The Accidental Intrapreneur BECOMING THE KNOWLEDGE CENTER CEO

Transcription

1 The Accidental Intrapreneur BECOMING THE KNOWLEDGE CENTER CEO

2 The Accidental Intrapreneur: Becoming the Knowledge Center CEO MARY ELLEN BATES, BATES INFORMATION SERVICES INC. Reluctant-Entrepreneur.com In a world where you can ask your smartphone for directions to your destination or for a diagnosis of a troubling medical symptom, conversations about the value of curated information and professional information services take on a new urgency. No longer is it enough for knowledge centers to have highly-skilled information professionals providing the best, most authoritative information to clients. Now, you have to take a more strategic approach to the role of the knowledge center within your larger organization. Effectively differentiating your services from all the other information sources available to your clients means developing the mindset of an intrapreneur, someone who brings the innovative, risktaking approach of an entrepreneur into an organization and always looks at ways to provide higher value to clients. You are, in essence, running a small enterprise within your larger organization; always responding to new competitive pressures, finding out clients new needs, and creating new services that best meet those needs. 1

3 THINKING LIKE A BUSINESS OWNER Intrapreneurial thinking requires a different approach to every decision you make on behalf of your knowledge center. Like every organization, you have competition your clients are already in the habit of looking for information themselves, every time they check their smartphone for sports scores or the weather forecast. You are competing for budget dollars with other parts of your organization. With the rise of apps that enable easy access to the information they need and the Google-ization of user interfaces, clients can get the impression that information centers and information professionals are no longer essential. An intrapreneur takes a proactive approach to the knowledge center s role within the organization. Rather than viewing your services as overhead an expense that needs to be controlled or cut you can see yourself as being directly involved in the strategic goals of your organization. You negotiate enterprise contracts to ensure knowledge workers have the resources they need to analyze the competitive environment and respond to new opportunities and threats. You support strategic decision-making by providing insights into the latest developments in your field. You collaborate with special project teams to find creative solutions and best practices within your field. In short, the Specialized libraries and information centers within Australia returned over $5 for every $1 invested knowledge center plays a strategic role in your organization; the more you recognize and leverage that role, the better support you can provide for the key activities of your organization. A 2014 study led by the Australian Library and Information Association, Putting a Price on Priceless (owl.li/riopd), found that specialized libraries and information centers within Australia returned over $5 for every $1 invested. This was calculated by assessing the out-ofpocket savings from duplicate access to information, as well as time saved by information professionals conducting more efficient and cost-effective research than their clients. Even more striking is that this figure only took into account the direct expenses and employee time saved; the impact of better outcomes and better-informed decisions was not calculated but was also considered to be significant. Even if you find it daunting to determine the ROI for your organization s investment in your knowledge center, you can consider how you go about meeting the strategic needs of your clients today, modifying or eliminating services that no longer justify the cost, and developing new services your clients want now. An intrapreneurial approach to staying in front of your clients key needs would be to focus on your key client groups within the organization. In for-profit companies, these groups may include product development teams, strategic planning and global sales accounts. For a non-profit, it might be the strategic partnership team, a research and policy group and the development office. The information center in a consulting firm might target managing partners, the business development team and practice group leaders. Whatever their job title, you thinking like an intrapreneur are looking for the people who create value for your organization s clients or users, generate revenue or make strategic decisions. They are the ones who are taking risks and anticipating the future; they need high-quality information, provided in a format that encourages insight and conveys value. They are often your best internal champions. These risk-takers and strategic decision-makers value the support that an intrapreneurial knowledge center can provide and can effectively advocate for increased funding and support. 2

