Here's an utterly warped and biased take on the Online Information Conference. Biased because I only attended seven out of the thirty one sessions. Warped because I'm only plucking out a few bits that interested, amused or surprised me.
Let's start with Tom Stewart from Harvard Business Review. He was talking about knowledge and where it resides. He gave the example of a company that installed a comprehensive customer solution programme and then ran a test to see who knew most about its products and services. Carlos scored highest, which was puzzling because he refused to use the system. He relied on his own knowledge. The second most highly placed operative was also surprising, until the company realised that she sat next to Carlos.
Nic Newman from the BBC's Search Futures showed a great example of pictures sized by the number of people currently connected to them. (Incidentally, during his 11:30 slot, he referred to Michael Grade as the "ex-chairman of the BBC" and the man had only resigned that morning.)
Stuart Kauder, of Accoona, made the interesting observation that, "good content works against the advertisers' interests - people read that instead of the ads". Oh dear.
Geoffrey Bilder, of Scholarly Information Strategies, was commenting on Web 2.0 hype. He showed a graph - red is perceived risks, blue is perceived benefits. The letters A, B and C refer to Venture capitalists/Management, Helpdesk/IT people and Gurus/Alpha geeks, respectively. When industry hype is peaking, the As only talk to the Cs, missing out the people who really understand the issues. Benefits get exaggerated and risks get minimised.
PodTech's, Robert Scoble thought that, because word of mouth is so rapid in the blogosphere, bloggers are becoming as powerful as the BBC.
At the end of the 'Future of Social Software and Web 2.0' session, audience member Steve Gibson of Cranfield University asked, "How does what you do relate to organisational objectives?" Good question and only one of the speakers (Ewan McIntosh from Learning and Teaching, Scotland) even referred to value. Mainly, the focus was on direct communication with customers and disintermediation of anyone who gets in the way (bosses, PR, marketing, journalists...).
In all honesty, the question of what value something - anything - adds to an organistion would appear an easy way out of a great question, but it is what I believe. The problem for many organisations is that they don't understand the technology's potential impact or value and the geeks/IT dept don't understand where the organisation could do with the value they have to offer.
ReplyDeleteThat's why what we are doing in East Lothian and in Scottish schools in general seems to be working. We have teachers like myself who have an insane interest in what the tech can offer but a good working knowledge of where the gaps in the organisation are. It means that we have to dip our toes into areas where are not experts and learn fast, but that's exactly what we're paid to do. For me, this is what a KM manager should really be doing.
I too thought Bilder's graphs were very interesting (and the Gartner Hype Cycle).
ReplyDeleteWas a bit confused to hear people lecture me for 3 days on how easy podcasts were, only to find that the sessions I had missed were not being podcast!!
Ewan seems to be doing a great job in Scotland (and Matt Locke @ BBC backed up the new type of tech-savvy graduates they are getting)...but it doesnt back up our experience. We've been trying to employ someone to help with our SEO and every Marketing graduate we interview seems to know very little about the internet. Is higher education letting us down?