not exactly what she was looking for. She says: “The saving grace was that I joined a working group within the first year looking at how to support KIM professionals and KIM skills. Some very dedicated people who worked across KIM in MOD had recognised that, compared to other professions, there weren’t any entry level qualifications that taught you how to do KIM in defence. It was just ‘can you use Sharepoint?’ That’s all our training was about at the time. It didn’t teach you the importance of search or how to organise information, what is KIM, or what do we do with our records? I’m still not sure to this day how I got onto that working group, someone prob- ably strong-armed me, but it was great. It exposed me to the broader sense of KIM, and for me it was ‘wow this is a big profession isn’t it’ and yet so grounded in what I’d learned in the library world’.”
KIM defence gap
“The working group had noticed a gap and really wanted to fill it to help people in the profession. It was KIM with a defence focus; the policy; the history and what KIM actually means in defence. I came into MOD in 2014 when the work- ing group started. They wanted to do some training but then that developed to
AI and KIM
Becky believes the cultural hold-ups to KM’s untapped potential may be pushed aside by the increasing demands of tech- nology. “We have not got that data and information culture right. There’s a lot of work there.
“But I think KM is gaining traction be- cause people are seeing how it links into the wider cultural aims. “And also, as Artificial Intelligence comes
Ministry of Defence, Whitehall, London. Photo © Harland Quarrington/MOD, OGL v1.0, https://commons.
wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26915313
be a proper qualification. We planned and wrote the thing for the next couple of years – I was part of that core working group and we wrote the entire qualification – but because a lot of us were ex-librarians and CILIP members, we said we wanted it to be accredited and not just some random thing created in MOD. CILIP accreditation gave it that gold standard.”
in, people are starting to see those links even more clearly. With AI you have to put good stuff in to get good stuff out. You’ve got to capture your existing knowledge well, to get it in there. And if you’re not do- ing that, you’re in trouble from the off-set. AI also highlights algorithmic literacy. It’s been a thing in the library and information world for a couple of years. “Looking at what skills people need to operate in an AI environment, they are really information literacy skills – they are what we have been teaching for 20 years. So, KM is exciting both on the ground where you can help people to capture stuff and get them talking to each other, and also at a strategic level, looking at how you’re going to capture your organisational knowledge and learn from it and become a learning culture.” IP
March 2024
INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL 25
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