Blogs For Workflow Management

Should researchers and analysts worry about increasing demand for ever-diminishing returns? Is small really that beautiful and is less really more?

Marydee Ojala, Editor of Online Magazine, has written a very thought-provoking piece, entitled "Information - Short and Sweet" in the latest issue (Vol. 28 No. 5 -- Sep/Oct 2004).

Marydee discusses the challenges facing information professionals as they attempt to distill and synthesize their research findings into user-friendly, bite-size packages - "executive summaries, a few bullet points for PowerPoint slides, and research snapshots".

She asks whether it potentially devalues the oftentimes huge efforts that have gone into collecting and filtering the research from a vast array of sources and then plucking "out the essence of what we've found so that we can condense it into the desired delivery format".

When research is used to make important decisions by its end-users, and those users are only willing to base those decisions on the researcher's final, distilled deliverable, whose responsibility is it if the end decision or action is wrong?

Should there be an audit-trail, should the bite-size chunks at the very least have links back to the content on which the summaries are based?

Weblogs (blogs) are a possible solution. Blogs offer the researcher the ability to maintain a journal of their research process, linking relevant content to postings as and when they find it. Providing end-users with the final deliverable with a link back to the appropriate research in the blog may, at the very least, offer some life insurance for the researcher.

More positively, the blog will demonstrate very vividly the amount of effort that has been invested in producing the research and, depending on who you've allowed to have access to it, will enable the sharing and re-use of the content by others.

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