5 Ways To Raise The Profile Of Your Corporate Information Center
By Andrew Clark, Director and Head of Global Information & Competitive Intelligence, UCB
As head of global information for a major biopharmaceutical company, I try to anticipate what might be the next service line that we should provide to our internal customers and what might be the next big thing in terms of information provision, rights requirements, and the like. To ensure that my corporate information center runs optimally, there are five areas of improvement I continue to focus on, which not only keeps my team current, highly-skilled, collaborative and empowered, but also demonstrates a positive ROI for our parent organization.
1. Staying Ahead of the Information Curve
Staying ahead of the curve is built into our strategic planning process. In fact, my team and I recently held an off-site meeting where we discussed what we want to address over the next three years in terms of new technologies and services for the corporation to meet its business needs.
But in addition to strategic planning, I regularly try to think about what might be “disruptive” in the scientific, technical, and medical publications industry or in the broader context of how technology enables access to and delivery of information. What are the disruptive technologies that may be a threat to the status quo? For example, I’ve been thinking a lot about text mining, which has existed in one shape or another for decades. I also watch organizations like IBM, which is building solutions as part of its Watson project, which is a human-like computer designed to deliver any piece of information in response to a question. Artificial intelligence platforms such as Watson are evolving and will change the way we work.
I also look to other industries for insight into how change happens. In England, we’ve seen the quick and massive rise of cut-price supermarkets, for example. There are many longstanding chains of supermarkets that are trusted and respected, but in the last 12 months low-cost supermarkets have come on the scene and brought the price points down on groceries. Nobody saw it coming and it’s been a game-changer for the industry.
As part of our strategic planning, I ask my team to think about the game-changers in the information world. Is it going to be robots and artificial intelligence? Is it going to be ventures like the Google healthcare model that aims to revolutionize patient data? Might Apple’s interest in developing technologies like voice recognition change how we interact with information? That’s the sort of external evaluation that is needed when thinking about what might be next.
In addition, we should consider how we interact with people via social media sites like Facebook and Snapchat. How does that type of interaction fit in my organization? How do I engage with my researchers and customers? Is a new way to collaborate on data and information emerging?
In summary, trying to anticipate and be ready for tomorrow’s information technologies and services requires curiosity, insight, and intuition. Looking outside of the industry and the workplace can provide a new lens through which to view and question how we work today and a potential model for how we might work in the near future.
2. Building Skills to Support Information Services and Activities
One thing that information managers have to think about is building the right skills and capabilities within their teams to be able to deliver and support both existing services and activities, as well as new technologies and services as they develop. Doing this requires a two-step process: analyzing your team’s current skills and making a plan to build on them.
Analyzing Skills and Identifying Gaps
There are many ways that you can analyze the skillsets of your team members. I did a skills and competencies analysis for my small team based on their work performance, educational experiences, and things like this and created a spreadsheet that highlighted the strengths and weaknesses of the team. Then I took everyone off-site for two days for a workshop, which included doing the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument, or HBDI, which measures thinking preferences of individuals, teams, and organizations.
At the off-site workshop we did some strategic planning, as well. We put a blank piece of paper on the wall and at one end listed what we are doing now and at the other end we posted a list of where we wanted to be in three years. Then we identified what we would need to do to get there and any gaps, in terms of resources and skills that would need to be filled.
Developing Skills
Based on the skills and competencies analysis I’d done for individual team members, the results of the HBDI, and the gaps we needed to address strategically, I identified a combination of mentoring opportunities, training workshops, and other educational opportunities to incorporate into their personal development plans.
But we are a small team and can’t provide all the development opportunities internally, so we partnered with an academic organization to offer some training as well, and we do it on rotation. We also leverage learning opportunities through the service providers and partners that we work with like Copyright Clearance Center (CCC).
In addition, we encourage staff to build their skills and knowledge by engaging with professional organizations like the Special Libraries Association (SLA) and Pharmaceutical Documentation Ring (PDR.) Both organizations provide opportunities for learning and professional development through annual meetings and other events and programs with an emphasis on what might be emerging in the next few years that might affect our work and how we might be ready for it. (Note that I am a president of PDR)
It’s important to regularly take a step back from the day-to-day operations of a corporate information center to evaluate your team’s skillsets and put plans in place to support their development. When you take time to build the right skills in your team, everyone wins. It’s good for the employees, your team, and the organization.
3. Internal Champions
A top-level ambition of mine is to have the information center embedded throughout UCB’s teams as much as possible and, likewise, to build champions throughout the organization. This is difficult for any internal service team to do, but especially when you’re a team of five that serves an organization of nearly 10,000 employees.
How can we share the story of our team and empower individuals to learn about copyright, open access, tools and technologies, content, and the like?
A great way to do this is to develop relationships, starting with key stakeholders and those with whom you engage most. To do this, once every couple of months, someone from my team will spend a day or half a day with a key stakeholder in a separate department at UCB and offer them the invitation to visit us in return. During this time we learn about another department or individual, what they do, their needs, and their skill set. With any luck, that department or individual also learns something about what we do in our department and our skill sets.
It’s hard to do this when you’re a small team because you are giving up your key assets for a valuable day or two to shadow another part of the business. That might mean that you go from a team of five to a team of two at one point in the month, which, when you’re small, is difficult to accommodate because you don’t have the bandwidth.
