Building the Community: A Call for IAIDQ Volunteers
January 2009: IDQ Newsletter Vol 5 Issue 1
Writer for Member Profiles
from Michelle C. Dy
The IAIDQ seeks volunteers to conduct interviews and prepare short articles that feature IAIDQ members for a new Member Profiles series.
Qualifications: excellent interviewing and writing skills, comfortable with using Skype or similar VOIP technology to conduct interviews, always reachable by email, consistently hits deadlines, and enjoys networking / meeting new people.
Expected time commitment: 10 to 12 hours every quarter (can be more if the volunteer's schedule permits conducting multiple interviews each quarter)
If this sounds like an exciting opportunity to you, please contact Michelle Dy via email.
Publicity and Member Services Team Members
from Daragh O Brien and Elizabeth Davis
The picture below is taken from a presentation slide that the IAIDQ used in the US and European conferences in 2008.
The IAIDQ Community
The picture is by no means complete, and it will continuously be updated because a few people have remarked that it is the most powerful slide for summing up the IAIDQ.
Why is that? It's full of people. Real people. Real people who care about information/data quality so much that they got involved with some aspect of the Association, whether it is writing an article, running for election, presenting, or setting the Association up in the first place.
The thing that gets us about this picture is that between us we are able to name each of these people and know most of them personally or at least well enough to carry on a conversation by email, Skype, or in person. There are no 'Facebook fake-friends' here.
The thing that links us all, regardless of our nationality, industry, hobbies, political views, and seniority in our organizations is that we all 'get' the importance of information quality in a deep and personal way.
And you know what? This is your community. Let's build it together.
How do we build it?
The IAIDQ has just gone through an election for Board members. Each of the newly-elected Board members has a challenging portfolio which needs to be delivered to help the Association meet all its goals. One of the reasons the Association has not always delivered as much or as quickly as we would have liked is that we are all volunteers doing this in our free time.
What we need to do to build the community and deliver value is build up teams of people who can work with each Director on key projects or on the 'day-to-day' tasks related to their role. Some director roles require more person-hours than others, so the teams will be of different sizes.
Having a team extends the reach of each Director, allowing us to connect the Board to the members more directly, and ensuring that all members are aware of what the Association does, how it operates, and how they can get involved.
The first set of teams was announced in San Antonio. Both of these initial teams were focused on the two most time- and effort-intensive Directorships, Publicity and Member Services. At the time we got some interested people coming forward. However, we needed to wait until after November's DM&IQ conference in London before we could get a handle on who the likely people were to take part in those teams and what the likely roles and functions would be within those teams.
Now, with a New Year and a new Board and new challenges, the time is right to outline the strategy for the proposed work teams that will support Publicity and Member Services.
It is intended that these work teams will operate in a cross-functional way, allowing Directors to manage overlaps in areas of responsibility more effectively through delegation to a work team or team member, particularly as other Directors define, recruit, and activate their respective teams.
Publicity Team (The Press Gang)
The role of the Director of Publicity is described on the IAIDQ website. In practice, the Director of Publicity is responsible for the regular monthly communications with members, maintaining the IQTrainwrecks.com site, responding to news stories with an information quality component found on the web or in local or national media, preparing press releases, engaging with information quality bloggers and blogs and interacting with our LinkedIn and Facebook groups.
The Director of Publicity is also a key stakeholder of the Director of Information Services when it comes to the adoption of technologies to help promote the Association and connect members together. The Director of Publicity is also charged with devising ways to attract new members to the Association.
The supporting work team for the Director Publicity will take on elements of each of these functions, with a focus being placed on country and industry representation, particularly with regard to the monitoring of media for news or issues to respond to or in capturing good case studies to include in the IQTrainwrecks.com site or (hopefully) identifying case studies of good practices which can be promoted.
It is intended that the Publicity team members will work in collaboration with the Publicity Officers of the various Communities of Practice. In practice they may even be the publicity officer of a CoP.
Interaction with blogs, discussion forums, vendor websites and other avenues of communication are also important parts of the Publicity Team role. This needs to be done in a structured way, reflecting some of the key messages and values of the IAIDQ. From time to time there may be a need to push a particular IAIDQ message.
For example, during the US Presidential Election, Daragh issued a number of press releases and commented on a number of blogs and newspaper sites about information quality issues in the US election. Posting relevant comments that add to the discussion is a good way of building the profile of the Association.
