

By Elspeth Hyams

“Although the world is awash with data, that is not the problem professions face. It is the lack of good filters.” So says the latest annual report from information specialist Thomson Reuters. In fact, when it last counted, there were already 800 exabytes of data in the world – that’s 800 billion gigabytes.

Most of us do not want all of the data, of course – we just want the right bit. Not finding what we need wastes lots of time and is a significant hidden cost in business.

The larger the organisation, the more time saved, and the greater the impact on the bottom line.

Intranet technology, content and knowledge-management systems, corporate portals and workflow solutions have improved the lot of the office-bound knowledge worker greatly

Not finding the data we need wastes lots of time and is a significant hidden cost in business in the past few years. But the amount of material everyone has to deal with, even with effective filters, has led to a very human response: when in doubt, ask your real-world friends. Almost as significant as collaboration, technology has been the cultural impact of social media, particularly the Facebook effect.

In many organisations where internal knowledge is an important business resource, there is implementation of Microsoft’s SharePoint. This platform is now

used in some form by 90 per cent of organisations, according to content technology analyst Real Story Group.

But the corporate world has reservations about SharePoint’s robustness. It is thought to be best suited to organisations that need to make communication and sharing easy – such as a charity like Christian Aid, which

needs to co-ordinate its relief effort for disasters of the magnitude of the Haitian earthquake.

In environments where there are strict regulatory requirements or where client confidentiality needs to be respected, information management gets more complicated. Workflow and systems architecture ideally need to capture and retrieve anything that might be needed in a legal situation requiring full disclosure – and that is technically much more challenging.

Even so, the Facebook effect has been so influential that this year technology analyst Gartner is recommending that enterprise content management systems more than five years old are replaced by ones organised around processes, social-content management and integration.

For search tools on the web, keyword favourites such as Google are falling out of favour. There are other alternatives that include specialist and multi-source engines – more than 170, according to independent expert Phil Bradley.

With a database product, though, users can benefit from a publisher’s “discovery” platform, which provides a Googlelike search for highly structured, indexed content in a controlled environment.

Unfortunately, companies’ content is not

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Online information usually indexed at all.

Certainly, enterprise search tools are big business, and the best ones are being snapped up by the IT giants. Microsoft long ago bought Fast, but Oracle has just bought Endeca and Hewlett Packard is acquiring Autonomy, one of the most successful ever British software firms.

But the effectiveness of search still depends on how well the search engine is integrated with corporate systems and the in-house taxonomy. It’s never a plug-andplay solution.

New technology like this can support process efficiencies but if it is to live up to expectations, training in good information management practice is essential. A technology implementation in the information world needs as much attention to change management as other IT projects.

unless they get a better deal.

Meanwhile, companies such as the publisher of Nature are experimenting with open platforms that publish reports on research in progress. It all involves cultural change – and it is slow as attitudes among researchers themselves are ambivalent.

Much content from publishers is still only available as PDFs. It’s the fear of piracy that keeps it this way, because PDFs can’t be manipulated or mined for text and data. But in the textbook market, publishers are being more daring.

Education and research

Our ability to search academic journals efficiently has speeded up the research process itself – thanks to the work of publishers. Not only can we can mine the structured and hyperlinked evidence base, there is more and more material available – millions of articles now.

A paper only gets published if it has been through peer review.

Universities and funders value this objective quality assurance process, and all the other aspects of publishers’ service (such as reference linking and metadata enhancement). But they do not like being prevented by licence restrictions from freely sharing papers with their peers.

In recent years there has been a backlash from the UK’s funding councils, which want research results disseminated widely, the so-called open access movement.

But publishers fund their services by selling subscriptions. They need to protect their intellectual property if they are to do so.

Most publishers are accepting that change is necessary and are experimenting with open access publication. Even so, still only 7.7 per cent of academic journal articles originating in the UK (which produces about eight per cent of total global scholarly output) are published in this way.

Recently there have been stand-offs on journals prices, with some prestigious university libraries in the US and Britain threatening to cancel their subscriptions to journal packages

A technology implementation in the information world needs as much attention to change management as other IT projects Educational publishers such as Pearson and Cengage Learning are breaking textbook content up into smaller units which can be rented rather than sold, or shared and used in different contexts.

They are also developing or acquiring platforms and learning environments of their own. Their business models are evolving to more closely reflect how students want to study and engage with their peers. It’s all part of the shift towards student-centred learning.

In the long term, this new delivery model raises big questions about the management of institutions’ learning platforms, student portfolios and institutional records. Who is responsible for this content? Who manages and curates it? Could there be process efficiencies from integration? And who will do these jobs in future?

Libraries and preservation

Key issues for companies, academia, government and so-called memory institutions– libraries, archives and museums – are selection, capture, preservation and making resources findable and useful.

They may also need to make resources available in new ways: images, music, video and sound.

National libraries and archives are heavily involved in digitisation and preservation projects, in partnership with innovative technology companies – with Tessella’s digital archiving software at the National Archives among the examples.

Also at issue for information professionals is material closer to home, in their own organisations.

How should they identify it, who should evaluate it and decide what to keep? How much of the process can be automated? Who should describe it or will top metadata and text-mining do the job?

