tfpl blog

The Annual SLA Winter Warmer Pub Quiz

by Helen Trudgeon, Contracts Recruitment Consultant

 

Last week saw SLA Europe’s Annual Winter Warmer Pub Quiz event take place, once again hosted by professional QuizMaster, AskTony and kindly sponsored by Swets and the Financial Times.

SLA President and TFPL Managing Director Darron Chapman welcomed the 16 teams, made up of SLA members and friends, all eager to be crowned Quiz Champions 2012.  So keen were staff at TFPL, that we were able to field 2 full teams – the IDOX Idles and TFPL & Back - competing not only for the main prize, but also to take home the honour of being TFPL’s own internal champion. Purely in the spirit of friendly rivalry, of course.

The quiz kicked off with an investigation of our knowledge of recent current affairs, which perhaps left a little to be desired, but the room soon warmed up as we were asked, amongst other things, to identify obscure television adverts, to get inside the heads of Sun readers  and to spot price an eyewateringly obscure range of commodities.  Smartphones were sadly banned, but our team nonetheless managed to achieve modest success, based on a sound knowledge of Asda pricing and at least one mathematical genius who knew the current price of Brent Crude.

The final round remains memorable, if only for the noise of over 80 people singing along to Chas n’ Dave and the Rocky soundtrack.  Possibly with more enthusiasm than any inherent musical ability. Or perhaps that was just me.

The eventual and well deserved winners were the Film Club, captained by Mark Haines, whilst both of TFPL’s teams managed a respectable mid-table ranking, with IDOX Idles pipping TFPL & Back by just 1 point.  We are already anticipating next year’s re-match.

Ultimate winners the Film Club https://picasaweb.google.com/asktony.co.uk/Sla2012?authkey=Gv1sRgCJrUv8Dvu5285AE#5698928439449238770

https://picasaweb.google.com/asktony.co.uk/Sla2012?authkey=Gv1sRgCJrUv8Dvu5285AE#5698928397971520194

SharePoint - how to manage groups across site collections?

By Shooresh Golzari

Reaching the conclusion of a one year SharePoint 2010 implementation at a government agency.  All in all, a successful venture delivered to time and on budget in partnership with our friends at SFW Ltd. 

Initially, I had specified for the use of just one site collection, however, the performance risks and potential future complications demanded a more robust set-up for the 150 or so users.  So the production set-up now stands at one site collection for the intranet and corporate reference sites, one for functions and one for programmes in addition to another for the content type hub (central control of metadata across all site collections).  The latter a very smart and useful improvement from MOSS 2007 where the management of metadata "out-of-the-box " across your deployment has to be done within each site collection.  Fiddly, tiresome and wasteful.

A similar feature as the content type hub but instead for the management of people, groups and permissions is lacking.  Modern matrixed organisations require that employees work across activities, projects and functions.  So in this particular set-up  we have people in the communications and information management teams working in cahoots with people at the business end of the organisation as well as in their own back office functions. 

This means that a Communications Officer will not only work in the intranet site collection publishing internal news articles, but she will also work in the functions and programmes site collections with other teams.  Therefore, instead of creating one communications group, adding her to it with the correct level of permissions across all three site collections from one place...  We have had to create three groups with the same name in each site collection, configure them and add her to them.  We are not talking duplication here but triplication - nevermind if she also happens to be a content editor for a particular directorate in addition to this...

For me this is an inexplicable oversight by Microsoft unless it is deliberate. 

So what's the answer?  Microsoft's Active Directory 2010. That is, centrally controlling groups and permissions in SharePoint from AD rather than in-place within SharePoint meaning that user groups will have to be managed by IT when new users join, move within or leave the organisation which turns the conversation towards governance - who is responsible?  Unfortunately for the IM team at this client, it is them until such time as they procure, implement and configure AD 2010, long after we've gone.

 

 

Which world do we live in?

Author: Vivienne Winterman, Senior Consultant

Physical or virtual?

Tangible or indefinable?

Real or imaginary?

