Dimensions of effectiveness of Information Scientists

by Patryk Kocielnik

It appears that in every interpersonal situation involving an information scientist all that is most important about how his effectiveness can be discussed can be assigned to one of 8 categories.

This is an attempt to list all the most important dimensions of the work of an information scientist. "You can't game what you can't measure", some say, and I feel time after time this is true indeed. "Put first things first" - is another statement often repeated I find especially valuable. And last but not least, classification seems to be the core of the power of all thinking machines. That is why working on a whole makes us busy, but all the real results come from improving a particular dimension. Taking on a dimension instead of a yet undefined "whole" brings focus, and focus is exactly what separation of concerns is all about - improving the whole by working on the clearly defined parts. What you see below is a result of my trying to group notions to be able to say instead of "I'm working on my thesis" - "I'm working on the algorithms in my thesis".

These may not be all categories, or some can be redundant. Nevertheless, here they are.

  1. Algorithms,
  2. Technologies,
  3. Languages,
  4. Products (of his work),
  5. Partners (institutions),
  6. Disciplines,
  7. Sources, and
  8. Evidence.

Dimensions explained

The algorithmic dimension addresses the share of time-proven algorithmic patterns and own well-defined and clearly documented algorithms in the total amount of algorithms applied to the work.

The technological dimension deals with the quality and perceived trustworthiness of the technologies applied in the invention.

The linguistic part is about the number and relevance of distinct well-defined languages used in the description of the solution.

Products is a direct question about the products of your work themselves - whether they were effective, who they serve or served, how many users they had and what they were built on. Notice that this question concerns something entirely different than the technologies you aspire to know at the moment or your current image; this is precisely and only about your products and inventions.

The dimension of partners is about the people and institutions you worked for and those you worked with. You designed a program for Google? It falls into this category, so you say: "I designed a program for Google", where the most important information in that sentence is your customer who was Google as a company. You partnered with Stanford to create a program to help the poor across USA? Very well - this places Stanford among your partners. See? It does not matter so much what you did - only that you did it for Google or with Stanford. That's why both these statements fall into one category named your "partners".

Evidence concerns the tangible or displayable traces of one's work. These can also be just verbal demonstrations of agility one still posesses in solving problems concerning the solution in question. All this can clearly be perceived as evidence.

Validation

Such approach allows us to avoid omission of an important aspect of our work by negligence. Imagine having cared for all of those aspects - what is there left in your work to be neglected? What is there to shoot at when reviewing it? If all of the dimensions are covered in an approximately equal level, then your work is balanced and therefore probably both useful, relevant and trustworthy. Congratulations. By the way, work is never done - but we can always simplify it a little.

Application

Assigning "levels" to each of the dimensions we get what is illustrated in the bottom of the cover image, which is: