by Judith Binder, RBSC Corporation

“The next best thing to knowing all about your own business is to know all about the other fellow’s business.” (John D. Rockefeller)

“Loose lips sink ships.” (WWII slogan, US Office of War Information)

Capturing competitor and market intelligence from people is both art and science. Effective elicitation techniques involve getting people to voluntarily tell you things without you asking or disclosing the intent of the interview or conversation. Before you approach a target, you’ve thought through what data you need and how you’ll go about getting it.

Why would someone share information, even sensitive information? The motivations are not exotic, but need to be kept in mind.

• The need to be recognized and appreciated
• Tendencies toward self-effacement; being uncomfortable taking credit for something
• Natural curiosity
• A general inability to keep secrets
• Delighting in gossiping
• The urge to correct others or prove someone else wrong

Here are a few elicitation techniques:

The provocative statement: getting the source to ask you a question and setting the stage for another technique. For example:

“A new Texas law requires gas drillers to make public the chemicals they use on every hydraulic fracturing job in the state. Environmental complaints are really taking hold.” “What?” “The Wall Street Journal reported that Chesapeake Energy said they’d ‘seen the light’ at their annual meeting.” “I wouldn’t be too concerned. We feel…”

Quid pro quo: “I’ll show you mine, if you show me yours.” For example:

“We go way back, coal mining in Scotland. My great great uncle died in a mining accident.” “Oh, similar to me…”

Flattery: “Your Calvert, Alabama mill site…annual capacity of 4.3 million metric tons of carbon steel products? The service centers…” “Well, not so much to the service centers.”

Inclined to complain: “3D glasses active-shutter technology relies on those goofy infrared emitters. How long ’til universal, radio-synchronized 3D glasses? I’ll wait.” “Yeah, I heard the same, although…”

Word repetition: “My graduate work at the University of Chicago got me to the place I am now.” “Ah, working on those advanced degrees. A good time had by all.”

Naïveté: suspending your ego to focus on collecting information and not collecting strokes. For example:

“You’re saying telecom enterprise account managers handle 50 current customers and target another 50-100? That must really keep you busy!” “It’s not so bad. The service managers also weigh in to provide additional customer care.” “About customer care…”

The more you use elicitation techniques, the better you’ll become at testing techniques in seemingly inconsequential conversations, building opportunities for later contacts, and making the information collected most useful to the decision-maker.

Additional information can be found in John Nolan’s Confidential (HarperCollins, 1999).

Judith Binder heads the Research Group of RBSC Corporation. RBSC is all about Right Answers, Right Time.® Their clients use timely, actionable, cost-effective and reliable business information to successfully bring new products and services to market, increase market share, and integrate customer feedback into executive decision making. Products and services include qualitative interviews, focus groups, surveys, industry analyses, and competitive intelligence, among others. Visit their website or contact Judith at jbinder@rbsc.com.

The Checklist Manifesto: How To Get Things Right (Every Time) by Atul Gawande: A Review

by Cynthia Lesky, Threshold Information Inc.

What do the following activities have in common?

Building a bridge… Flying a plane… Providing consistently high-quality business intelligence.
One thing they have in common is that they are all complex processes requiring a delicate balance between process on one hand and creativity grounded in expertise on the other hand. And because this is true, each activity can benefit by adherence checklists.

To learn some of the fine points of using checklists, turn to Atul Gawande. Dr. Gawande writes and speaks extensively about medical — especially surgical — safety, an area he staked out in two early books, Better (2008) and Complications (2003). The more recent, The Checklist Manifesto (2009), pulls the lens back to encompass any complex field of practice.

And in our modern world what field isn’t complex? In addition to medicine, consider aviation, skyscraper construction, automobile manufacturing, software design, maintaining safety in the food supply chain…the list of professions where know-how potentially outstrips the ability to manage complex processes goes on and on. With increasingly more diverse sources and higher expectations for added value, I would argue that business research, technical literature search, and many document-related operations also belong in this list, thus making The Checklist Manifesto recommended reading for information professionals.