The list is endless. These are the worlds the information professional (IP) has to deal with. Skill requirements are changing. Paradoxically the world is getting bigger yet smaller at the same time in information terms. As the rate of information creation continues to increase at an exponential rate, its retrieval is still ever challenging. Digitisation is in to bring the world of archives into our homes and businesses.

When will it stop?

How do you contain it?

Is it necessary?

Does it benefit us?

To answer the questions. Never. You can’t. Yes/no (glass half full/empty syndrome). It should do.

To take the last question first. It should benefit us. We should learn from good practice, stories and events that ought not to be repeated. But do we?

Is it necessary? Absolutely. All information should be transparent and there if you need it. It does of course need to be well managed, structured and retrievable.

How do you contain it? Well the cloud concept is doing a good job, but I dread to think what will happen when there is a cloud burst! I’ll leave that to your imagination.

Will it stop? No way. There is so much to learn. With the world population rising to 7 billion more and more information will be created just to manage daily living requirements.

What an opportunity for the IP. TFPL’s recent report ‘Connecting information with innovation’ (TFPL’s 2011 survey of skills and roles) http://www.tfpl.com/resources/index.cfm shows that investment in knowledge and information management (KIM) is seen as an essential component contributing to business success. KIM skills are being embedded in the workforce to bring about a new way of working, so that KIM is ‘not another initiative’ but the ‘way we do things around here’. IPs rapidly need to increase their range of skills. They need to be IT proficient, provide e-learning as a means of communicating with the virtual, global, workforce, be metadata and taxonomy advisors, maintain information governance, be concerned about managing risk, aligned to the business supporting the goals and objectives, and many more as detailed in the report. Over 350 individuals have downloaded the report, available in English, French and German.  Have you?

The Cloud: Sharing information....redefined (Not nebulous, but grounded)

Author: Julia Hordle, Director of Recruitment

Let’s be honest, it isn’t often these days, that you go to an conference event expecting to interested in every topic and speaker on the schedule.

Yesterday, we heard about the principles, potential and applications of cloud technology in a way that even a lay person (me) without a technological bone in their body, could not fail to be impressed by.

I consider myself to be a lay person because, whilst I am interested in (now fascinated by) the possibility of doing so much more with the information we hold, there is always just the promise of doing wonderful work with information, and I am always reliant on others to make the magic work.

In practice, making progress with legacy systems, written in older eras, is painfully slow and there is a high dependency on IT partners who may not share or fully understand the business purpose behind the work.

We had here a group of experts, from many different perspectives, who spoke about a new era in Information; we are at a point where we can optimise value from the content we have already invested in by designing our domains so we can share, inside and outside our own organisations.

The key points driven home were:

• That given the rate of increase of the volume of data held, a cloud solution is the safest and most economical way to store information which is not security sensitive
• The way forward for most large organisations is to use a combination of private and public clouds, infrastructure and content clouds
• That in the use of the cloud, businesses perform better by encouraging self service for customer/users, thus creating the capacity to do much more
• Through social and dispersed media, the cloud can be an excellent mechanism for due diligence, through the smart use of links
•  Economies of scale and better community working are easily enabled through a cloud
• To make clouds work, thought must be given to classification, taxonomy and linkage, if they are to work across border, cultures and languages
• There are clear cost savings via reduction in classical IT expenditure
• But the ownership, value and “curation” of data needs to be carefully thought through, or we may lose information, valuable in years and decades to come
• Who pays for content, provision and/or usage? Authors, owners, users or society? How do we pay?
• Little wastage of storage or data utility in the cloud
• Need to get into good meta data habits to be fit for the cloud

Caution: we were advised that in this ”free-for-all” stage of Cloud uptake, the current wisdom is to be cautious in your commitment to cloud service providers;

Pay detailed attention to contracts. Have an exit strategy.

Who owns the data once you hand it over, what are the rights issues, will you cede power over your own IP if you are not careful?

Make sure you are prepared to have your data back, if contract terminates. Will this undo your cost reduction?

Do providers have the right to keep and use a copy of your data?

• Understand implications for compliance and for QM systems and accreditation requirements
• Independent audit  is essential. Don’t rely on service and solutions providers
• Think carefully about security and encryption versus utility
• If encryption bars algorithms for analysis, will this prevent the cloud as a useful solution to data storage and analysis?