In pharmaceutical companies, legal or health practices, construction or other regulatory environments, preservation requirements are clear. But in scientific or social science research, researchers use only about 10 per cent of the data they generate – so what should they keep? There is a need for curation services of many kinds, some of them yet to be invented.

Academia is working hard to identify and curate what are known as open-learning objects which can be reused, and in general, digital asset management has become a new competence.

The capabilities of technology are already far ahead of how we are currently rethinking what we might do to organise and exploit information better. It’s exciting or scary, depending on your attitude to change. Technology can, but need not be, expensive so decisions about whether to invest in new tools or information products need a context.

It’s no longer enough to be an information, technology or business specialist. The days of a department operating in its own silo are long gone. Just as effective research programmes or healthcare depend increasingly on teamwork, today we should all be business process analysts if we are to understand how competence in information adds value.

A legal taxonomy Law firms must tackle a complex combination of challenges in their information management Governance, compliance and chains of command, not to mention multiple languages, all add to the information management challenge for companies such as legal services firm Linklaters.

Information is a complex business at law firms because of the need for client confidentiality.

Firewalls are important – content is organised around pieces of work for clients but these may involve different departments of the company. Companies may also have a global presence, as may their clients, and multilingual search is a big challenge.

So is it technology, or human and process issues that cause the biggest headaches? According to Liz Scott-Wilson, information architect at Linklaters, understanding governance and processes are the key challenges.

“Who’s responsible for content creation and who for indexing and finding?” she says. “Where does escalation go? What are the interrelationships between information, content, users and repositories? How does information need to hang together, even if it is internally created? To help solve these issues, I am bringing in taxonomy management.”

A taxonomy is about finding content: it’s a hierarchical classification scheme that maps equivalent terms and the relationships between terms and concepts, explains Scott-Wilson.

“It’s essential in legal databases and for law firms – and in a multilingual law firm you need to map particular legal terms in more than one language and character set – which is a big challenge.

Without a taxonomy, a search engine, however powerful, will not retrieve information usefully.”

Search is still a problem for law firms, too, she says, no matter how big they are. “We use Autonomy for legal knowledge search. But I don’t think any of the large practices have got it right yet, as we all have the same issues in trying to get a handle on internally generated knowledge.

“Externally provided information is quite well organised, by providers such as Westlaw and LexisNexis. We need to do a similarly good job on our own information.”

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Business Technology

November 2011

an independent report from lyonsdown, distributed with the guardian

Industry view

Building a public chemistry resource Access to an online database of more than 26m chemical compounds allows users to comment, edit and contribute to information, creating a shared data community ChemSpider, a free chemical database owned by the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC), provides flexible chemistrybased search capabilities to the community while harnessing the social web to build a public infrastructure for chemistry.

The free ChemSpider website provides powerful chemical search tools to cross-examine more than 26m compounds from more than 400 internet sources. This allows anyone to find a chemical compound by name, chemical identifier, or by drawing the structure or substructure. Additional features such as experimental and predicted properties, and excellent links between structures and the various chemical names and identifiers associated with a compound, facilitates integration to other existing online public resources. What makes

ChemSpider really different is the addition of editing tools that allow users to comment on and edit existing entries, and to load their own chemical compound collections and associated data.

The additional features, built on top of the key chemical search, has allowed ChemSpider to explore the new ways in which the chemical community can use public resources to highlight their own research and to use data from the resource in their own applications.

ChemSpider in use Academic groups are using ChemSpider to build up their own learning resources, adding analytical data, links and videos to compounds, benefiting their own group and promoting their work while making it available to other researchers worldwide.

The RSC is using ChemSpider to both link to its own publications

Online: chemistry database

and also to develop a teaching resource where the chemical data can be built up into structured lessons and tests suitable for school and undergraduate-level teaching.

Powerful software integration services are used by commercial organisations and academia to link into their existing applications, which can be within their own secure networks – such as identifying a chemical structure from a name, or finding analytical information.

ChemSpider is also providing chemistry services to the Open PHACTS project, an Innovative Medicines Initiative-funded EU/pharmaceutical industry collaboration to make drug discovery more effective by integrating pharmacological information sources together in a publicly accessible data store.

ChemSpider has proved to be the most innovative and adaptable chemical data source publicly available, and the provision of such a resource fits perfectly with the RSC’s mission to advance the chemical sciences.

ChemSpider provides access to a powerful core chemistry search – via the web or by app – together with the tools for users in the developed and developing world to use and publish their own data. www.chemspider.com

an independent report from lyonsdown, distributed with the guardian

November 2011

Business Technology

13

Online information

Customers know best

With everyone able to post an opinion online, it’s only a matter of time before our reputation capital will count more than our credit rating. Welcome to the digital future

By Tim Buckley Owen

When BlackBerry smartphone users lost their internet access for a few days recently, pressure came not just from the mainstream media but also from individual customers using social networking to vent their wrath. And it soon became clear that the $100 (£63) of free apps on offer from RIM by way of compensation might not be enough to calm their fury.

Companies might have expected to ride out a PR crisis when most communication was one-way and in the hands of big institutions, but not any more.