4 QUESTIONING ASSUMPTIONS Earning that support requires an intrapreneurial approach on the part of the knowledge center staff; information services that were valued in the past may no longer be seen as relevant. Clients expect a higher level of analysis and distillation from information professionals, and the practice of simply delivering a collection of articles or reports to a client is no longer welcome. In fact, a frequently-used acronym in social media is TL;DR Too Long; Didn t Read. In an environment where information overload can be summed up in four letters, data dumps are dismissed as having little value. Sometimes, the best answer can be a data visualization that shows a trend more effectively than a stack of articles. While a deliverable from the knowledge center usually is not as minimalist as an infographic, it is critical to appreciate the need for distillation and sense-making in your information services and deliverables. Intrapreneurs are always challenging their own assumptions about what their clients want and value. They assume that their services will always be evolving to meet the current challenges of their organization. They are always asking questions of themselves and of their clients. Whenever intrapreneurs are talking with clients, they ask questions such as: What would make this deliverable more useful for you? How can the knowledge center help you meet your goals? What do you wish the knowledge center could provide for you? Where else do you go when you are preparing for a strategic decision? Intrapreneurs are also testing their beliefs against what they learn from conversations with clients, by asking themselves questions such as: Where else are my clients going for information and insight? Can we meet those needs? What don t my clients know to expect from the knowledge center? How do my clients access information? How would they like to? How frictionless is the knowledge center? How easy is it for clients to interact with us? Informational interviews, casual conversations, online surveys and other forms of primary research are powerful tools for identifying the unique services your knowledge center can provide and the unique needs that experienced information professionals can meet. While that can entail indepth discussions (see the sidebar, The Reality-Check Interview ), you can also gain insight by simply shifting your approach in your interactions with clients and asking these questions during every conversation. Take time on a regular basis to sit back and reflect on what you have learned from your on-going internal competitive intelligence. Where are the biggest opportunities to increase value for your clients? Where are the most strategic unmet needs? What do your clients need to know about your services? THE REALITY-CHECK INTERVIEW The best way to find out what clients really want is to ask them in a context of inquiry and open-ended questions. These conversations need not take more than 10 or 15 minutes and they involve no promotion of the knowledge center s services. Your intent is to learn more about your clients information needs apart from the context of your services. Questions that can elicit useful insights from clients include: How do you prepare for an important decision? What is keeping you from achieving your most important goals? What do you wish you knew about our stakeholders or competitors? What services would support you strategically? These questions, all of which are focused on the clients needs and priorities rather than the existing services of the knowledge center, help spark a conversation in which you can learn how best to fit your services into your clients work flow. Pay attention, too, to what your clients do not mention. Are you providing services that your clients no longer value or find relevant? Are there legacy products that originally met a strategic need but are no longer useful and can be retired? While some low-visibility services may still be justified, question any of the knowledge center s products or services that clients do not use or value. 3

5 OFFERING GREATER VALUE Information professionals are finding that the proportion of time spent finding information is dropping and more time is invested in making the information more useful and insightful. The client-needs assessment, known by librarians as the reference interview, is critical in ensuring you understand the purpose behind each project and your client s expected outcome. Will your client want a slide deck of the key findings in order to best convey actionable information to her direct reports? Will your client be using this material on a mobile device and, if so, should it be delivered in a different format? Does your client want all the details or just the toplevel story? With an intrapreneurial mindset, you can develop a collection of templates for adding value to deliverables, based on what you have learned from your conversations with clients. Depending on your organization, they might include: Executive summary Hyperlinked table of contents Timeline of key events Comparison chart Graphics of key statistics or metrics Search result insights (e.g., key players, regional differences, most-mentioned organizations) Identify ways to offer insights and a narrative of the key elements of your findings. (Remember that acronym TL;DR!) The search refinement tools of the valueadded online services can often be used to bring more analysis to the report and to answer questions through data visualization that your clients may not have known to ask. FACTIVA Dow Jones Factiva, which commissioned this white paper, offers a number of presentationready visualizations that can be used in a report to convey information to your clients. Take as an example a search about the danger of hackers accessing cars onboard computers. A company involved in IT security might want to know whether discussions of the thread of car hacking are primarily taking place in one particular geographic region or whether this is a worldwide concern. The public affairs office of an automobile manufacturer might want to monitor the frequency at which their company is mentioned in this context. If they knew what journalists were writing about this topic most frequently and which executives were being quoted, they could reach out to these influencers directly. Figure 1 shows the search results page for a query about cars and hacking, highlighting the Search filters, which can provide insightful context. Note that each of the filters Date, Companies, Sources, and so on can be expanded for a visual display of meta-information about the retrieved material. FIGURE 1. FACTIVA SEARCH FILTERS 4

6 SEARCH FILTERS INSIGHT POSSIBILITIES The recent spike in mentions of this topic indicates increased concern, warranting a response by organizations affected. After expanding the search for non-english articles by using Factiva industry and subject codes, it appears that concern about this topic extends to the UK and Canada as well as in the United States. An organization wanting to get its message out regarding this topic may want to reach out to the journalists who write most frequently about this topic and arrange interviews with key organization executives. The following table offers suggestions on how some of the Search filters could be included in a report to provide insight, while requiring no additional work on the part of the searcher. 5

