Today Alane Wilson of OCLC spoke to the Education Institute and provided what she called an “amateur primer” on environmental scanning (ES)based on insights from It’s All Good blog that I mentioned in an earlier post on the topic of ES.

Alane discussed how ES at OCLC started with strategic planning efforts as one elements of the planning process. Alane, like most other planners & scanners, is not a professional futurist, came to the futures field accidentally. It is amazing the number of disciplines and avenues from which futurists emerge, like Ray Kurzweil, a current fixture at futurist conferences. She quoted from futurist, Peter Bishop, who said that futurists need two things — a facination and interest in change, and didn’t want an MBA.

The definition of ES from Alane’s primer describes it as an internal communication of external information that may influence your future. It is a tool to evaluate strengths and weaknesses. Even though there is no one template, or list of must do’s with ES — ES has to be relevant to your organization. There are oftencommon elements with ES in that they look at variety of landscapes to describe and co-ordinate trends such as ecomonic, social/sociological, technological, and other landscapes that might be relevant such as the local political environment if you are a community organization. Alane mentioned the RCMP environmental scan and that their organization changes their sensing compass for landscapes each year.

The scanner is the look out — not the navigator, first mate

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Don’t you love it when things come together? I was just talking with CIL conference speaker & organizer Darlene Fichter the other day about getting a wiki up for CIL to include travel and eating tips, information about DC, techniques for getting the most our of the conference, and also a place to connect with the CIL community. Watch for posts from pros like Scott Brandt, who I’m hoping will post his tips for speakers.

And now a CIL06 wiki exists, and it comes from someone I have never met — Meredith Farkas whose blog is called, Information Wants to be Free. Meredith is planning to attend CIL/Computers in Libraries for the first time, and we look forward to meeting her next month; and we really appreciate her efforts to assist all conference attendees through a CIL06 wiki. A great way to build community and wonderful to come from the grassroots! Thanks, Meredith.

The 10th annual KMWorld & Intranets Conference and Exhibition will be held on October 31 – November 2, 2006 at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center, in San Jose, California. Consider being a speaker or participant.

The KMWorld & Intranets Conference and Exhibition offers a wide-ranging program especially focused to meet the needs of executives and strategic business and technology decision makers. This is a must-attend for those concerned with improving their organization’s bottom line, business processes and productivity, as well as streamlining operations and accelerating development and innovation in their evolving enterprises.

This year’s theme, Applying Strategies & Tools for Innovation, emphasizes that Knowledge Management is neither theory nor dream, but at work today, totally integrated into daily business and work processes, and having a major impact on organizational innovation. A reality check for the business manager, this year’s KMWorld Conference and Exhibition looks directly at improving business processes, solving urgent business problems, and expanding creativity and innovation. As always, the conference program covers the strategies, practices, processes, tools and solutions for enterprises. This year, the emphasis is heavily in favor of practical, hands-on advice and real-world experience. This is a conference that stresses solutions that businesspeople can use immediately in their organizations.

While traditional knowledge management (KM) often signifies sharing already existing knowledge which leads to some value add, major gains and competitive edge come today from creating and implementing new knowledge — innovation. A recent global study of innovation showed that transformational innovation comprised 2%

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Friday at OLA was another fun day. (You know that right-brain stuff = play is important!) More of my favourite quotes of the day:

Kathleen Imhoff — “Cultivating Creativity”“Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.” — Will Rogers“Remember: only you can change your frame.”Kathleen had us all playing with pipecleaners — and by the end of the first exercise, the range of results was interesting: angel, swan, tiara, cat, one-legged dog. Her point was, in a meeting, many of us can be looking at the same thing — but see totally different outcomes / opportunities. We have to remember the frame.

Stephen Abram — “Are Libraries Innovative Enough?”Stephen’s point was that libraries are innovative — but questions whether we are innovative ENOUGH. He challenged us with the emerging technologies that will transform our world — and whether or not we were ready to accomodate and embrace these technologies — and the kids who are already there!“The next 10 years will be about even more huge discontinuous change.”“What will it mean to libraries when our services can be delivered to cheap technologies everyone carries in their pockets?”“Think about how innovative we have to be to deliver to a market with ubiquitous access to technology via wireless connectivity.”“What if there were no libraries — what would you do if you were starting from scratch?”“Don’t transact — transform!”And my personal, lighthearted favourite: “If the TV’s a babysitter, the Internet is a drunk librarian!”For more

Continue reading Juanita on OLA06

Juanita Richardson’s quotes of the day:

Kim McArthur:“Following on what Dan Pink told us about right-brain thinkers last night, consider this: there are 240 Master of Fine Arts in Writing programmes now in North America — 20 years ago, there were 3! Great news for publishers — and for libraries!”

MJ D’Elia “Connections not categories”:“Ontology is nearing the end of its useful life…LC classification exists not because concepts require hierarchecal placement but because books do.”

Steve Uzzell “Creative problem solving”:“If you don’t visualize the solution, you will never see the path.”“Ask yourself: 1) Is it the right time? 2) Is it the right place? 3) Am ***I*** in the right place?”“Don’t focus on the near term, go for the wide shot.”

Stephen Abram “Real measures for libraries”:Finding from the NDP study being conducted by SIRSI: “What do the patrons of our public libraries value?: Community, learning, quality, efficiency, money.”So what should our objective be? “Empower your client to thrive — our success is dependent upon their success.”