Ultimately, the role of the Director of Publicity and the Publicity Team is to manage the dialogue between the Association and the wider community, bringing our message and hopefully bringing the community to us when they need an information quality perspective (such as commenting on a news story) or when they want to join up to become part of the Information/Data Quality movement. The Publicity team would also work with the Member Services Team to support internal conversations through the Monthly Email update and the Quarterly Newsletter.
If you have experience as a blogger, in Public Relations or journalism, are a creative thinker or communicator, or would like to develop skills in these areas then the IAIDQ Press Gang would like to hear from you. To join up, please visit our Yahoo Group page at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/iaidq_publicity_team or email Daragh.
And if you would like to know why we christened it the 'Press Gang', well the phrase has two meanings. In one sense, a Press Gang is a group of journalists. Another meaning though is a form of recruitment used by the Royal Navy in the 19th Century.
While we would never make people join the IAIDQ against their will, one function of our group of 'journalists' is to make it harder for prospective members not to join our community than it is to join it by presenting a compelling reason why the IAIDQ is an important and valuable organization and why Information Quality is a key tool to delivering sustained and sustainable business value.
Member Services Team
The official role profile for the Director of Member Services is likewise described at the IAIDQ website. However, Member Services spans a wide range of aspects of the Association, from Communities of Practice to the Ask-The-Experts webinars to the Quarterly Newsletter to the IQForum mailing list.
The Director of Member Services is also responsible for the production of industry research reports. Basically the Director of Member Services is charged with ensuring that the Association is able to deliver value to members.
Along with the Director of Publicity, the Director of Member Services is a key stakeholder of the Information Services Director in the adoption of technologies that allow members to connect and collaborate and support the effective delivery of services to members.
Part of the Member Services brief is to ensure that members get value for their membership and renew each year.
As with the Publicity Team, the Member Services team take on many elements of these functions. They enable the Member Services Director to execute many more projects each year to deliver value to members either by ensuring that existing services operate effectively or by developing new services and products that benefit our members.
The Member Services team would also support the Director of Member Services in enabling the delivery of member services at local or industry level in collaboration with Communities of Practice. Indeed, the Member Services function already has one successful work team underway in the form of the Ask-the-Experts webinar team. We would like to build on that success into other areas however.
Interaction with members, researching new service ideas, and observing what competitor organizations are engaged in with a view to collaborating or competing are all important aspects of the role of the Member Services team. Prototyping of new service ideas and developing clear value propositions for everything that the Association does for our members are also among the key responsibilities of this team. At the end of the day, the value the Association brings to its members and the wider community rests in no small part on the value that the Member Services team and the Director of Member Services can bring to the Association.
In one sense, the role of the Director of Member Services and the Member Services team is to ensure that the Association, as a community, has the tools and opportunities to collaborate effectively and carry on value-generating internal conversations.
Through these discussions we improve the value of the Association and promote an environment where the principles of quality management as they apply to information can be refined and continually improved for the benefit of the wider Community.
If you have ideas for new services, or have experience project managing the development and delivery of a product or service to market, or have experience defining and exploring the value propositions of a product or service to help improve it or extend its relevance, or you simply have a passion for Information Quality and want to contribute to the Association, then there is a role for you on the Member Services team. To join, please visit our Yahoo Group page at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/iaidq_member_services or email Liz.
Sadly we have yet to come up with an apt or witty branding for this team, but then again Member Services doesn't do branding... that's Publicity's job.
Conclusion
Publicity and Member Services are all about working to have better conversations amongst our Community (Member Services) and with the wider Community (Publicity) to ensure that the Association can grow in numbers, profile, and value to members.
Contributing to these roles in a supporting team for the relevant Directors frees the Directors up to focus efforts on strategy and looking to the future of the Association while at the same time providing a strong link between the membership, the community, the Communities of Practice, and the Board.
This ensures good feedback mechanisms to the Board, which results in a better strategy and a shared vision of the future.
Other Director roles will likewise require support teams over the coming months. As the needs and strategic priorities of those roles become better defined, the objectives for these work teams will be communicated to members with a clear call to action.
The way to build a Community is to connect the people and get people working together towards common shared goals. Working together on strategic work teams in the IAIDQ is a great way to contribute back to the Association and to the Community.
Please get involved. It is your as much as it is our Community. Let's build it together.