“Any consumer with an internet connection can quickly assemble information on any organisation,” says Sandra Ward, joint editor of the professional journal Business Information Review. “This enables them to challenge almost anything – the price, quality and legality of services.”

But while organisations are more exposed than ever before, consumers also need to use

information wisely and ethically; if businesses are now in the goldfish bowl, so too are consumers.

“Information literacy has never been more important,” says Ward.

All search engines and many websites use personalisation,

How do we ensure our digital identities reflect our real-world identities? How is trust built online? localisation and semantic search, which seeks to home in on intent and context. That can be useful when a grocery website is checking that you haven’t run out of something, but is perhaps less welcome when advertising agencies track a searcher’s every move to serve up targeted adverts.

New European Union rules are forcing websites to seek

users’ permission before planting cookies – small programs that keep track of online activity – on their computers. And social media sites regularly attract criticism, from activists and the authorities, for being less than transparent with their users – for example, by not drawing attention to changes in privacy default settings.

None of this seems likely to halt consumer infatuation with screenbased content – and the arrival of portable devices such as e-readers and tablet computers has given a jolt to conventional publishing.

“Our research shows that when reading books online using a PC browser, the user experience is typically one of searching, browsing and skimming, and only very occasionally are individuals prepared to read in depth,” says Martha Sedgwick of academic publisher, Sage.

But with the increasing popularity of mobile devices, users are becoming more familiar with in-depth reading, she says.

“Devices such as the Kindle

and iPad are proving great tools for immersive reading and this is having an impact on how publishers design products.”

Having access to so much copyright material online inevitably raises intellectual property issues. The Copyright Licensing Agency is developing an industry-standard copyright icon that publishers can use to display their key terms of use on their website or online publication.

CLA licence development manager James Bennett denies that this will lead to a copyright clampdown.

“It’s more a strengthening of copyright compliance online,” he says.

But for Rachel Botsman who writes on collaboration through network technologies, the impact that growing access to information will have on consumer behaviour is more fundamental than any of these specific developments indicate. If companies such as BlackBerry have to consider their reputations among web-savvy consumers, individuals have to look to protecting themselves, too, in this global online village.

Most people are probably familiar with eBay, but Botsman reels off a string of other community-driven marketplaces – such as Airbnb, Taskrabbit, Whipcar, Zopa – which she believes will drive the development of “reputation capital”. These websites cover services such as loans, finding accommodation and car hire and offer an easy way for those wanting a service to get in touch with someone offering what they need.

“The information we ask for and share to build trust between reputable strangers is an untapped market and big grey area,” Botsman says. But how do we ensure our digital identities reflect our realworld identities? How is trust built online? What questions do we need to ask to get the right information to trust someone? Who has access to that information?

Says Botsman: “I believe that it’s only a matter of time before our reputation capital will become a cornerstone of the 21st-century economy, a currency more powerful than our credit history.”

14

Business Technology

November 2011

an independent report from lyonsdown, distributed with the guardian

Industry view

The greatest show online The biggest names and the latest technology are all in store for visitors to the leading online information event If it’s online, it’s on show at Olympia in London from Tuesday 29 November to Thursday 1 December.

That’s when the Online Information 2011 event takes place at the site’s National Hall.

The exhibition attracts thousands of international visitors each year and offers unrivalled access to a range of companies and suppliers.

And it’s free to enter, too.

The exhibition covers different areas: content management, search solutions, social media, epublishing solutions, content resources and library management.

Among the exhibitors will be Bureau van Dijk, EBSCO, the European Union, the Financial

Exhibition: access to a range of companies and suppliers

Times, LexisNexis, MarkLogic, ProQuest and Thomson Reuters.

Alongside the exhibition is an extensive educational seminar programme consisting of nearly 100 topical sessions.

Expert speakers will include representatives from organisations such as Eduserv, Good Food magazine, Google, Sage, Squiz, Wiley-Blackwell, Wolters Kluwer and YouTube.

A major focus of this years’ event will be a series of exciting and stimulating show features designed to focus on new

technologies and key sectors including the epublishing Zone, XML Pavilion, the Library Management Zone and European Librarians Theatre.

The Online Information Conference, Europe’s most important education event for the information industry, runs in conjunction with the exhibition.

The focus for this year’s event is Information and Collaboration: Meeting the challenges of a mobile generation - and offers attendees a huge range of expertise giving delegates the skills they need

to prepare themselves for the challenges ahead.

The conference is split into five sections - Going Mobile: Information and knowledge on the move; Social Media: Exploiting knowledge in social networks; Building a framework for the future of the information profession; New frontiers in information management; and Search and information discovery.

This structure enables delegates to mix and match sessions so they can customise the event to suit their priorities and interests.

In addition to opening keynote speakers Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist and craigconnects, and social commentator and author Rachel Botsman, there will be speakers from Allen & Overy, the British Library, Citi, IBM, KPM, Westminster Abbey and many more organisations.

For full details of the event and how to pre-register for free entry to the exhibition, visit www.online-information.co.uk

an independent report from lyonsdown, distributed with the guardian

November 2011

Business Technology

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