But the results can be massive, especially when visiting a team with which you have had challenges in the past. The only thing that will improve that relationship is an investment of time and effort with that individual or group. Sometimes you won’t shift their opinion for months. But if you show that you really want to understand their needs and responsibilities, and then you extend an invitation for them to see what you’re doing on a daily basis, how you work, and your challenges, it starts to build that relationship.
For example, my team had a very difficult start to the year with another team, to the point that they had escalated a whole set of issues to upper management. It was very hard to figure out how to deal with this. The only way that we managed to turn it around, to the point that they come to us all the time now, is by me and my team members spending time with them, and then vice versa.
It’s easy to walk away from difficult relationships. I hear too often that people just cut relationships off and teams break down into their silos. Instead, they should make the call to invest in the relationship and try to turn it around. It is an opportunity to turn a negative into a positive.
Another way that we built internal champions was by forming an information advisory group. We brought together two individuals from about a dozen stakeholder groups globally at UCB to form the group. The group meets once a month to learn about the specific tools and services of our team, how we license content, etc., but also to talk about their challenges, needs, requirements, and frustrations.
We also provide training sessions and webinars as part of the advisory group program. Recently, however, we gave a webinar on copyright in a multinational group and decided to open it up to anyone in the company. It was so successful that we are going to provide more webinars on other topics that might be interesting to the entire company based on frontline customer service and library information requests that we receive. Needless to say, this is terrific opportunity to raise the visibility of the information center and develop more champions.
Developing internal champions requires an ongoing dialogue between your team and your customers. It takes time, creativity, and a commitment to building relationships. But the reward is better meeting the needs of your stakeholders and greater understanding about and adoption of the services you provide.
4. The Benefits of Cross-Collaboration
Resources are increasingly harder to come by in support of corporate information centers. Budgets and headcount are being cut, but the expectation for services remains high. Dwindling resources beget dwindling skills and capabilities. As a result, we have to be innovative and creative if we want to continue to grow the services we deliver.
One strategy that I have employed at UCB is partnering with and leveraging the expertise from colleagues in other areas of the business to replace skills and competencies that we don’t have in our own group. Essentially, we have harnessed the expertise from others for whom it is a core domain area.
Many organizations struggle with taking a step back to analyze the skillsets of their team members and few go even further to ask how they might supplement skills from the greater organization. This may be because both are challenging.
To leverage the expertise in other departments we identified colleagues who had a reputation for being good collaborators or willing to work and engage with our team. We met with them in person to learn about their work and gauge if they would be willing to share their skills to supplement our own. We focused first on those who we would describe as our trusted partners or key advocates in the organization because they were the most likely to support us, promote what we do, and work with us. We also focused on identifying collaborators who had the specific skills that we identified as necessary to carry out our three-year strategic plan, which we had charted out at an offsite workshop. For example, we approached someone who we heard was working on an initiative involving analytics and asked if they could lend a hand on an information center project involving our content and data by sharing their IT skills.
An added benefit of cross-collaboration is that you create internal champions for your team and build your internal network. By working closely with people in other departments, participants from each department learn about the daily ups and downs of each other’s work, about how other teams function, and about other parts of the organization that they didn’t interact with before.
Cross-collaboration in the form of drawing on the expertise outside of your team requires planning and analysis, but it is an opportunity to stretch and share resources across the organization, deliver better services, learn from each other, and build relationships.
5. Rethinking ROI
How a corporate information center can demonstrate a positive return on investment (ROI) for its parent organization is one of those things that keep corporate librarians awake at night. How can we justify the significant budget spend that we fight for from upper management? How can we ensure that our department generates a great ROI?
Demonstrating ROI is tricky business, especially for an internal, service-focused group like an information center. One way to approach ROI is to think about the value that the information center brings to your company’s decision-making process. For example, if my company launched a new product, I would look at the part my center played in it. We might have conducted research on the product using various data sources, packaged up the information, and delivered it back to management to enable them to make a decision or move the decision-making process forward.
Using altmetric data is another way that an information center can contribute to decision-making. Traditionally, journals receive a scientific impact factor, which is an industry-wide assessment of that journal’s scientific value. Additionally, altmetric data measures the impact of individual articles in the public domain by counting how many times they have been cited in public blogs, forums, or websites, or posted on social media sites like LinkedIn or Facebook. The data can be used to explore the level of interest in an article or topic to help determine if there’s a potential market for a new product or to justify a decision to end a particular project.
Altmetric data can be essential to highlighting ROI specifically around examining the value of your current content portfolio. I could conduct an analysis of my content portfolio by applying altmetric data to the articles I've purchased through RightFind, our content workflow tool, to find out how many of those articles have come from the top 10 high-impact journals, and determine what percentage of mentions those articles had in the public domain. This would show us the degree to which the articles have been considered important by its readers and discussed among peers.
In summary, corporate information centers must be creative when assessing ROI. Focusing on how the center supports strategic management decisions is an area worth exploring, as is using data sources to quantify the value of its content portfolio.
Andrew Clark has more than 17 years’ experience in the information industry and is currently Director of the Information & Competitor Intelligence team at UCB, a global Biopharmaceutical company headquartered in Belgium.