Collaborating within the organisation for better results

As Director of IP Processes and Tools development for General Electric, Keith Dilley will be as familiar with the challenges facing IR specialists as anyone. He gave assembled delegates at the Information Retrieval Facility Symposium (IRFS 2008) a handy breakdown on how to get a team working effectively in the Informatics and Analytics arena.
The premise of the collaborative interfacing sessions asked a number of questions, such as what is the information seeking behaviour in patent retrieval? What contextual factors influence their behaviour? How can a search interface support collaboration in patent retrieval? And how can we divide labour, share knowledge and resolve disagreement on relevance in patent retrieval tasks?
Historically, Dilley argued the focus has been on the tools of IR rather than the processes of it. The 'bad old days' he explained were a time when patents were asked to be checked as a product launch date loomed. Poor briefings and communication between different islands of the organisation all compounded the problems for the IR specialist.
These days however Dilley explained how he takes a different approach with his team at GE and it made some worthy points, not least of which is that the solution to better IR should also come from the way you work, the solution not always having to come from a technical angle.
The method that is used at GE involves a number of factors such as getting buy-in from senior decision makers, by involving them directly, results become 'theirs' as well, because they have been involved in the process from the start. It's a good way of spreading best practice around by agreeing what objectives are going to be with all concerned at the beginning to avoid having to go back two or three times in the analytics stage because the aims weren't clear at the get-go.
To keep facilitating this Dilley suggested sharing preliminary results and if necessary modify the search details, it was necessary to share the lessons of best practice
Perhaps a little more obvious was the suggestion not to share results in a dull spreadsheet but utilise a variety of tools to present information in interesting and unique ways
Admittedly the procedures suggested are better suited to large, resource wealthy organisations, but the lessons on offer here can use scaled back technology to apply to the smaller companies operating with a more disparate team.