How to survive clients that want information within 1 hour?

I attended the intermediate level educational program put on by the Competitive Intelligence Division of SLA, presented by Lynn Strand, the Principal of Outside Knowledge LCC. In this session, Lynn presents a Quick take session entitled: "What to Do When They Say "Give Me Everything You Have  on ... and Not Freak Out Because They Want it in An Hour". Below are her 9 tips in bullet form which can be helpful to both special librarians and independent information professionals.

1. Don't panic. That does not help.
2. Trust yourself. You can do this.
3. They do not want everything. Just an overview. In fact, they really don't know what they want.
4. Use "trends" in your search terms. This will retrieve information that provides an overview or that is broad in scope or focus.
5. Use resources you already know. Exhaust the familiar first.
6. Plan to search for 30 minutes and then give yourself time to put together your deliverable. Save some time to put together a final report on what you have found and don't spend all of it on searching for information.
7. Have a flexible template. For doing research reports, you need to have a template that all you need to do is put in new content and not worry about formatting.
8. Keep it to 3 pages or less. Right at the top of those pages, indicate three to four things the client must know. Hence, the most important information first.
9. Do a Google file type research. Sometimes the commercial databases may not contain the information you are looking for. Hence, if this fails, use Google search for file types like pdf, ppt. or doc. in order to retrieve the information you need.

Distilling the career wisdom and stories of SLA 2015

So I am gratefully to have attended SLA 2015 in Boston and in this post, I want to share some of the career wisdom and stories shared on June 14, 2015 from the opening  and general session.

For this session, as I listened to the career stories of the SLA awardees, I was impressed at the diversity of awardees featured. I saw international awardees from Asia and the Middle East, awardees that recently graduated as students and were newly active in the profession, and awardees that were faculty of library schools.

In particular, I listened to two speakers. The first was the awardee, Marjorie Hlava, who received the John Cotton Dana award. Her career gems to me were:

• Employers allow us to learn their business and give us the opportunities to serve their needs. Hence we are indebted to employers who give us opportunities to learn, grow and give back. They provide us with the opportunity to develop new skills and expertise, and to get experience and practice in serving the needs of others.
• Since what we do in our daily jobs have changed, but the principles remain the same, we must test assumptions to see if they are still relevant or not. After doing this, we must remove barriers, give access to all members and remove unnecessary rules and regulation.

Marjorie Hlava

The next speaker that I documented career gems and wisdom from was the SLA 2015 conference keynote speaker, Leigh Gallagher . Gallagher is a Fortune Magazine editor and journalist, and author of the book The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving. Gallagher was a useful speaker because she spoke about herself as a user of libraries and librarians as well as provided some advice for how librarians can better advocate for their value in business organizations.

Gem #1: The process of planning is more important than the plan itself
Gallagher first described her job as being paid to become an expert on any topic by doing research.
She spoke about how she always over-researched a topic just to be over-prepared. In this discussion Gallagher made the statement that plans are not really as important as the planning process. The planning process is more important than the document or plan itself.

Gem #2: Librarians need to develop and write business cases
Gallagher also talked about the need for information professionals to document case studies when information helped a company to make a better decision. She described such case writing as a "show- don't tell- cases of how information provided helped a company make a crucial or critical decision.

Gem # 3: New names suggested for libraries
Gallagher also suggested that information professionals consider alternate names to libraries such as the "Wisdom lab" or the "Wisdom Vault".

Coming up in future posts: Tips that I gathered from other speakers and also a post on my own conference presentation with a link and embedded slide presentation .

Information consulting today: Some insights from Marcy Phelps @ SLA 2014

So I arrived at my first session of my first SLA meeting with the stress of:

1. having lost my cellular phone between Toronto and London
2. Coming straight to the conference convention centre with my luggage to discover that there was no bag or suit check available, which meant that I had to lug with suitcase and suit carrier to all the sessions,

Nonetheless, my travel stress could not take away from my gaining some insights from Marcy Phelps, the principal  or founder of Phelps Research. According to her website:

Marcy M. Phelps, founder of Phelps Research, provides professional research, analysis, and research training services that help clients make better business decisions. She founded the company in 2000 after obtaining a master’s degree in library and information services from the University of Denver. (Phelps Research, 2013)

The session that I attended from which Marcy Phelps presented was entitled “Data Visualization” (Phelps, 2014). However, the session yielded more than just insights into Data Visualization. In addition to the information on data visualization, Phelps provided insights into the modern trends and shifts from information brokerage to information consultancy (a topic already discussed in this previous blog post).

Marcy Phelps provided a very interesting context to her presentation on data visualization that highlights the shift in information work of locating sources for clients and providing value added services to the information retrieved. Drawing on her experience as an information broker and consultant for a number of clients including marketing agents, Marcy Phelps suggests that in the past information brokerage was about librarians being in business to help clients find more and better information. She however suggests that today, the clients no longer want more or better information, but actually want more value added to the information. In fact, her argument is that clients are drowning in information, and do not have the time to deal with the large quantities of information. She further opined that clients don’t have the time to sort through a while lot of information and as such want information professionals to provide them with information that is “decision ready” (meaning information that they can use immediately to make decisions). Now they want to know what does the information mean? They do not want to search for the story but want information professionals to supply the meaning of the information to them.

Phelps went on to discuss the steps and process to be undertaken in creating or adding this value to information for clients, by using and creating visual analysis and presentations for information. (This discussion itself warrants its own blog entry). However, another key insight that Phelps stressed was that librarians need to use their reference interview skills in the process to get at what clients really want from the data or information that is to be supplied. She mentions that this is key, in order for the information professional to deliver the value-added result that clients demand. She went on to suggest, that sometimes clients have a hunch or theory and wants the information professional to conduct the research  to prove their theory. Our research as information professionals in this regard is to provide the message from the data that clients need to know and use to make their decisions. 

A question was asked of Phelps as to whether or not she has to provide clients with information for which she did not agree with the decisions that they intend to make. Phelps in response stated that this is why she always includes an executive summary or a cover letter contextualising the information being supplied as well as presenting the limitations of the data.

These few insights into the work of information consulting are indeed valuable for the troubles and expenses associated with my conference attendance. It is further insightful for me to be in such conferences to be part of the community of practice surrounding information consulting work. And hopefully, all these insights will transfer into helping me better understand my thesis research. And there's more to come. :)

References:

Phelps, M. (2014). More than pretty pictures: A guide to data visualization for info pros. Presentation at the Special Libraries Association 2014 Conference, June 8-10, Vancouver, B.C. Retrieved from http://www.phelpsresearch.com/Portals/0/DataViz-Adv-SLA2014.pdf

Phelps Research (2013). About Phelps Research and Marcy Phelps. Retrieved from http://www.phelpsresearch.com/AboutUs