Sunday 5 May 2013

About me: the 2013 edition

Given it's been 3 years since I blogged I thought I'd better give you a sense of who I am and what I get up to professionally these days.

I am the Knowledge Manager for CCH Australia.  My role is a blend of special librarian and true knowledge manager (ie working on improving the flow of knowledge and information around the business).  I've also done a fair whack of research on behalf of CCH.  Let's break those three down a bit more:

Linda the Special Librarian:

CCH is a tax and legal information solutions provider.  Our editorial team (mostly lawyers-come-writers) spend a lot of time tracking what the government and courts are up to, analysing it and turning it into useful information for our customers.  So as a special librarian for this team my focus is on providing effective current awareness for these sources.  I'm also in charge of managing all our research subscriptions so editors stay on top of what other information providers are saying about the law.

The CCH library is virtual, with the exception of our historical publications archive and the odd book that an editor may request.  We are too small to bother with a proper Library Management System so I have become a master at contorting Microsoft SharePoint into a library intranet and basic catalogue.

Linda the Knowledge Manager

This part of my role is a funny blend of document management, intranet management and social media champion.  I have become a DIY expert on SharePoint and am currently working on two projects that utilise SharePoint to manage and access editorial and marketing documents more effectively.  Recently the business implemented Salesforce Chatter (think Facebook for the enterprise) and I am doing a lot of work with various teams around the business to help them use the tool for genuine cross-functional communication and collaboration.

Linda the Researcher

As part of my work at CCH I have done several major research projects on how our customers (ie accounting and legal professionals) use tools such as mobile devices and social media.  My interest in mobile technology is not a new thing!  You can access all of my whitepapers here but the most relevant one for #anz23mthings is Legal Professionals and Mobile Devices (March 2011).

Resurrecting the blog for ANZ 23 Mobile Things

After almost 3 years I've logged into Blogger and blown the dust off my poor old blog.  The reason? Despite  having several major projects at work and a REALLY major one at home (I'm having a baby in October), I've been swept up in the excitement of ANZ 23 Mobile Things.  For the first time in a long time I feel the need to  publicly say something longer than 140 characters about my profession and technological change.

ANZ 23 Mobile Things is a learning program based on the highly successful "23 Things" model that educated the library profession about social media and its applications for libraries/info mgt about 6 years ago now.  This time (in case you hadn't guessed) the focus is on educating us about mobile devices and their applications.  I'd say I'm familiar with about 2/3 of the concepts in the program, but there is always room to learn more!  I volunteered to write a feature post on mobile email and I've already discovered some apps that will make my inbox waayyy more manageable.

So if you're involved in the library, KM and info mgt profession and have even a passing interest in mobile technology I encourage you to sign up to the program.  Heck, sign up even if you don't.  It's an enjoyable, free opportunity to do some structured professional development, and you can't go wrong with that!

PS twitter details: my public handle is @Linda_Moore.  The program account is @anz23mthings and the hashtag is #anz23mthings.  See you there!

Friday 4 December 2009

ECM: Governance, Implementation and More – Chris Donohue, Alpha Knowledge

The last NSW KM Roundtable event for the year was held this week. The theme for the day was information and governance - a topic I am currently quite interested in. Here's a writeup of one of the presentations on Governance and Enterprise Content Management.

Chris Donohue of Alpha Knowledge has had a long and varied career in both corporate governance and KM, which means he is well qualified to speak on the challenges of implementing a content management system that allows sharing while ensuring that there is a consistent approach to the governance of critical information.

It’s also fair to say that a number of KM Roundtable members pricked up their ears when Chris indicated that most of the ECMs he has implemented are based on – you guessed it – Sharepoint.

Before he launched into his case study, Chris made a couple of pithy observations:

  • We spend 90% of the time managing 10% of information that needs to be secure
  • Why copy and paste documents, emails and images when you can streamline a process?
  • Part of the info management challenge is identifying what “quality information” is.

Case Study: Information Mismanagement

There’s this alarmingly common assumption that the implementation of a shiny new piece of software (in this case Sharepoint) will instantly fix all of the challenges an organisation might have with managing their documents and content. But, as the subject of Chris’s case study found out, just tossing documents into Sharepoint because the CEO has decreed “make it so!” really doesn’t work.

Enter Chris. His mandate was to establish a governance structure that would turn their Sharepoint site from a mess into a well-ordered and efficient platform for managing content and sharing information.

