City Information Group: Working with IT

Last night I gave a talk about my experiences of working with IT Professionals at the City Information Group meeting. These are some of the things I spoke about, and links to resources I mentioned:

There should be a natural affinity between Information Management and Information Technology, but in practice the working relationship between the professions is often fraught with misunderstanding and frustration.

I had more than my fair share of problems with IT departments before founding OneIS. It’s been a rewarding experience to have developed such a productive working relationship with IT Professionals while building OneIS. We have such complementary skills, and when the relationship works well, we can produce amazing results.

The New Interface

My first example of collaboration between Information Professionals and IT was in using Information Professionals to improve search.

I showed the example of a search for O’Reilly on Google. Most of the hits are about the technology publisher and the talk show host, but you’ll notice that about four results down, there’s an extra section, See results for: o’reilly auto parts. This is so that the O’Reilly Auto Parts company can be found, even though there’s little written about it on the web. This was added manually to the search by Google — even systems like Google, with all their technical sophistication, need someone with an understanding of what the user is looking for to improve the search.

Information Professionals and IT

Information Professionals need to be involved with IT projects, because they deal with Information. We can explain the meta-data that should be recorded for each piece of information, which input fields should be free text, which a controlled list, and which lists need to be hierarchical.

But just as importantly, we can work out what the end users actually need, helping everyone involved to agree on the right system which will fulfill the requirements quickly and accurately.

There are also lots of extra skills we can offer, from Training to Documentation to Project Management and beyond. But we need to make sure our skills are up to date, and the language we use to describe them is understandable to IT colleagues.

Information Management resources

Information Architecture for Information Professionals, Sue Batley

Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, Louis Rosenfeld, Peter Morville

Essential Thesaurus Construction, Vanda Broughton

Organizing Knowledge: Taxonomies, Knowledge and Organization Effectiveness, Patrick Lambe

International Society for
Knowledge Organisation

How to spot a good IT Professional

There are lots of bad IT Professionals out there, mainly because it’s a new profession which hasn’t yet embraced the professional standards that older professions, like law and accountancy, have adopted. So I gave some tips on how to spot a good one. A good IT Professional will normally demonstrate:

• a meticulous attention to detail
• a methodical approach
• a need to solve problems
• intellectual curiosity
• logical and consistent answers to technical questions
• professional pride & commitment
• the right attitude, helping users rather than protecting the systems.

The usual “easy” things to spot can be red herrings. Don’t be misled by:

• newer computer science degrees teaching practical skills which will be quickly out of date
• vendor certificates, which just take a multiple choice exam to gain and the vendor issues as many as possible

But there is hope for qualifications; the British Computer Society’s CITP Chartered IT Professional scheme recognises those with a wide range of experience and ability.

Top Ten Tips

Here’s my tips for working with IT professionals:

# Respect each other’s skills # Keep your skills up to date # Have a conceptual understanding of IT # Develop through conversation # Be very precise when talking to an IT professional # Watch out, we’re two professions divided by a common language # The early stages are important # Be patient # Don’t interrupt an IT person deep in thought # Have an interest in the IT industry

For the last point, I recommended reading Neal Stephenson’s In the beginning was the command line, together with some blogs:

BBC Technology

Guardian Technology

Confused of Calcutta — JP Rangaswami, CIO of BT Design

Joel on Software — thoughts on developing software from a famous developer

Daring Fireball — random links about random bits of IT culture. Lots on Apple, with tangents on baseball and Stanley Kubrick

The Daily WTF — where developers laugh at the stupid things their colleagues do. Skip the code, laugh at the pictures and the stories.

How to make your IT project happen

Here’s how any IT project is approached, whatever its size:

# Needs and requirements analysis # Functional specification # Technical specification # Coding # Testing # User manual and help pages # Implementation and training

As Information Professionals, we should probably leave the Technical Specification and the coding to the IT people, but we must be involved in all the other stages to make sure information is handled properly.

Avoiding the pitfalls

Finally, I spoke about the most common pitfalls you must avoid.

Get the concept right on paper

In the beginning, most IT projects are very abstract and difficult to get your head round. But this is the most important stage — if you get it wrong now, the whole thing is doomed.

So make sure you get it right on paper first, when it’s easy to change. If you have to make changes any later, it’s frustrating and expensive.

Work with people who understand the whole IT infrastructure

It’s important that your IT colleagues have at least an awareness of everything in the IT infrastructure they’re using. This avoids classic problems, like systems which work fine in development with a tiny amount of data, but take minutes to respond when they’re in use and filled with information.

Use people with the best skills for the job

Even when you join forces with an IT professional, there will be times that neither of you is the expert. It’s usually cheaper to get in a freelancer to fill the gaps, than to get it wrong on your own.

A good example is the visual look of the system. To make it appealing and be a joy to use, it’s usually sensible to get a graphics designer in to make sure it looks great.

Working with IT

I’ve enjoyed working closely with IT Professionals to develop OneIS. I hope the lessons I’ve learned can help others working with traditional IT departments on the usual projects, as well as those tackling new and innovative problems through Information and IT.

My thanks to the City Information Group for hosting the evening, and being such an appreciative audience.