Know How; making the enquiry process work for you
| Published date | 01 April 2000 |
| Date | 01 April 2000 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb040768 |
| Pages | 5-9 |
| Author | Graham Beastall |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management |
Know How;
making the enquiry
process work for you
by Graham Beastall, Chairman of
Soutron Ltd.
How libraries and information centres go about
their work is changing. At the heart of this
change is both technology and new trends for
managing information in the context of
knowledge management. This article
examines the start of
the
process for gathering
knowledge by managing enquiries. It looks at
what has been done in the past, the failures,
and why emerging technologies make it
possible to develop systems for strategic gain
to the professional and the organisation.
The debate about what constitutes knowledge
management has been ongoing for the past eight-
een months and it seems that there is no single
definition that accurately defines the term. Having
reviewed several books on the subject and read
many more articles there appears to be no single
piece of work that puts "library" at the heart of
Knowledge Management. Yet for many people
who work in libraries and special libraries, the
organisation, management and transfer of knowl-
edge is second nature. Their work is at the heart of
the "knowledge" transformation. When free text
retrieval systems came into vogue and thesauri
were downgraded, librarians and information
managers continued to develop their classification
schemes and indexing tools. Making links and
sharing know how, signposting users to appropri-
ate sources of quality information, where to go or
not go, who to speak to, and what might be appear-
ing in the near future has always been part of the
job for a special librarian. Odd really for some
organisations to say that they have not imple-
mented KM systems when they employ special
librarians!
Asking where the Knowledge Management proc-
ess might start is like asking about roads and
chickens. But, if we accept that there must be a
process within the definition of
KM,
where in an
organisation might we look to examine how
information gets turned from a piece of data into
something useful, which can then be developed
and, as a result, becomes valuable to the organisa-
tion and those associated within it or externally?
If you were to ask whether the starting point for a
library management system was at the point of
cataloguing materials or the acquisition of materi-
als,
I am sure there would be some debate. But
generally one or the other would be chosen. All
systems flow from the point of entering data into
a catalogue system to recording the bibliographic
details, irrespective of whether it is an acquisition
or a straightforward cataloguing task. But, for
libraries who wish to implement Knowledge
Management, where do they start, what are the
elements to prepare for and how are these to be
integrated into a corporate systems methodology
and perhaps even more difficult, integrated into
the way in which people work and share informa-
tion?
I am reserving my comments to corporate and
special libraries rather than any other form of
library, but I believe the principles are the same
and could be applied to a university or public
library where community members are the equiva-
lent of employees in an organisation.
It was in 1994 when we were first asked to think
more logically about how information was cap-
tured, transferred around an organisation and made
available to external parties (stakeholders would
be how we would have described those people a
few years ago). Microsoft Windows was emerging
at that time and our old friend Inmagic DOS
version 8 was the product that many clients used
for managing catalogues and information sets. We
were asked whether this DOS based text database
tool could help a pharmaceutical company with the
management of
enquiries.
Not knowing exactly
what their processes, then currently in use con-
sisted of, I recall sitting in their information centre
for much of
a
day listening and observing what
was happening. After the people who worked there
got over the shock of
a
foreigner in their office,
their work pattern settled down and I became part
of
the
furniture, forgotten. What was apparent was
a process by which incoming enquiries were
translated to specific questions by a means of
interacting with a variety of people and systems to
arrive at a satisfactory answer or solution to a
question or problem.
VINE 121
— 5
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