Wednesday, December 15, 2004

Online-Information Conference at Olympia 2004 - Report

Leaving the conference at the end of the third day, I found myself wondering --- am I really an ‘information worker’? This seemed to be a phrase used frequently during the 3 days of this tightly packed conference.

furthermore...

Conference chairman, Martin White kicked the conference off with a picture of a church organ (it turns out that this is his ‘weekend job’), and explained that the ‘user interface ‘ for this musical instrument has taken 400 years to evolve. This looked like a very complex arrangement of stops, buttons and keys. Even so, organists can quickly find their way around such an instrument. I think his point here was that we have only just started to develop the perfect user experience for the computer and we may have a long way to go. The keynote speaker was usability guru Jakob Nielsen and his presentation was full of statistics. Nielsen’s user centric notion of the web is very well known through his books and web site (Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity and useit.com). Nielsen’s talk gave an optimistic view and that by comparing usability satisfaction ratings between 1994 and 2004, things were getting better. In the early days of Nielsen’s assessments of usabilty, only 40% of user experience could be deemed satisfactory, whereas in 2004 66% were satisfactory. In other words, in previous years more than half of people browsing the web had an unsatisfactory experience and this contrasts with the situation now where less than half are having an unsatisfactory experience. Nielsen was implying that one reason for this was that web designers are paying attention to his (see useit.com) usability advice. More particularly, in his opinion, designers are being ‘less sinful’ at designing glamourous websites and are being more ‘restrained’ in their approach to web design. Jacob Nielsen stepped through some of the usability issues and how they could be improved. He also entertained the conference audience with some sample web sites being used by his (anonymous) testers. One particular example was the Disney web site where a woman was desperately trying to view a trailer for ‘the Incredibles’ film. The messages on the screen completely confused her and she ended up with lots of windows overlapping each other on the screen – the conference audience laughed – was this at her? It sounded like a ‘nervous’ laugh to me! My goodness, people were thinking – ‘I wonder if my web site is that difficult to use?’ As is usual with events like these, there was a lot going on! Three tracks, many overlapping my interests but here are some thoughts on my further experiences: Graham Smith, Deputy Information Commissioner for UK government gave a scary talk on how we must all pay very strict attention to the compliancy regulations. This means penalties if you don’t provide information that you hold within your organisation for individuals who are requesting that information! You will need good records management because you will have just 20 working days to get that information from your archives. Maintain a good paper trail or (if things are digital) good search mechanisms within your intranet. Oh, by the way, when I say penalties I mean ‘prison’! I got a bit weary of the legal track and rushed on over to the talk about the ‘Semantic Web’. John Davies, Head of Next Generation Web Research, BT, UK was a good speaker and kept us spellbound with his report on the SEKT project at BT. (Did he ever tell us what SEKT stands for?). Best if I just quote him here because he was one of guys who was deep into knowledge:

“Knowledge is the new battleground for competition. Knowledge workers make up an increasing proportion of the workforce in an increasingly competitive European and global economy. A new generation of knowledge management (KM) tools and techniques, based partly on the next generation (Semantic) web will emerge over the next 3-7 years. Capability in this area is fundamental to European economic competitiveness.”

Enough of knowledge! Time for a visit to the exhibition floor and a vastly overpriced sandwich! The exhibition was the place to meet vendors of knowledge management systems, content management tools and data search engines. I picked up a lot trinkets (pens, mints, mouse mats and a very odd little compass / light and whistle combined) and some useful brochures. I managed a quick glass of champage on one stand; celebrating an anniversary .... I can’t remember what for. Anyway lots of ‘solutions’ to be found on the exhibition floor and worth mentioning as well were the free seminars, even though many were ‘sales’ pitched! So back to the conference and my next moment of interest was the talk by the well known ‘Information Architect’ Louis Rosenfeld. He gave a keynote on Information Architecture, and was cheerful and optimistic. He gave us a survey of his views on the changing patterns of work for Information Architects. Louis Rosenfeld, co-author of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web talked about those who work with corporations (innies) and those who work as self-employed consultants (outies). Two things that make for good opportunities for Information Architects: 1. The explosion of content (I learnt from Adrian Dale that in December 2003 there was 800Mb of data for every person on the planet) 2. R.O.T. - Redundant, Outdated and Trivial content (tons of it!) Lou Rosenfeld finds good opportunities working with ‘messy, political enterprises’. Lou reminded us of AiFiA, Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture which serves to advance the design of shared information environments. Complex taxonomies are the speciality of Margaret Hanley, Senior Information Architect at the BBC and her talk on the way the taxonomies of the BBC web site is structured was a high point of the conference. Seven BBC staff constantly review the way that the BBC site is searched and they then develop controlled vocabularies and taxonomies accordingly. XML data is pushed out as HTML. It was a shame I couldn’t catch the session on Open Access Publishing because this was moderated by our good friend Hugh Look. Monica Morrison, in a presentation about her experiences at the UN, told us about personal knowledge management. Individuals like me would be very familiar with the issues described; we need coaching in PKM (Personal Knowledge Management) systems. In our case this might be a matter of how to manage our email which has now become our own record management system. It seems to me that there are important unresolved questions in this area, particularly in relation to compliance; who owns the information on your desk? You (the knowledge worker) or your organization? Timo Hannay, Associate Director, Nature Publishing Group in the UK gave a very informative presentation on Syndicating and Personalising Content using RSS. There is a reason for the confusion over the acronym RSS. In its first version (0.9) it meant Rich Site Summary. Later developers labelled version 2.0 Really Simple Syndication. With version 1.0 came the integration of another acronym - RDF (Resource Description Framework), and so we now have RDF Site Syndication. Version 2.0 of RSS seems to have less functionality than version 1.0. Confused? A book was recommended – in the O’Reilly series- ‘Content Syndication with RSS’ -By Ben Hammersley and I just ordered it from Amazon. The presentation by Timo Hannay was only the start of what turned out to be one the most interesting sessions for me. The talk was followed by Anne Clyde from Iceland University on how blogs are used in libraries around the world. The final talk by Adriana Cronin-Lukas from bigblog.net/ was actually a late entry and not billed in the programme so it was a nice surprise, this one. Adriana gave a splendid talk on the use of blogs in enterprise. Interesting examples from Disney, Google and InfoWorld were given and it was good to hear ExpressionEngine mentioned and recommended. Yours truly nervously asked a couple of questions. A good deal was said at this conference about ‘search’ and it was good that I managed to catch the talk from Stephen E. Arnold, a consultant and search engine specialist from the US. The need for an efficient search technology to manage access to the rapidly expanding growth of data / information / knowledge within a typical enterprise was explored. We were warned – ‘this is not as simple as setting up an internal ‘Google’ – you need a budget and you need specialists’. I learnt of one government agency in the US that had 154 million emails within its archive and it doesn’t stop growing! Now search that!