TFPL Events did a wonderful job of bringing together a group of speakers and participative delegates who gave The Cloud a rigorous 360 degree, public scrutiny. The event discussed the Cloud as a positive, adventurous mechanism for collaborative working and for engagement with external customers for interest groups. The event worked, because the vendors did not oversell, and the users and the sceptics came to learn but not to deride.

The sentiment in the room was of an event that delighted in its effectiveness, to raise awareness and expand our perspective on the Cloud, through real experience. There was a call for more – perhaps a follow up event to share more about inventive applications of Cloud, to inspire innovation. There is also a clear demand for CIOs –intrepid strategic information and IT professionals able to lead organisations on adventures to a promised land of cost reduction, shared information and easy information living.

One of the delegates talked about a “race for adoption” and how important it is for growth, to take up new technology ahead of the curve for optimum performance. This seminar made us all want to race.

A word from our newest member of the team

Author: Tom Green, Sales Executive Training and Events

As a new member of the training team at TFPL I thought I’d note down a few points gleaned from my work to date.   In particular, Cloud technology and its future impact on organizations has become a regular topic of client conversations. The information, knowledge and records management sector is talking about this revolutionary hosted service and the effects that implementing it will have for their future. What it can provide to their current systems and what it has potential to  has created an excited hype around its revolutionary infrastructure. However, with this air of potential does come challenge. A stigma of unreliability around how connective, compliant and secure it really is still holds prominence within the minds of information professionals faced with the future potential of having to use it.

However, not all information management professionals hold similar speculations or concerns. Some see the Cloud as only a technological change so are not yet focussing on how they will manage information services within it in the future. In fairness, if the intercompany talk which surrounds them only revolves around its impact as a technology, why would they think otherwise. This is however, what we have learned to try to avoid. We are trying to encourage our community to think about its impact and, in turn, fully prepare themselves and their information service for the future. As a recent example, SharePoint had a big impact on information services that were not completely prepared for what it could do and how it should be managed. Like Cloud it was optimistically seen as a revolutionary way to host organisational information yet, through lack of preparation, could not be properly used and in turn became recognised as disruptive. From my own experiences of perspectives toward Cloud this has the potential to happen again.

This is why I feel our future event by discussing Cloud specifically in terms of its impact on information, knowledge and records management professionals is important. By creating a space for organisations to learn, share and discuss about their future in Cloud it will help lay a foundation for it to be efficiently used in the future. Take your opportunity to join the discussion and start thinking about how it will affect you at ‘Sharing Information...re-defined’ on 20^th October

 

WEB evolvement – one, two, three...

It does feel like the web today, or www, has all happened very fast. But it has taken 2 decades! Back in 1991 Tim Berners Lee first introduced the web to the public, having created the concept, developed the idea of ‘hypertext’, shaped the first web browser and editor, launched the world’s first website - http://info.cern.ch and gave users an introduction to getting started with their own websites.

Initially websites were there as a means to publish information. Estimates show that the 220 million pages in the 1990s, have grown to a number of 1 Trillion, but as Internet hosting is not restricted the answer is more likely to be ‘infinite’ and growing at that rate too! In the early nineties pc’s were gradually appearing in organisations. There were significant cost factors, training people on how to search, learn keyboarding skills, use DOS, the early non-windows operating system and so on. Mainframes had been around for some time, but only usable by computer programmers who had the skills of cobol, fortran, pascal and the like. In the early nineties the pc was the tool used by the library and information staff to search the bibliographic databases as a profound improvement to thumbing though the printed indexes. Amstrad led the word processing market, then other software providers came along and finally Microsoft conquered the market with their ‘office’ suite. At the same time PCs became laptops, netbooks, iPads and communication moved from ‘wires’ to ‘wireless’ with mobile technology now commonplace.  Another overwhelming advance as to how people can work both in and outside the workplace to access real-time data repositories to save and access information and data.

The web has evolved in tandem. These slides (Download Web 3) take a light hearted look at the changes, which almost typify generations x,y,and z.