Implementation

Here’s some of the elements that helped them to achieve an effective Sharepoint implementation:

  • The information architecture was carefully designed and kept CONSISTENT across the team sites
  • A governance and security framework was also clearly defined
  • Any content that had not been used in more than a year was not not migrated
  • The implementation team got buy in and collective consensus from the company (it helps if the CEO is a fan of the project!)
  • Phased process – it doesn’t have to happen all at once
  • Communication was critical
  • Change managed proactively

Information Architecture

Chris then discussed the Information Architecture of the site. It was broken into 3 types of repositories:

  1. Personal Knowledge
    - folders/personal data
    - emails
    - IMs

    which feeds into
  2. Group Knowledge
    - meetings
    - Network data
    - Intranets
    - hard form docs

    which feeds into
  3. Business Intelligence
    - data warehousing
    - data mining
    - KPI tracking
    - Reporting

The Governance Framework

Some issues that had to be considered when creating structures for information sharing were:

  • Chinese Walls (where departments/business units are in competition and can’t share info)
  • Privacy (information that should only be available to HR etc)
  • Hierarchy (cascading information accessibility appropriately)
  • Compliance (ensuring appropriate and secure management of information required for audit and disclosure)

Most of these issues were dealt with by developing a generic security matrix. Sharepoint allows administrators to establish security groups. In this case they were set up by function:

  • Group 1 – exec
  • Group 2 – projects
  • Group 3 – Operations
  • Group 4 – HR

Implementation and Change Management

Training consisted of “Pretraining an post-training”

  • pretraining grouped by IT proficiency. Pretraining also provides the opportunity to test the usability of the site and make adjustments before going live.
  • post training – refresher courses
  • flick the switch! At some point old systems and repositories need to be shut down to avoid duplication of content OR worse, the ongoing problem of content scattered across multiple systems.

Monitoring and Updating – facilitating governance of content

  • Assigned owners to content, automated update reminders were set in Sharepoint to prompt review of content by the owners
    -> great for policies and procedures.
  • Need to have an overall coordinator monitoring the content owners

An overall view of the process:

Analyse –> redesign architecture –> plan –> implement –> maintenance

The value of the who project was clearly demonstrated when the business went into a merger and were able to create a data warehouse of all the information in just a few days.

Thanks Chris for a solid and interesting presentation.

Thursday 24 September 2009

Instant Messaging: an "elegant solution" for general practices

My family lives in rural NSW, where there is a chronic doctor shortage and it can be difficult to recruit new practitioners. So I really loved the story my mum told me about her most recent trip to the doctor. She wasn't able to get an appointment with her regular doc, and saw a new doctor who hadn't been practicing very long. This doctor wasn't sure about the correct prescription for my Mother's condition. But instead of spending time surfing around medical databases, or knocking on the door of the doctor next door, she sent an Instant Message. Within seconds she had the name of the appropriate medication - from two different doctors.

This practice probably has 5 or 6 doctors and probably hasn't even heard of "Enterprise 2.0" - but by using a free application such as MSN they have been able to dramatically increase the sense of presence and support they can provide this new doctor. She can confidently request assistance from her colleagues while knowing that it won't significantly impact the time required by her patient - or theirs (especially as they can choose not to respond). It would be interesting to know if this will consequently increase the likelihood of this practice retaining their new recruit - which would definitely be a plus for the rural community.

Some might consider Instant Messaging to be a relatively "old" form of social media - but there are still so many ways it can be used innovatively to solve basic problems and increase efficiency. It's great that small businesses are realising this as well.

Friday 11 September 2009

Legal Professionals and Web 2.0 - ALLA presentation

I have loaded a copy of my conference presentation up to Slideshare - there are notes for relevant slides too.



You can also read the full paper (yes I actually submitted an article - it was like being back at uni!) on the ALLA conference site. A number of the papers and presentations are now available - I'll let you know my favourites over the next week or so.

ALLA sidetrip - Kakadu!


I haven't posted any of my notes from the ALLA conference because I am still recovering from the holiday to Kakadu that I took on the side! If you're a fan of birds, crocodiles, aboriginal rock art or sunsets you might like to have a look at my pics on flickr. I'll blog about some of the most interesting papers here or on CCHatter over the next week.

Yellow waters sunset 3

Wednesday 2 September 2009

On my way to ALLA

I’m sitting at the airport about to board a plane to Darwin for the Australian Law Librarian’s Association conference.  I’m super excited about the conference this year – the theme is evolution and many of the papers explore how legal research has changed and is changing. 

I will be giving a presentation that draws on the findings of the CCH “Professionals and Web 2.0” whitepaper and explores what Web 2.0 means for the creation and dissemination of information – and what THAT means for information providers such as CCH!  I will put the presentation up on Slideshare next week.  In the meantime you might like to check out these two posts on www.cchatter.com.au – they are based on some material that didn’t quite make it to the final draft of the paper.