Volume 2005, Issue 2
June 21, 2005

Headquarters Happenings

Carroll To Be Panelist at September PSC Conference

The Professional Services Council (PSC) has invited IIa President Bonnie Carroll to participate on a panel at their annual conference in September in Williamsburg, Virginia. Carroll is a member of PSC's Board of Directors.

The panel presentation is "Borderless Services: Crossing Components, Agencies, Governments and Oceans: Can the Government Marketplace Adjust to Global Realities?" Panel participants will focus on issues associated with interoperable requirements, the interplay of state, local, and federal customers, and related topics.

At IIa, We Value... Campaign

In the last newsletter, you learned that IIa has identified 12 values that, together with the mission, vision, and values, complete the corporate philosophy. The twelve words printed in that issue were pretty broad strokes...excellence, community, teamwork, communication, etc. The same strategic action committee that identified these values has put together the "At IIa, We Value..." campaign to help each of us understand what the individual values mean to IIa and also to give us a mechanism to begin to internalize them. The campaign calls for involvement from every employee.

Here's how it will work. Members of the executive team will be meeting with employees to talk about the values more in-depth to help us understand what each of the values means to IIa. Beginning in July, and for the remaining months of our fiscal year, we will focus on our mission, vision, and a "value of the month," which will be announced each month by company president Bonnie Carroll. Employees will be asked to recognize fellow employees who exemplify the company’s mission or vision or a value as described by Bonnie. At the end of that month, IIa will publish a list of the nominated employees on our web site along with the information submitted about them.

Each employee who is nominated will receive the corresponding collectible button (examples shown in this article) for that value. Employees can collect those buttons on the "At IIa, We Value..." Banner that will be distributed when an employee receives their first button. Employees who are recognized for four, eight, and 12 of the values will receive a special recognition.

In addition, employees who recognize colleagues throughout the campaign will receive the “Excellence” button. Employees who are recognized by colleagues as reflecting the company’s vision and mission will also receive the "Excellence" button.

We'll start the campaign with our mission and vision in August. Watch for a message from Bonnie early in the month formally launching the campaign.

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IIa Undertakes an Intranet

Preliminary work for an intranet for IIa employees is under way. A knowledge management audit conducted by graduate students from the University of Tennessee School of Information Science recommended that IIa implement an intranet to enhance both knowledge management and internal communications. Using the results of the audit, a task team was created to define in broad strokes what the IIa intranet would include. In May 2005, work began in earnest when another UT graduate student, Daniel Redmon, joined the team to develop an intranet story board.

In June, a survey about what IIa employees would like to see in a corporate intranet was disseminated to all employees. As the intranet development progresses, employees will continue to be called upon for input and feedback.

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Hodge, Hutchison, Rumble Present at Joint Conference on Digital Libraries

Three IIa staffers, Gail Hodge, Vivian Hutchison (on behalf of USGS), and John Rumble gave workshop presentations at the 2005 ACM IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL). The conference, a "major international forum focusing on digital libraries and associated technical, practical, and social issues," was held in Denver, Colorado, June 7-10.

John Rumble was co-program chair for a special workshop on international scientific data, standards, and digital libraries sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the National Science Digital Library, and CODATA, the ICSU Committee on Data for Science and Technology. At the workshop, Hutchison talked about biodiversity data standards, focusing on work in the USGS-sponsored National Biological Information Infrastructure(NBII). Rumble made a presentation about the changing nature of scientific discovery caused by the advent of large-scale databases.

Gail Hodge was program chair for a second special workshop entitled "Next Generation Knowledge Organization Systems: Integration Challenges and Strategies." Her specific presentation addressed the SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System) Core and other World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) activities related to knowledge organization systems. The SKOS Core is an RDF (Resource Description Framework) vocabulary for describing thesauri, terminologies, glossaries, subject heading schemes, and other types of controlled vocabulary. This was the 7th Networked Knowledge Organization Systems (NKOS) workshop held in conjunction with JCDL. NKOS is devoted to the discussion of the functional and data models for enabling knowledge organization systems as networked interactive information services to support the description and retrieval of diverse information resources through the Internet.

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