tagged: Best Practices

Call for Best Practices

Posted by Erik M. Hartman in Call for Chapters

Information Management Best Practices
The practical guide to Information Management

Bob Boiko & Erik M. Hartman, Chief Editors of the Information Management Association, invite you to contribute to ‘Information Management Best Practices’, a TIMAF publication.

Have you experienced the merits of a specific approach to information management strategy, methodology, technology or tools? If so, here is an opportunity to share your knowledge with a global audience in ‘Information Management Best Practices’.

Information? Management!

Information is the term we use to stand for all the forms of preserved communication that organizations care to produce, store and distribute. Anything from sales figures in a database to a video on philosophy can be considered information. However, in general, we consider the less ‘data-like’ forms of information to be of most interest to our audiences. We define management as the organized collection, storage and use of information for the benefit of an organization. We consider information management to cover the sub disciplines of content, document, asset, data, records and all other ‘managements.’

The field of information management is currently fractured and incoherent. Each sub discipline (content, document, asset, records, data management to name just a few) has its own practitioners, applications and professional communities. We believe that behind the seeming differences between these “managements” there is a deeper unity that will eventually define a strong clear foundation for all of them. We do not believe that all managements will or should merge, but rather that just as business underlies a variety of business practices including accounting and finance, there is a common foundation for the variety of forms of information management.

On the other hand, just as business is only practiced within a more specific context, information management is also practiced in context. Thus, we believe that the best way to illustrate the concepts and practices of information management is within the context of one or more subfields. As a result, we envision a best practices book that shows global principles of information management in the context of one or more of the sub disciplines.

To provide a guide to the foundations of information management we will work concurrently on a framework for information management which will be published later. The framework will bring the commonalities between sub disciplines to light and help to organize the best practices that we publish.

Finally, we believe that the principles of information management differ in detail but not substance between nations. Thus, we propose that our best practices be drawn from around the world.

In summary, we feel that there is an information management discipline that spans all the particular managements but that it is best to draw best practices from the sub disciplines as they are practiced around the world.

What is ‘Information Management Best Practices?’

‘Information Management Best Practices’ is a compilation of high quality best practice guidance, written for and by experts in the Information Management field around the world. It is a yearly library of case studies and derived wisdom that guides professionals through their most challenging activities. It is full of useful knowledge, views, and guidelines that will help professionals overcome the information management challenges of contemporary organizations. It brings complex models down to earth, with practical guidance on day-to-day problems and issues.

Each year a new edition of ‘Information Management Best Practices’ will be published with this structure:

• An introduction to the Information Management Framework which puts context around the best practices.
• A section on trends in Information Management, with last year’s highlights and a preview of the future.
• A section of recent developments in the Information Management discipline, written by invited authors.
• Approximately 20 detailed best practice articles on Information Management topics.
• A cumulative index of authors and articles.

The first edition of ‘Information Management Best Practices’ series is scheduled to be released at the HartmanEVENT in Utrecht, The Netherlands in October 7, 2010. The first submissions were published in a ‘sneak peek’ version in May, 2009 at the JBoye Conference in Philadelphia (PA), USA.

The guide will followed by a later publication titled ‘An Information Management Framework’, which will provide a conceptual foundation for Information Management.

In addition to being published in the book the Best Practice articles may also be distributed online, in white papers and in training materials.

Who is our audience?

‘Information Management Best Practices’ is intended for professionals including analysts, developers, architects, managers, content creators, and other technicaland non technical staff involved in the creation or maintenance of information systems. The work will help them create high quality systems and work with their sponsors and stakeholders.

How to contribute a proposal

To contribute to the book, simply submit a proposal, according to the requirements listed below. We will accept proposals on an ongoing basis. Please email all proposals to info@timaf.org.

Proposal requirements

Each contribution must cover a specific issue, problem, or challenge in the field of Information Management and present a proven solution. Your proposal should include the following information:

1. The working title of your article.
2. Your name, job title and organizational affiliation
3. A one-paragraph statement of the main issue of your article.
4. A one-paragraph statement of your solution to the problem.
5. An outline of your article that is no longer than one page.
6. A sample of your writing (10 pages or more) that shows your style and skill level.

