theorywatch

Well, finally back from ALISE in Boston. This time was much better than my only previous ALISE in Boston, which was very stressful because of my last-minute decision to job hunt while I was there as a Garfield dissertation award winner. So this year, since I was neither recruiting nor being recruited (except that as a member of our search committee, I was casually talking to people who might be interested in becoming our new director at Oklahoma when Kathy Latrobe steps down next fall), I could relax and enjoy hearing the brilliant Tom Malone from MIT talk about the “genes” for collective intelligence, have fun with Scott Nicholson’s account of “the game” of becoming a global YouTube celebrity, see some fascinating posters (especially those by doctoral students of Howard Rosenbaum and Barbara Kwasnik, as they both tie loosely into my own research areas, so I was delighted to see exciting new work), chat briefly with several deans and directors that I know (such exalted circles I move in these days!), applaud Connie Van Fleet as she received her well-deserved ALISE “service” award, and give a presentation on “Practicing Strategic Relevance” (based on my CI course), which went pretty well and got some very useful comments from the audience. The highlight, though, was getting to meet Dr. Edna Reid, who does “terrorism informatics” and was there basically to recruit LIS grads as government intelligence analysts. I’ve admired her research for ages (she did seminal papers on “terrorism from below” and “terrorism from above” which I have always tried to use as a model for “practical” theoretical contributions), but I’d never met her in person. So that was an unexpected thrill for me!

An illustration, from a keyword search for “OODA loop” or “Boyd loop” in Google Books, of Colonel John Boyd’s OODA loop in action. (The OODA loop is “observe, orient, decide, act” in order to maneuver more quickly than others in a particular situation to obtain the competitive advantage. You can see from the book covers shown how popular this idea is in business and military circles!) The OODA loop also seems to apply to how quickly the Google Books project is being implemented, even while its “official” status is still being determined.

In case anyone is curious as to what is not considered a fundable topic for internal summer research support by the University of Oklahoma this year, here’s mine:

Opening the Black Box of “Actionable Intelligence”

Abstract:

This proposal offers a new model based on contemporary research in information science that will explore the most critical area of competitive intelligence today: so-called “actionable intelligence.” The project will examine key strategic decisions within the U.S. computer industry as described by 75 of the leading entrepreneurs and executives of the past quarter-century in order to determine what, why, and how “relevant information” becomes “actionable intelligence” within the current high-velocity business environment. This project is also intended as part of an ongoing effort to re-invent relevance research for the new global information environment.

The title of this proposal alludes to a seminal article in library and information science from 40 years ago: “Opening the Black Box of Relevance” by Cuadra and Katter (1967). Their important work began the complex process of unpacking the multidimensional concept of “relevance” (Mizzaro, 1997; Saracevic, 2006) which was originally viewed as a fairly elementary attribute pertaining to a particular piece of information (Goffman, 1964) but which has since been deconstructed over time into a user-oriented construct (Schamber, Eisenberg, and Nilan, 1990) best represented as a continuum (Spink, Greisdorf, and Bateman, 1998) comprised of such components as task relevance (Taylor, Cool, Belkin, and Amadio, 2006), algorithmic relevance (Saracevic, 1975), topic relevance (Janes, 1994), psychological relevance (Harter, 1992), cognitive relevance (Cosijin and Ingwersen, 2000), and situational relevance (Wilson, 1973), among others (Mizzaro, 1998).

The research proposed here will attempt to do the same for the concept of “actionable intelligence.” This term describes particularly relevant and presumably novel information that is likely to precipitate some kind of active response to its import. “Actionable intelligence” has received its greatest notoriety in reference to the events of September 11, 2001 and the alleged discovery of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the subsequent initiation of military actions by the United States and its political partners (Hartnett and Stengrim, 2004; Herman, 2002), but it has also been used in reference to the gathering and use of competitive intelligence by business organizations for at least three decades (e.g., Montgomery and Weinberg, 1979). Contemporary management approaches require extensive intelligence gathering to ensure that correct assumptions are being made about the environment and competitor capabilities. Without such intelligence, any actions attempted to develop, maintain, and extend the firm’s key assets and competencies may be flawed and even fail (Powell and Bradford, 2000). This second usage is the one of most interest to the proposed research, as it is closely associated with the learning organization, a crucial concept in knowledge management (Choo, 1998).

