tfpl blog

Blogs in suits

Excellent edition of In Business on BBC Radion 4 yesterday evening (Thursday 14 June) devoted to how the Interrnet is developing with Web 2.0 and the take up of blogging by  businesses.  The programme pulled together a group of contributors drawn from the content and technology sides and included an interview with a tailor who runs a "Saville Row" business in bespoke tailoring from his house in Cumbria.  His blog is now being read across the USA and order for suits keep coming in.  A key feature of his experience was the realisation that his blog allowed him to reach a new and very different sort of customer than he was used to. 

Hear the programme again from the BBC site for at least a few days more!

Disruptive innovation

Last night's RSA event was a dicussion about 'Using disruptive innovation to drive growth' with a panel speakers from the BBC, Shell and 3is.  It was a fascinating discussion and behind the ideas is a real need for information management - perhaps IM needs to take advantage of disruptive innovation.   To hear the discussion and/or see the transcript go to the RSA site www.thersa.org.  It is worth looking at the list of earlier recorded events and RSS feeds - lots of RSA events are petinent to the information world.

CKO Summit Report - now available

CKO Summit Report - "The agenda for growth"

A summary executive report compiled from conversations and discussions at the eighth International Chief Knowlege Officers Summit for the private sector held in Berkshire, UK in October 2005.

The CKO Summit report is available to download, free of charge from the TFPL website.

The CKO Summit was jointly sponsored by TFPL and Factiva, a Dow Jones & Reuters company.

Just remember, once you're over the hill you begin to pick up speed! (C.M.Schultz)

On Monday we had some training on The Employment Equality (Age) Regulations 2006. It appears that in the UK we have been playing catch-up with most of Europe, many of whom already have laws and guidelines in place and have done so for some time. However we are finally getting there with our own laws coming into play later in the year.

Age discrimination is an important and complex issue, the stereotypical attitude that has for a long time been completely unacceptable with regards to race and sex is still regularly applied to age. Let us hope that the act of age discrimination becomes as taboo as other forms of discrimination now are and does not simply become more subtle!

Key facts:

• The Employment Equality (Age) Regulations 2006 come into force on 1 October 2006.
• The regulations cover people of all ages, both old and young
• The regulation will ban age discrimination in terms of recruitment, promotion and training, ban unjustified retirement ages of below 65 and remove the current age limit for unfair dismissal and redundancy rights. 
• They will also introduce a right for employees to request working beyond retirement age and a duty on employers to consider that request and a new requirement for employers to give at least six months notice to employees about their intended retirement date so that individuals can plan better for retirement, and be confident that "retirement" is not being used as cover for unfair dismissal.

For more information go to:

• Age Positive (Part of the Department for Work and Pensions)
• The Employers Forum on Age
• ACAS

What can records managers learn from knowledge managers?

''So much of an organisation’s knowledge is locked up in its records.  So why isn't records management seen as the key to harnessing that knowledge to improve the business?''

This was one of several challenging questions that Ceri Hughes posed to records managers from the Records Management Society (RMS)  London Group at their June meeting, held here at TFPL last week.   Ceri is Associate director of knowledge management at KPMG, having previously been records manager at Cable and Wireless.  She is a past chair of the RMS.

Ceri said that her own previous experience as a records manager had been of considerable help to her as a knowledge manager  but that organisations still did not sufficiently appreciate the contribution that records management could make.  In her experience knowledge managers talk a  better game than records managers in making sure their discipline:

·       Is seen as being critical to business process improvement 

·       Is seen as being critical to building the intellectual capital of the organisation 

·       Is not just on the boardroom agenda but also in the annual report, as something the organisation is proud to report on

Improving business processes

It was important for records managers to make the link between timely access to records and efficiency in business processes.    Examples of where this had been successfully demonstrated by knowledge managers include one were knowledge managers ensured that key knowledge and productivity tools provided by the organisation were explicitly linked into the business process by which the employees carry out their work. The same system on which employees recorded their day to day activities and the work for clients also gave access to key resources such the organisations' Yellow Pages.

Building intellectual capital
Ceri showed examples of an increasing trend for companies to report on their intellectual capital, as a means of promoting their company. Records are a crucial repository of an organisation's intellectual capital.  But we can not assume that just because information is present in records that it is exploitable as a knowledge resource.  Effort and thought have to be extended to ensure that key information from key records can be easily accessed and used.

