Slippery Mental Glossary particularly those trickey intranet portal things.

I’ve heard a good number of sermon’s in my time and even delivered a few, a classic device is for the reverend one to stand at the front and say ‘I looked up the word ‘Hope’ in the Oxford dictionary and it said…’ etc. As I stand before my congregation of Exec MBA students I wish that describing Information Management was as straight forward as simple subjects such as hope, justice, poverty and omnipotence. But alas the words keep changing their meaning making hard work keeping my own mental information management glossary in place.

Terms causing some trouble to explain on the MBA module this week are ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), intranets and CRM (Customer Relationship Management Systems).

Intranets are perhaps the key illustration of the problem, Francis Muir teaches this part of the module and he and I also allude to them in an undergraduate E-Commerce module. Originally an intranet was a little private slice of the network based on TCP/IP technologies. It did much the same type of thing as groupware technologies such as Lotus Notes that back in the 90’s were due to take over the world. However over time it has all got a lot woollier. The sort of things that intranet’s do have become packaged as a set of services and sold as either bits of software or as Internet services. So instead we have to think about an intranet not as a bit of IT Infrastructure with services delivered over it but as a set of services available from who knows where. All very well, but this process happens over time and apart from the hassle of updating the lecture notes every year during the transition stage it makes the lecturer seem vague. For students tackling this in their assignments I have suggested that the word ‘Portal’ is now a better description of what they need than intranet but that term is slipping around the glossary as well.

A similar problem has occurred in the world of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) in lively discussion with my students. It is easy to see chat a CRM is when it is represented by a lump of business application. But really it stretches beyond the application to be a whole block of capability predicated by having a core set of corporate systems that are basically on top of everything and then some kind of CRM system that adds some functionality veneer on top to marshal all communication with the punters. But then I get the question from one of my students from a housing association that if there core system handles customer interactions is it essentially a CRM system among other things. This is where it becomes more about a view of systems as a whole rather than as components.

Even trickier in terms of movement is the question what is an ERP. Historically I understand that ERP’s came from an integration of sales, logistics and other back office systems in large corporations. I tend to describe them as being monolithic based on a single logical database. But of course the term ERP being successful has been lavished around all other the place. I tend to contrast for students the ERP approach to the EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) approach to building the corporate backbone of systems, but then you are in a continuum. The implied vagueness confuses students of course. The question then comes that if the CRM system comes from the same supplier as the ERP system then is it really part of the ERP. The answer to this in my mind is to do with whether they are based on the same logical database and hence integrated at the data level or whether they integrate at the services level. But then it becomes a technical issue and beyond the scope of my MBA crowd to know or care about the difference.

These major terms change meaning perhaps over a 5 or 10 year period. However corporate scale businesses probably hold onto their core systems for longer than that. So if my student is discussing what an intranet is in her company then it can have a whole slew of possible meanings most of which can be wrong for the person sitting next to them.

Makes me wonder how my clever library oriented colleagues with their fancy semantic web ideas are coping with the rapid change of meaning of Information Systems words over time.

All the way from America...

Research is a much abused term. If you ask undergraduate students they will confidently describe a Google based “bash in a couple of terms and hit the return key” as research and subsequently suffer from the delusion that that is all research is. What I have been engaged in for the last week I think could be defined as a “fishing trip”. This is a research approach from the “old days” before the whole world was claimed as available online.

When you were opening a new major area of research you would take yourself off to a monster library (The British Library at Boston Spa was ideal – due to the immense journal collection it possessed) and using printed abstracts and indexes would slowly wade back through the last ten or twenty years of “stuff” as appropriate. At the end of the exercise you would have reasonable confidence that you had covered the field in detail. The subsequent reading of the literature gathered would allow you to patch what gaps there were. As my LCSH topic predates the standard abstracting and indexing services, this older approach was required.

So ensconced on the 5th floor of the Library of Congress Adams building I worked my way through sixty years worth of Library journal about thirty volumes of the Bulletin of the American Library Association and about ten years of the Catalogers’ and classifiers’ yearbook. The most recent volumes consulted were 1940. I would regularly branching off to pick up specialist subject heading lists or contemporary textbooks as I moved forward.