Gawande’s foundational argument is that our knowledge has surpassed our ability to manage the execution of the knowledge. We have “accumulated stupendous know-how” and put it in the hands of highly-trained and hard-working people. But that know-how is often unmanageable. And thus we have failures that are demoralizing and frustrating in finance, aviation, the military, engineering, and medicine, just to name a few headline-generating examples. “And the reason is increasingly evident: the volume and complexity of what we know has exceeded our individual ability to deliver its benefits correctly, safely, or reliably.” The strategy for overcoming this kind of complexity? A simple, well-designed, systematically utilized checklist.

Well, actually Gawande posits two kinds of checklists: one set of checklists to make sure that process steps are not skipped and another set of checklists to make sure that everyone involved in a project talks through and resolves unexpected problems. The two types of checklists are complementary. Top-down authoritarian task checklists capture the steps that always need to be taken and which by their nature take personal choice and discretion away from workers. Communication checklists, on the other hand, require team members to talk with each other at given pause points in the process. The communication may be as straightforward as members of a surgical team introducing themselves before beginning a procedure or as structured as engineers meeting to resolve unexpected problems in a complex process. The communications checklist restores the professional judgment and worker sense of control that the dictatorial task list takes away.

So, you might be thinking that the work of information specialists is not nearly so complex. Perhaps not. But it’s not getting any simpler either. And in my field, business and technical research and content curation, there is the tendency to work as lone rangers – or research heroes – rather than as a team. At Threshold we have checklists that we invoke to be sure that each client’s requirements for resource use, formatting, and delivery have been met and that the prescribed sources have been checked for our monitoring or content curation projects. The Checklist Manifesto gave me some ideas on how to more effectively design checklists and motivated me to require more structured team check-ins on larger projects.

Whether you manage all information center processes or focus on one or more specific functions like research or contract management, I guarantee you will get some ideas from the checklist stories from other complex industries. The Checklist Manifesto will indeed teach you “how to get things right.”

Now it’s your turn to share your experience:

• What kinds of activities do you use checklists for in your organization?
• Are checklists primarily training tools for you or operational tools? In other words, do you apply the discipline of running the checklist each time the operation or function is performed?
• Gawande notes that people who are comfortable in their jobs sometimes don’t like to surrender to the discipline of the checklist – but it will almost always ratchet up quality. Is compliance a problem with your staff?
• Have you found that checklists improve quality?

Research analysts at Threshold Information, the company Cynthia Lesky founded in 1993, help companies harness external information to enable smart decisions and accelerate innovation. Products and services include industry intelligence news digests, decision-support research and analysis, custom journalism and an infinite variation on these themes. Visit their website or contact Cynthia at cynthia.lesky@threshinfo.com.

Happy Friday! Imagine the conversation at the actual water cooler for a second.

Hey Sally, where have you been the last few days?

Oh hi, Ted! I was just at the most inspiring conference ever. I received so many new ideas that I don’t even know where to start!

We’ve all been there. We come home from a great SLA Annual Conference, chapter meeting, or any professional development opportunity, and we run through the mental list of takeaways from the events that we will implement in our professional and personal lives. Feeling energized, we feel that we can take on the world, and there’s nothing that we can’t do.

However, we come back from drinking the Kool-Aid to our rote routines, and the steam trickles out. Whether it takes a couple of days, a week, or a month, it seems evitable.

Am I speaking from personal experience? Of course! While I don’t want to presume that I’m the only one that runs into these roadblocks, I have a sneaking suspicion that I’m not alone. Therefore, I took a moment to look into the issue of motivation and ways to “keep the drive alive” (FYI: don’t use that phrase in a Google search when searching for information specific to work motivation).

Heidi Grant Halvorson, motivational psychologist and contributor on the Harvard Business Review Blog Network, writes that the mind plays a vital role to ensure staying on track with a project. She discusses recent research that two types of mental mindsets, “to-date” thinking and “to-go” thinking, that logically serve to motivate individuals to see goals through to the end. However, the “to-go” thinking mindset actually goes the extra mile with the constant reminder of what’s left to complete the task. Her advice? Focus on the remainder, not what you’ve already accomplished.

It’s the mind that helps us along the way, but what about “performance enhancers” and their effects? I located an article that suggests that I should be the most motivated person ever. Apparently coffee drinkers are among the “most inspired people”, according to a survey of over a thousand people that ranked their sources of motivation. (While the results may be biased, I did find the original blog post and TED video equally interesting.)