Ceri gave an example of this from the professional services sector :   In order to win new business organisations need to be able to demonstrate their credibility by showing examples of similar work carried out elsewhere. One of the sources that can harvest this type of information is an organisations' records,  but it needs to packaged in a way that supports access within tight timescales.

Getting on to the boardroom, and then into the annual report

Records management has been successful in getting onto the boardroom agenda, but that it was not necessarily on that agenda for the best reasons. Too often records management was on the boardroom agenda as a compliance issue, and rarely on the agenda as a source of value to the organisation. Knowledge managers have on the whole been more successful in being recognised as a means of adding value to the company: KPMG’s own annual report includes as section on the value of its knowledge assets.

Calling all linguists

Not surprising in a global market but we are constantly being asked for information and sales professionals with language skills. I think in the UK we are woefully monolingual (myself included) especially compared to our bi/tri/multilingual European counterparts. However how many of you did a 3 year language degree by itself or alongside another specialisation and now only use it to translate the menu in your local Italian! So everyone who does have a second language that may be a little rusty, dust it off, get some practice and sell it to the employment market.

Ref: 19517
A global market research company is looking for a Sales Executive with German, French, Spanish, Italian or Scandinavian. Based in London
Salary - £20-£24K basic £45-£48K OTE

Ref: 19473
A leading provider of financial information requires an Account Manager with fluent English and German. Based in London.
Salary – £24k

Ref: 20005
A global provider of advertising services is looking for a keyword optimiser with a fluency of German, French and English. Based in London.
Salary – negotiable

Enron rolls on

Enron has been in the news over the last few weeks as the trial draws to a (temporary?) close.  A comment on the case in this week's IT Week  quoted the words of New York state attorney general Eliot Spitzer who said: “Never write when you can talk. Never talk when you can nod. And never put anything in an email.”

Sage advice, perhaps, if you want to avoid litigation but it does run counter to our growing desire for corporations and governments to be transparent and accountable.

Google?

When discussing information architecture, taxonomies and finding things on websites with clients, inevitably the question comes up: “Why can’t we just have Google?”.  It seems like a fair question. After all, I use Google several times or more a day to find stuff.

So Gerry McGovern’s article,“Do you really need search on your website?” seems a little radical but this comment rang true:

"Having a search engine can also be used as an excuse not to organize content professionally. It can be seen as a magic wand that gets people to where they want to go no matter how badly organized the content is. Of course, that's not the case.”

A project to create a taxonomy or navigation structure for a website can be fraught with misunderstandings, politics or plain lack of interest. But Google isn’t going to do it for us.

Using a folksonomy to find out about folksonomy

I am researching a training course on folksonomy and its application inside organisations. 

The best source of material has been Del.icio.us -  which is itself the best example of a folksonomy on the web.

The Del.icio.us tag/folksonomy page shows every website/article/blogpost that anyone has seen, liked, and tagged with the word folksonomy so that they can go back to it at a later date.

By changing the word after tag I can use Del.icio.us to find material on taxonomy, cricket, records management, the future, or anything else that takes my interest.

Del.cio.us lacks Google's universal coverage (it only knows about the things its users have alerted it to)  but it beats Google for variety, novelty, currency and serendipity.

The Del.icio.us tag/folksonomy page brings up new references hourly.  Other pages will bring up new references by the minute or by the day depending only on how many other users are interested in that topic and use that word to tag. 

In contrast a Google search on folksonomy would bring back results that change little from day to day:  because the rankings (based on the extent to which a site is linked to) take a long time to change.

Del.icio.us is quicker to reflect new material than Google.  Only one person has to tag a post a site  with the word 'folksonomy' and I see it on the tag/folksonomy page.  It appears at the top of the page which, like a blog, is in reverse chronological order by time of posting. 

The serendipity effect comes in when I find a web resource that is useful.  I can then find out:

• what else has the person who tagged the resource bookmarked?
• who else has bookmarked the resource that I found useful (and what other resources have they bookmarked)?

For the record the best overview of of the topic that I found was Philosophies of folksonomies  saved by Juerg Hagmann.  This has serendipitously led me to Juerg's blog about records management.

Upcoming training courses

Upcoming TFPL training courses for June include:

Consultancy and advisory skills

Branding your infomation service

Introduction to the European Union

Thesaurus Construction Demystified

Knowledge management: foundation programme

For more information please visit our website or contact Angela Cookson or Val Skelton on 020 7332 6000.