The result of this process can be evaluated in at least two ways. A simple measure of the thickness of the stack of photocopying to be brought back evidences (in a real sense) the extent of the information capture. The other measure came as a surprise to me, it just kind of sneaked up on me as the process developed. My confidence in my knowledge of the topic strengthened as the week proceeded. The previous slow and laborious accumulation of material of the last two years had not inspired my confidence (I was painfully aware of gaps in the process – even though I did not really know what the gaps were!). Having dug in and worked my way through the major sources of information my doubts as to how to proceed have cleared and the next stage in the process seems quite straightforward (at the level of ideas!).

The total luxury of having a whole week to dedicate to nothing else except the research has been massively helpful. I have waked, washed, ate, walked, worked and slept the research. This has allowed effective thinking to occur as those thousand and one well intentioned interruptions that plague my working and home life were simply turned off – along with the mobile phone.

Today is Thanksgiving – the massive American family festival, everything is closed – even the food facility in the hotel – just a continental breakfast – I have to eat out tonight – if I can find somewhere. So the day has been spent sorting my document harvest so I know what I need to copy in my Friday morning visit to the Library.

The real task begins when I get back to Liverpool as I attempt to convert this short sprint in Washington into the steady paced marathon that is required to deliver this research as an academic thesis.

Stop the press: Google is grim!

I always enjoy being kept abreast of scientific developments by tuning into Leading Edge on BBC Radio 4 on Thursday evenings. A riveting piece of radio journalism! Last Thursday (15th November 2007) we had reports on a team from the US that has created cloned embryos from an adult primate and an invigorating debate on the deployment of brain enhancement drugs. We also had researchers that have demonstrated how robotic cockroaches can influence the behaviour of real ones. However, Leading Edge often gives us snippets of news that impinge directly on what we do within the Information Strategy Group – and last Thursday was no exception.

Technology guru Bill Thompson explained why he believes Google is corrupting us all. This is a refreshing viewpoint from a technology commentator and not one we are accustomed to hearing (except from librarians, information scientists and some computer scientists!). Such commentators normally fail to observe the limitations of any information retrieval tool and drone on about how 'cool' it is. Not Thompson. "We have all fallen for the illusion" because it is "easy" and "simple", says Thompson. "Google and the other search engines have encouraged us to forget the fundamental difference between search and research".

Google is indeed easy and simple. To make his point Thompson (unwittingly?) revisits well worn LIS arguments emanating from the metadata, cataloguing, and indexing areas. Some of these emerged in the 1970s when the efficacy of automatic indexing began to improve. These arguments cite issues of reconciling the terms used to describe concepts and issues of collocation (e.g. 'Java' the coffee, 'Java' the programming language, 'Java' the primary landmass of Indonesia, etc.) and differentiating between information about Tony Blair and information by Tony Blair. Thompson almost sounds surprised when he vents spleen over Google's inability to make sense of the word ‘Quark’. Welcome to web search engines, Bill!

The most astonishing part of Thompson's report was not his LIS-tinged rant about Google, but his suggestion that librarians had themselves fallen for the Google illusion, along with the academics and school children. Pardon? What could have given him this impression??? Was it an ill-judged, off hand comment?

The body of research and development exploring the use metadata on the web is gigantic and is largely driven by the LIS community. The 'deep web' is almost synonymous with digital library content or database content under the custodianship of information professionals. Those in content management or information architecture will also be singing from the LIS hymn sheet. The Semantic Web is another development that seeks to resolve Thompson's 'Quark conundrum'. Even at front line services, librarians are rolling out information literacy sessions as a means of communicating the importance of using deep web tools, but also making users aware of Google's limitations (e.g. Google only indexes a small portion of the web, problems of information authoritativeness, etc., etc.).

That is not to say that the profession doesn't flirt with Google; of course it does! It flirts with Google because Google provides a vehicle through which to introduce users to valuable information (often from the deep web). And such flirting does not immediately jettison well formed library and information management theories or principals (see an ex-colleague, for example [1], [2], [3] and [4]).

Of course, I could go on for a lot longer, but there doesn’t seem to be any point as you already know the arguments. But you can listen to Bill Thompson’s report on Leading Edge to hear the arguments of yore restyled by a technology guru. You may also feel compelled to contact Leading Edge to vent your spleen!

MTSR 2007

A paper some ex-colleagues and I submitted to the International Conference on Metadata and Semantics Research has now been published as part of the conference proceedings. The paper entitled, 'Terminology server for improved resource discovery: analysis of functions and model', is available online for those that might be interested.

The conference took place at the Ionian University in sunny Corfu; however, owing to work pressures (since moving to LJMU) I was unable to present the paper in person and take advantage of warmer climes! Enjoy!