"What's new about innovation?"
In his speech at SLA's annual conference in Toronto Don Tapscott referred to the invention of the blackboard and its enormous impact on education. He used this example as an analogy for explaining that some of the greatest innovations did not come out of new inventions, but by adapting or harnessing old ones.
I suppose you could draw the same analogy from the use of the wheel. Round stones with holes in them had been around for ages, but when Man thought of putting two of them together to create a wheelbarrow, it was a monumental innovation. Woman probably worked it out long before, but knew that Man would use the invention to make her do all the transporting, which he had had to do previously. I digress. Innovation feeds on the appropriate use of information, and that's where we come in.
Obviously we cannot initiate innovation, but we can strive to ensure that our users, customers, clients, or whatever you want to call them, know where to find, and have easy access to, as much information as possible. We are always working on improving the dissemination of information, but let's start by working with the systems that we have in place now.
We need to establish what information is available, required and used. How you carry out an information audit depends on the size and nature of you organization, but it is something that we should be doing on a regular basis. I know that I do not do this, but perhaps it will be a New Year's resolution.
You will need to design one or more surveys, but I suggest that you start by arranging some interviews with users from different areas within the organization. We have an inherent bias into thinking that our colleagues or customers use the information that we make available to them, and therefore are likely to design surveys based on that premise.
Go into the interview with an open mind, and make sure that you do most of the listening. You will need to have a checklist of areas to cover in the interview, but you want the interview to be moderately unstructured so that the interviewee opens up and feels comfortable telling you how he/she works, and how information impacts this work schedule. Remember that you are not only trying to find out what information is used, and how, but also what information or resources your users think they need that are not currently made available to them. Only by understanding what are the goals and objectives of individuals, and how they work to achieve them, will you be able to do this.
At this stage you are carrying out only a few interviews to help you design the survey instruments. Try to include individuals from as many areas as possible, because the requirements of the accountants in the finance department are different from those in production.
If you cannot include the CEO, at least try to include the executive assistant, or someone close to the CEO. The more visibility you can achieve with senior management, the better. Also make sure that you include people who probably do not use your services or resources. They may not be using them because they do not know of their existence, or because they are not valuable to them. Some people are just not aware of what documentation or information within an organization can now be made available, so you may have to guide them.
After the interview, prepare notes and send them to the interviewee for comment, asking for anything that he/she may have left out during the meeting. Based on these interviews you will have a better idea of how to design the survey instrument. You may well have to prepare more than one survey depending on the nature of your users. In the association world, the requirements of management and staff are very different from those of members. Remembering also that you will receive a better response rate if the survey is short, you may want to have more than one.
If you have a second survey, it gives you a chance to add questions based on the results of the first survey. I am not dealing with the design of surveys at this time, but I do recommend that you have someone independently review the survey instrument to make sure that questions are easy to understand and that it does not use unclear terminology that only information professionals understand. Also try to avoid too many open-ended questions, as they make analysis of the results difficult and time-consuming to assess.
Once you have received the responses and analyzed the data, the fun part is deciphering what it all means, and what to do about it. This may require discontinuing services and products, or upgrading or adding services and resources. It will almost inevitably lead to changes in the forms of delivery due to advances in technology, assuming that you can afford them. For new users of your resources or services, it is certain to require some user training.
"It is said that information added with the addition of intelligence transforms into knowledge, and that knowledge with the addition of imagination becomes innovation." We certainly know how to use our competencies (intelligence) to add value to information to transform it into knowledge. It is then up to the imaginative user to convert it into innovation
