I am often asked “What do I tell IT when they want to replace an existing Lucidea solution with one they promise to build in SharePoint?” Well, there are many advantages with our Lucidea solutions, but here I’d like to share one simple but very powerful differentiator: date handling and date searching. Once you’ve read this, you’ll have a thought-provoking response for IT!

I was speaking with a client about faceted search. (For more information on that subject see my blog post “A Firm Foundation for Faceted Search”). We discussed the need for well-organized and well-structured data to support useful faceted searching. The client challenged that need, and stated she had read and been told that some forms of guided navigation require no data preparation—and will work with completely unstructured data. In this post I’ll compare and contrast two approaches to searching.

As discussed in my last post, special libraries now exist in a highly competitive information marketplace, where business users of content have lots of options. Michael Porter—in his seminal book Competitive Strategy—stated that in a competitive marketplace there are three strategies that make sense: cost leadership, differentiation, and focus. What does this imply for special library strategies?

In my last post, I wrote about how I learned a difficult lesson: hard work and quality output must be in service of a solid business strategy if individuals, roles and departments are to thrive. As you know, keeping your special library vibrant and sustainable requires adaptation and lots of hard work. In addition, are you thinking strategically about how to make your library the best that it can be? Please read on for some ideas.

My first job was at Data Resources Inc. (DRI) working as a consultant with a large Fortune 25 conglomerate. My role was to provide industry information and sales forecasting via timesharing to its various business units by building a model that the customer would run (ideally) for years to come. Whenever the customer ran the model, DRI generated revenue. Sounds great, right? But I learned a difficult lesson about how things really work.

How many collaborators does it take to change a light bulb?

I was just visiting with a client and we had a long discussion about the benefits of collaboration in KM.

This is the third in a series of posts on IT and the information Professional. When I chat with information professionals and IT managers about open source software, they often talk about two key concepts:

• It’s free
• Bug fixes and enhancements come from the community

While both of these statements are true, they fail to paint the whole picture and hide some pretty ugly truths.

In my last post, I discussed the unfortunate fact that many information professionals find themselves at the bottom of the IT totem pole, and thus they receive underwhelming IT support as they attempt to build and manage world class knowledge/library systems, or special collections.

So what’s an information professional to do? Knowledge and library systems are complex pieces of technology that require IT involvement at some level. Over my career, I have observed that in departments having the best relationship with IT, the information professionals practice what I call "IT Jujutsu."

Earlier this year, we presented a “KM Conversation” with well-known enterprise social network expert, author and consultant Euan Semple. During our session “The New Knowledge Ecosystem: Content and Connection,” Euan shared valuable insights on how information experts play a social media curator role that helps us “see the wood for the trees.”

I talk to lots of information professionals about IT. Some have great relationships with IT, others not so great. But if you’re leveraging technology to build and maintain your collection and information/knowledge systems—and who isn’t?—then just like death and taxes, it’s inevitable that you’ll be working with IT.

This month I co-hosted a webinar on gamification with KM expert Stan Garfield. In this post I’ll share a few key takeaways that jumped out at me during the session.

I love the creativity now enhancing museums’ physical space. It gives me huge comfort to know that museums are on the forefront of creating experiences designed to inspire awe and wonder. A favorite of mine is the “Levitated Mass” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

In my last post I discussed problems with the shared drive and SharePoint as knowledge management solutions. With these systems adoption is high (everybody is in the pool) because they are simple, but due to lack of an information management strategy the content is often a mess.

In this post, I’ll discuss strategies for building successful KM systems that achieve high adoption while simultaneously providing access to organized content. In other words, throwing a KM Pool Party that isn’t a hot mess.

The most common KM tool for sharing documents and other items with colleagues is the shared drive. But why is that, and is it really such a good idea?

In my first post on this topic, I looked at the fundamental flaw in self-driving cars – the inability to respond to the unexpected, such as suddenly encountering a lady and a duck in the middle of the road. As mentioned, this story is very applicable to the way we build our knowledge management systems and information centers.

If you have been following the developments, dreams, and travails in the quest to build a self-driving car, you may have heard the story about the lady with a duck. I think this story has great applicability as we build our knowledge management systems and information centers.

In my first post on the changing habits of information consumers and the changing role of information professionals as part of the knowledge supply chain, I shared examples of increasing complexity, underpinned by technology and changes in personal preference. In this post, let’s take a look at the third paradigm (KM 3.0) and see what it means for the sustainability and relevance of knowledge managers and special librarians.

As I was finishing last week’s successful webinar on KM Pitfalls with Stan Garfield, an audience member asked a question about Enterprise Social Networks and their value. It made me think about Lucidea CEO Ron Aspe’s blog post on the ways in which information consumption is changing, and has changed over time - and how our personal habits are a key driver of this change. Let me explain…