Competitive intelligence stems from an organizational paradigm that centers on group decision-making focused on so-called “key intelligence topic” that both inform and are informed by an ongoing series of items of information found by a variety of means (Fahey, 2007; Francis and Herring, 1999; Herring, 1999). Rather than concentrating on an organized collection of information sources as in traditional library reference settings, the emphasis is on collecting highly relevant information that may or may not already exist in any organized form. This also means that a much wider net is cast: the information sought may include such diverse sources as so-called “open source intelligence” (unpublished and published documents from a wide variety of sources), “human intelligence” (the elicitation of oral information), and “tech-int intelligence” (the analysis of data from a variety of technologies, especially geospatial ones).

Competitive intelligence also posits a strategic user group within the organizational setting. Competitive intelligence revolves around the so-called “intelligence cycle,” in which the one group specifies the general area in which intelligence is to be collected, and the other group is then responsible for collecting, evaluating, and analyzing relevant information that is then delivered as a potential decision-making input to the strategic end-users (Antia and Hesford, 2007). While competitive analyst cognition (Herbert, 2006; Heuer, 1999), managerial cognition (Barr, 1998; Clark and Montgomery, 1999), the difficulties the two groups encounter in attempting communication (Bernhardt, 1999), and various aspects of the entire process (Powell and Bradford, 2000; Thomas, Clark and Gioia, 1993) have all been studied, precisely what makes relevant information into “actionable intelligence” has received little attention. This research will attempt to address this omission.

(As may be obvious, since I’ve already started on this project, it’s a bit late not to continue on with it. Guess you can call me “Oklahoma tough” now!

Today a thread in the Competitive Intelligence class discussion forum on CI and intellectual property that Ethan’s running mentioned Harvard History of Science doctoral student Alex Wellerstein’s research on patenting the atomic bomb. (Thanks, Mike and Ethan!) While that in itself is interesting enough, Wellerstein’s website mentions a paper he’s written that I find even more intriguing: Diagrams of destruction: Secrecy, style, and the drawing of nuclear weapons: Read more…

And, apropos of the 5553 class (Competitive Intelligence), there was an excellent question about bias there the other day, because the week’s project involved the use of Edgar Schein’s approach to corporate cultural analysis in analyzing our target firms. The question was, “In doing this, should we worry about bias?” (Thanks, Wyatt!) My response was:

“Since the goal here is to ‘achieve’ bias (by trying to think ourselves into seeing how our target firm perceives the world), ‘use’ bias (by scouting out a variety of sources representing the views of stakeholders involved in some way with our target firm), and ‘transcend’ bias (by ending up with a realistic competitive strategy for the firm), I would say that yes, we should worry about bias, but make it work for us.”

I’ve been trying to build a few bridges during curriculum committee meetings for this type of “relevance work” as an addition to our more traditional “reference work” (for business research especially), but, considering the paragraph above, perhaps it is a bridge too far.

Although I never did find out exactly what went on in Thom Gillespie’s alternative games workshop “The-Library-Knowledge-Kills” at LITA in Denver this fall (why did nobody blog about that? was everybody sworn to secrecy? the idea sounded absolutely fascinating!), it looks like I’m getting a second chance at achieving gamasutra anyway. Just in time for KM/LIS 5553: How to Write an Adventure Game. I think I may call mine “Google Underground.” Heh.

Somewhat unusual convergence of interests: I was looking for something else entirely on Weibel Lines for my current class, and came across this book review there, which is a biography that relates to my other class on competitive intelligence. In that class, we discuss Boyd’s ideas (especially his OODA loop) as one of our models for the competitive intelligence process in general. Nicely-written review of the biography, and I can certainly see how the military establishment (then and now) would have trouble with his ideas! (Though I still don’t quite see why Stuart Weibel is interested in them…..)

Last semester in Competitive Intelligence, we had a pretty wide-ranging discussion about ethics (for example, whether it’s okay to eavesdrop on a loud-mouthed group from your competitor’s firm in a hotel bar at a trade show.) One of the things that came up was IBM’s business conduct guidelines, which gave an interesting and useful turn to our discussion. (I know from observation that these guidelines are taken quite seriously, as my “other job” for the past 25 years has been that of “IBM spouse”….)

Anyway, IBM has also had blogging guidelines in place since 2005, and I believe is now the first company to produce business conduct guidelines for virtual worlds, including but not limited to their own Metaverse.

As Scott Wilson has cleverly pointed out, the thing about virtual metaverses, like all other possible worlds, is that there are so many of them. But, wherever you go, there you are — or aren’t you?

The “World Without Oil” ARG game launched back at the end of April, while our Competitive Intelligence class was immersed in other things, such as final projects and final exams, so we didn’t get a chance to jump in (although it certainly related to many of the things we were talking about — including how oil companies did competitive intelligence!) Read more…