On a serious note, I am curious to know: what do you use as inspiration to follow through on your ideas? Do you utilize lists, self-bribery, or rewards for completing a task?

I’ll end with an interesting quote that I stumbled upon in researching this issue. It came from Twitter, of all places. “Motivation is the art of working more with the human brain’s chemical and electrical circuitry – than against it. It’s innate.” (@ellenfweber, aka Dr. Ellen Weber, via BusinessWeek’s Twitter’s Motivation Tips)

by Julianne Medaglia-Kurtz, TD Bank

While the phrase ‘cloud computing’ is gaining in popularity, the technology has been around longer than we realize. Back in 2009, librarians at Ohio State University were engaging in cloud computing by sharing information with Google Docs and uploading their photos to Flickr. Before that, people were using Facebook, a cloud computing service, operating since 2004. We have been using the cloud for nearly a decade without even knowing it. But what is the cloud, and how are we using it? How will it affect our libraries and information centers?

The ‘cloud’ itself can be defined as a central hub computer where large amounts of data are stored (this is another way of describing the internet). Once you upload your data to the cloud, it can be accessed anywhere. A demonstrative example of the cloud is Google’s music service (still in beta), music.google.com. Another example is Evernote.com, a powerful program and mobile phone app that is used for storing notes in the form of text, webpages, a photograph, a voice memo, or a handwritten “ink” note. Once uploaded to Evernote, you can access your account from anywhere using the Internet.

In a nutshell, when you connect your computer(s) to a network wherein all of your data is located in one place, operated by a powerful central computer, you are engaging in cloud computing. The information you request is sent from the central computer to your individual computer. It is important to note that no data is stored on your computer. You are merely requesting that the information be sent to your screen; you are viewing it in the same way you view a television program.

Now we can see how cloud computing programs and systems are making our lives easier, more efficient, and more enjoyable. It can even be better for the environment: Google just released a study detailing the improved energy efficiency of cloud-based email. But there are many implications of cloud computing for libraries and information centers. There are many types of information shared in libraries: user-generated content, original content, content created by the library. With Google Docs, files can be shared instantly. With the increasing digitization of works, this could be both a blessing and a curse. How can we regulate use, permissions, copyrights, etc?

For a more in-depth discussion about cloud computing, check out Library Journal’s article, .

So the question is: Have you started using cloud computing in your workplace? If yes, how? Has it increased your productivity? We’d like to hear your thoughts!

Julianne Medaglia-Kurtz is a graduate of the Master’s program of Library and Information Science at the Rutgers University School of Communication and Information. She has worked in several types of libraries and archives, including the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, MO. She is currently a Research Associate with TD Bank. In her free time, she enjoys going to museums, traveling, and cooking with friends. She can be reached at jmedagli@gmail.com.

by Judith Binder, RBSC Corporation

Although the practice of crowdsourcing isn’t new – interviews, focus groups, customer feedback, and surveys have been around for decades – Jeff Howe first used the term in a 2006 Wired magazine article. Since then it has become a buzzword that describes an invitation to imagine, interact, and inspire. It is used by companies that want to be perceived as modern, tech-savvy and networked.

Crowdsourcing is defined as the act of outsourcing tasks, traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, to an undefined, large group of people or community (a “crowd”), through an open call. With the Internet and social networking popularity, such “calls to action” can attract thousands of individuals, especially when they are motivated by obsession, competition, money, or all three.

Some say crowdsourcing drives better innovation, deeper insight and competitive advantage. The notion of crowds creating solutions is appealing. After all, we want to believe that working together we can do anything.

Crowdsourcing can be a part of an overall plan to foster technological advancement, design products, research markets and sell to consumers.

Check out Judith Binder’s blog for further exploration of the topic.

We’d like to hear from you.

• How has your organization used crowdsourcing or social networking?
• When is crowdsourcing most valuable? Product development, branding, tomorrow’s technology?
• What are the measures for success?

Judith Binder heads the Research Group of RBSC Corporation. RBSC is all about Right Answers, Right Time.® Their clients use timely, actionable, cost-effective and reliable business information to successfully bring new products and services to market, increase market share, and integrate customer feedback into executive decision making. Products and services include qualitative interviews, focus groups, surveys, industry analyses, and competitive intelligence, among others. Visit their website or contact Judith at jbinder@rbsc.com.