Contributions must be original. Please do not submit articles that have been published in English before. If you want to repurpose an existing work, tell us where the original was published and what the added value in the new article will be.

Contributions to ‘Information Management Best Practices’ must not contain any advertisement or endorsement of specific products or services. On the other hand, we encourage authors to mention the specific organizations whose experiences, knowledge and views gave rise to the best practice.

Copyright of the provided articles will be held by TIMAF. Authors retain the right to use their article in their professional activities, as long as their activities do not directly compete with the book. A full author’s contract will be furnished to all selected contributors

Contributors must also be willing to:

• Provide a complete first draft of 10-15 pages.
• Work within strict style guidelines in a structured authoring environment.
• Provide the rights to republish your work on the Web or as part of future white papers or training materials.

Here are some other practical guidelines:

• Deliver your proposal in Word format (font Verdana 10).
• Avoid using graphics unless they are absolutely necessary explain your idea.
• Don’t use company formats – all information about companies and all business formats will be removed before your proposal is forwarded to the editorial board.

The final articles will be 4,000 to 6,000 words.

Proposal assessment procedure

An international Editorial Board of Information Management experts will assess all proposals and will select approximately 30 proposals.

Upon receipt, proposals will be made anonymous, and sent to the Editorial Board. The board will select the proposals that are appropriate for publication and invite the authors to submit a next draft.

Key selection criteria are:

• Responsiveness. Selected proposal will follow all the requirements listed above.
• Appropriateness. Selected proposals will address important issues in the domain of Information Management.
• Originality. Selected proposals will present solutions beyond what has already been published.
• Practical value. Selected proposals will address common problems with workable solutions.
• Non-Commercial. It must be possible to apply the instructive content of the article without acquiring any specific product or service.

The outcome of this assessment will be communicated to all submitters. After the initial assessment period, additional proposals may be evaluated per the judgment of the editorial board. The selected authors will receive an invitation to write an article in the period June – August, 2009.

Next Steps

Questions, response and proposals can be sent by e-mail with the subject line ‘IM Best Practices, attn. editor’ to info@timaf.org.

Relevant topics for articles

The editors of the publication aim at a balanced mix of theory and practice: recent theoretical developments and cases about implementations. Relevant topics include but are not limited to:

• ASP, SaaS
• Auditing principles
• Authoring
• Benchmarking
• Business-IT alignment
• Business Process Management (BPM)
• Competence Management
• Certification
• Content management
• Content Management Systems (CMS)
• Compliance
• Content acquisition
• Content archiving
• Content Component Management (CCM)
• Content modelling
• Content tagging procedures
• Content templating
• Content typing
• Conversion
• Customer satisfaction
• Digital Asset Management (DAM)
• Document Management
• eDiscovery
• Editorial and Metatorial processes
• Enterprise Content Management (ECM)
• Findability
• Governance
• Information architecture
• Information flow and information ecologies
• Information Management
• Information Management in small or medium-sized enterprises (SME)
• Information Quality
• Information seeking behaviour
• information security
• Information service departments (Web, helpdesk, libraries, etc.)
• Informaton  sourcing
• Information strategy
• Integration
• Job Roles (CIO, service manager, content manager, etc.)
• Localisation and translation
• Marketing of the content organisation
• Maturity models
• Metadata, Controlled vocabularies, Taxonomies, Thesauri, Ontologies, Topic Maps, RDF, etc.
• Multichannel publishing
• Organization set-up
• Performance Management, metrics, KPIs
• Personalisation
• Portals
• Procurement
• Records Management
• Repository structure
• Requirements gathering
• Role of culture in managing organisational change
• Search & Retrieval
• Security
• Semantic and format tagging
• SEO
• Service Level Management,
• Specific information processes e.g. Archiving, Deploying, Planning, Evaluating, Creating, Managing, etc.
• Staffing
• Standards (XML, CMIS, JSR, WCAG, DITA, Dublin Core, Topic Maps, etc.)
• Supplier management
• Syndication
• System implementation
• System maintenance
• System selection
• System strategy, and implementation case studies
• Tools
• Usability
• User administration
• User targeting profiling
• Versioning and file control
• Web Content Management (WCM)
• Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, social content
• Workflow procedures