What is interesting to information professionals, is the increasing need for the use of taxonomies, metadata standards, tagging, information architecture, enterprise searching and discovery tools.

As the web has evolved so has the requirement for LIS skills. With available information growing at an infinite rate ‘googling’ for items becomes an almost impossible task. Recall is up, precision is down. Indexing/classifying items is the only way through the myriad of websites and pages. Automatic tagging software only really works well once the taxonomy and metadata rules have been set up. Intelligent systems can now clock what we read, films we see, clothes we buy, restaurants we visit so they can provide us with the information before we even know we want it. Sounds familiar? Push and pull? All points in one direction. Long live the information professional!

- Vivienne Winterman, Senior Knowledge and Information Management Consultant

Join the experts in the Cloud

In putting together the programme for our latest event on 'the Cloud', we've had the opportunity to speak to a wide range of people, all with their own key challenges to address. The biggest one, aside from cost and efficiency benefits available in IT service provision, has been around realising attainable business improvement, for example, in reducing the cost of doing business whilst maintaining and improving information security and integrity.

Andrew Jordan, CTO from Thomson Reuters has been overseeing a huge data migration programme at Thomson Reuters, amalgamating the organisation's disparate business information sources into a centralised cloud based platform with the aim, in doing so, to reduce and ultimately eliminate duplication, gradually ensuring that business data is current and relevant.

A must have when the organisation relies on the quality of its data when its research is aiding companies avoid dealing with money launderers and ensuring that they conduct comprehensive due diligence. Andrew has been particularly concerned with the mapping of the information architecture and metadata to aid this process and make the migration to a successful new system. And rightly so. Without a sound information architecture which reflects corporate content requirements there is always the danger that the same old problems will be migrated to the Cloud with the data. Andrew will be presenting a really interesting case study on his work at our event in October.

Simon Smith, COO of Extrinsica Global has realised business benefits in both enhanced collaborative working in the cloud and solid security of data that can be accessed without an Internet connection but still using cloud services. Data security is a major concern for all those holding data whether on internal systems or at a data centre. His story reflects on both his own company, and his experience of working with large global organisations where he has been able to meet very high level security requirements through a cloud system.

It will be really quite interesting to see how what he's done at Extrinsica would weigh up against the dilemma of putting regulated data with its legal implications (which many of our clients face) on the Cloud

For further further information on the Cloud event programme which has now been finalised please visit http://www.tfpl.com/cloudevent 

aside from cost and efficiency  available in IT service provision

Report on the CLSIG NetIKX conference on “Making the Most of Sharepoint”

Author: Matt Woods, Contracts Recruiter, TFPL

This Wednesday, CLSIG/NetIKX hosted an interesting gathering, where about 45 people listened to a presentation by Mark Field on the implementation of Sharepoint and cloud platforms at the Department for Education, followed by case studies and group discussions led by Hugh O’Neill (Knowledge Manager, EMEA for Jones Lang LaSalle) and James Andrews (KIM Officer at the British Red Cross)

Funding restraint, while being a driver of innovation in many cases, could end up being a result of improved efficiencies brought about by a move toward shared workspaces.  Mark spoke about the improvement in document control and compliance at the DfE since the introduction of the Sharepoint-based system.  Perhaps the main theme of Mark’s case study was the importance of achieving staff participation and acceptance of any new platform and to get beyond a perception that it is merely a case of “the intranet’s changed”.  Mark did this at DfE by identifying key people to become advocates or “champions” of the new system, being sure that these people were senior and with a reputation for being resistant.

Hugh also had experiences of promoting Sharepoint as a Knowledge Management tool at Jones Lang LaSalle, where he helped to implement a platform that enabled previously technophobic executives to collate and share information about contacts, intangible market and competitor intelligence and business information.  He stressed the importance of approaching the setup from a KM standpoint rather than as an IT project, a point which seemed to echo the thoughts of Mark Field, who found that avoiding Sharepoint and Microsoft language helped to improve engagement with the project.  Hugh also found that making the platform visually appealing made it much easier for people to engage with.