7 FIGURE 2: FACTIVA ANALYTICS SHARE OF VOICE GRAPHIC FIGURE 3: FACTIVA ANALYTICS NEWS VOLUME VS. STOCK PRICE GRAPHIC FIGURE 4: FACTIVA NEWSLETTER BUILDER In addition to these on-the-fly graphic displays of filter options on the search results page, Factiva offers an Analytics feature, which allows users to generate graphics to better understand their external environment by analyzing the results of saved searches. These charts and graphs bring insights to life and make a more compelling report, as they can convey information in more engaging ways. Figure 2 shows the Share of Voice chart comparing the relative number of mentions of five alternative energy sources over the past two years. This chart was generated by saving five individual searches, clicking Chart Builder in the Analytics tab, and specifying the type of chart and date parameters. Proactive information professionals might create similar charts to track their organization s presence in the news, updating the chart on a weekly or monthly basis, noting changes and correlating the impact of their organization s activities and public communications on their share of voice. One of the habits of successful intrapreneurs is watching for opportunities to hack whatever resources they have. They use the advanced search features of LinkedIn, for example, to track down former employees of a company to interview for insights on the organization s corporate culture. They use Google Trends (google.com/trends) to monitor consumer mindshare over time. Intrapreneurial Factiva subscribers notice Factiva s Newsletter Builder feature and start exploring it, even if they have no plans to create a newsletter. Why? They use the newsletter template to create client reports that are attractive, easy to navigate, and professionally formatted. While the feature is oriented toward newsletter creation, intrapreneurs can recognize it as a tool for creating presentation-ready research reports. Once a template has been created, a searcher can build the report an item at a time, adding annotations and highlights, organizing the material into sections, summarizing the findings, inserting charts, linking out to additional resources, and generating a hyperlinked table of contents. Figure 4 shows a report generated from Newsletter Builder on the topic of hacking the onboard computers of automobiles. 6

8 EFFECTIVELY COMMUNICATING VALUE The intrapreneurial mindset says that it is your responsibility to demonstrate your value, not your client s or boss s responsibility to figure out your value. If the value of your knowledge center is not recognized by your organization s leadership, your job is to find ways to more effectively show and talk about how you contribute to the strategic goals of your organization. First, conduct some of those reality-check interviews with both existing clients and people within your organization who are not yet effectively using the knowledge center. The purpose is to discover not only what their most important information needs are but also what words they use to describe their information pain points. By incorporating those words and phrases into all your communications, you can ensure that the leaders within your REALITY-CHECK INTERVIEW QUESTIONS THAT ELICIT VALUABLE INFORMATION: What do you do when you cannot find the answers you need? Can you describe how you would prepare for the most important decision you make this quarter? When, if ever, do you consult the knowledge center? What prompts you to contact us? Why then? Can you tell me about a time when you knew you needed to consult with someone at the knowledge center? How would you describe the knowledge center s services to a colleague? organization hear and understand the impact the knowledge center has on the success of the overall organization. By speaking their language, you more effectively communicate your value. Based on what you learn from these conversations, review all the ways that you communicate with both clients and prospects. Look at your operation from the perspective of an intrapreneur, and build the habit of talking about tangible results you can tie back to the use of the knowledge center. Intrapreneurs view every expense as an investment, so they would recognize a $20,000 line item as enabling a new product launch or the design of a new initiative. Examine what metrics you use to describe your knowledge center and the services of the information professionals, and consider whether they best convey your impact to the larger organization. Do you talk about the number of literature searches conducted and how quickly you found a relevant set of results or can you describe how your research affected a specific outcome? Do you report on the total amount spent for information products or can you tie clients use of an online resource to sales goals achieved? Consider developing an annual report on the key activities of the knowledge center. Instead of reporting operational metrics such as number of library e-content downloads or budget per capita, describe knowledge center projects that had tangible business results a new client acquired, a competitive threat responded to proactively, or a supply chain interruption anticipated. Identify the strategic goals of your organization and correlate the activities of the knowledge center to these goals. If one of your organization s goals is to increase the number of patents it is awarded, highlight the intellectual property research you provide. If your organization advocates for the health needs of children, focus on your contribution to an influential policy paper. If the knowledge center offers specialized search training for internal clients, ask your clients to estimate how much more efficient and cost-effective their searches are after the knowledge center training, and highlight the savings to the organization. Be visibly involved in the activities your organization most values, whether they are building more energy-efficient heating systems or developing new treatments for diabetes. Intrapreneurs understand that funding for their operation is never guaranteed; their organization will always be asking the knowledge center to justify its existence. Fortunately, your intrapreneurial mindset will ensure that your knowledge center is always proactively addressing the critical decision-support needs of your organization, and that you effectively convey to everyone in your organization the strategic value you provide. Financial support flows to the groups within an organization that are most aligned with the goals of the organization. The knowledge center can and should be positioned to be one of those groups. 7