During questions and answers, user-engagement came up time and time again, as well as references to open government regulations and with that, the future prospects for using Sharepoint platforms to provide linked data to people within and outside of public sector organisations.  With this in mind, Hugh O’Neill stressed the importance of having common versions of the programme to make sure that different sets of data are compatible and able to migrate from one platform to another.  I asked Mark Field whether, as the roll out of this type of platform continues across departments, the use and choice of different programmes or even versions will hinder the linked data aspect of open government.  This will most likely depend on the attitudes of different departments and Permanent Secretaries and how they are able/forced to collaborate.  It was particularly interesting to compare these observations to those made by the information Commissioner and Paul Davidson (Local e-Government Standards Body) at the recent ISKO Public Access to Information conference (see blog post  14 April) and may be an indicator of further business opportunities in exploiting Open government, linked data and FoI requirements within local and national government.

In all, even though approaching the seminar form a non-technical viewpoint, it was clear that there is a groundswell in favour of using Sharepoint and Cloud systems, with upgrades to later versions inevitable.  The key points appeared to centre on the importance of making the platforms easier to use, which in turn will improve user participation and acceptance, as well as the increased likelihood that organisations in all sectors will be looking to implement and improve their use of Sharepoint.

 

 

Building a business case for taxonomy

Last night I tuned into an hour long webinar kindly run by Earley and Associates in the US.  Given the limited time, it focused on a few key themes in building a business case for enterprise taxonomy. Some of the points weren't really new but I found it useful to have everything brought together in a short, well delivered presentation. Here's what I took away from the session:

A business case for taxonomy is about linking the efficiency of your content resources to a core business objective and deliver a better quality of service or product.  It is about demonstrating how your organisation will benefit from implementing or improving a taxonomy without it being brushed aside as a simple "editorial issue".

So, how are decision makers influenced by a business case?  In two particular ways when it comes to taxonomy: by demonstrating ROI (return on investment) and/or CDB (cost of doing business). ROI is all about how much you gain on the amount you spend on any given improvement.  CDB focuses on your delivery barriers, for example the length of time it takes to retrieve content.

ROI is a management accountancy method which is intended to indicate a monetary value on the benefits of a given investment and is a commonly used tool in business cases.  It works very well for instances involving tangible products such as manufacturing equipment which may improve product output, reduce faults, or make manual labour redundant.

However, it is very difficult to effectively demonstrate the ROI on something like a taxonomy for many organisations; to many people a taxonomy is a vague enough concept, even if they know what it means.  So how about identifying its impacts on business outcomes without confusing them with jargon?

This is where CDB might fill the gap for your taxonomy business case when coupled with supporting evidence from some relatively simple before and after usability testing. Such testing may prototype the time taken to find, retrieve, use and reuse information before and after the implementation of a sample taxonomy. Any improvement in findability can then be linked to the quality of service delivery to clients or the amount of time valuable employees spend looking for documents instead of doing their job.

This is not to negate the value of ROI for taxonomy, especially for commercial organisations; a good taxonomy can positively impact your bottom line.  Just look at Amazon and how it recommends other related products, this surely persuades many online shopper to spend more.

Might seem obvious, but it seems that there is no standard formula for creating a convincing taxonomy business case.  It is important to think about what line of business you're in and what you are trying to achieve so that you speak to decision makers in language and terms that they understand and of which they take notice.

Nil Desperandum post CSR; the news is not 100% bad if you are in the KIM segment

Author: Julia Hordle
TFPL Intelligent Resources

There is some indicative demand for skills transfer towards the private sector.  Sweet spots for people needing to transfer skills from Public Sector/NPOs back into the private sector include:

• Research:
  
  • Planning; current and future funding structures, research and analysis
  • Policy research, Change and & Communications

• KM: 
  • Change management and portal design/redesign
  • Programme management & project management within KM/IM with accreditation
  • Sharepoint & MOSS 2007/2010: architecture, development and creation of business tools
  • Organisational needs analysis
  • Corporate communications

People with combined private & public sector experience are particularly valued. There are some good opportunities for people with a sophisticated grasp of IM/KM best practice and an affinity for business. Is this you? Please make contact to explore current options.