tfpl blog

The Growth of Social Media

by Denise Harmer, Recruitment Consultant

I attended my first NetikX event on Tuesday where Steve Dale and Geoff McCaleb (social media mobile consultant) shared some interesting statistics about social media which is undoubtedly here to stay given that staggeringly two thirds of the population visit a social network site once a month and Facebook has 800 million users...

The future of social media is clearly growth, Facebook’s strategy for example is to encourage users to spend more time on the site, this will soon be a a possibility as they are about to launch Timeline which will encourage the user to spend more time uploading and sharing information. Another major focus of social media will be its mobility -  by 2013, it is predicted that mobile devices will provide more people with their online experiences than desktops.

A few facts – 1 in 3 companies now use some form of social media to recruit (eg LinkedIn), 47% of journalists used twitter as a source in 2010, 50% of the population uses Facebook.
Its official – social media is here to stay and who knows, in ten years time email may be replaced and we could be operating in a Skype based in environment conversing face to face via a mobile platform.

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

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?

Social Media adoption research

Author: Claire Valentine, Training Manager

We at TFPL have long be interested in the impact social media has on organisations.  Following on from a survey that was conducted with Edinburgh Napier Univeristy in 2008, we are now happy to promote further post graduate research that they are conducting. 

Are you interested in how social media can support information and knowledge management? Would you have 15-20 minutes to spare to complete a short survey to help us enhance our understanding of the role of social media in organisational settings?

A postgraduate student supervised by Professor Hazel Hall at Edinburgh Napier University is conducting research into the opportunities and risks of social media tools to support information and knowledge management. You can find further information on the previous work that was undertaken jointly by TFPL with Edinburgh Napier University in 2008 here  http://www.soc.napier.ac.uk/~hazelh/esis/soc_comp_proj_rep_public.pdf.  

We would be most grateful if you would contribute to this project by completing the online survey at http://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/672848/5b1b3dc8a308.

All responses will be aggregated and no individual or organisation will be identifiable in the results. The findings will be shared with the broader information and knowledge management community after the project is completed.

Collaborating in the Cloud / FIFA World Cup Security Team

Author: Claire Valentine, Training Manager

I am pleased to welcome our second guest blogger and speaker at our Cloud event in October, Simon Smith, COO Extrinsica.  Below is a note from Simon around the subject of his talk:

Debate continues about whether the ‘Cloud’ IT model is THE model for business into the future. Some commentators are already describing it as dot com boom 2.0; others believe that it’s merely a passing fad. Having been both provider and consumer (we use our cloud service ourselves) of business cloud services, we believe that it’s a technology development that has the potential to revolutionise the business landscape as we know it, transforming the way we are able to work and collaborate.

It is already becoming evident that the days of companies whose core business is not IT, managing a complete on-site IT infrastructure are numbered.  Intriguingly, I overheard a conversation at a well-known IT reseller recently where one account manager said to a colleague ‘…wow on-site IT is dying on its backside at the moment!’  So, what makes the cloud so compelling?

One of the key benefits of having an organisation's data and applications in the cloud is its ability to enable much more flexible and efficient collaboration regardless of place and time.  Collaboration is the key to success in any business; the more efficient and effective collaboration can be, the more effective the organisation can be.

When IT facilities are cloud-based, people can collaborate much more efficiently from anywhere at anytime via any device. With very high availability and ubiquitous access, business users are now able to collaborate flexibly and efficiently on a global scale.

I’m looking forward to sharing our experiences of enabling collaboration between teams across continents by looking at how the FIFA 2010 World Cup Security Team used cloud technology to great effect in South Africa during the tournament.

I will also be taking a look at a development that arose out of that project to enable cloud users to continue to work and collaborate effectively in locations and scenarios where they have little or no Internet connectivity.

Simon Smith, COO, Extrinsica Global.

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

Capitalising on Social Media – Recruitment in a Digital Era

by Luisa Jefford, Director, TFPL

The emergence of social and professional networking tools has had a profound effect on the way the world collaborates and shares knowledge and expertise.  TFPL, are more aware of this than most, we have daily contact with organisations and employees whose roles are to aid the transfer of knowledge, information, intelligence and insight within their domain. 

Having celebrated 20 years in recruitment this year I have seen the landscape change dramatically.  My introduction into recruitment was a folder full of CVs that got added to and searched on a daily basis by the Consultants, people were contacted, submitted and roles obtained. 

Working in a market where demand far outstripped supply there was little need to have a more pro-active approach when meeting your clients requirements, you matched people looking to recruit staff with people who were actively looking for work.  Fast forward 20 years and you are sitting in a market where there is a war for talent and the recruitment business is a competitive one.  People looking for work are and should continue to be prized assets for any employment business and having a strategy for attracting talent is vital for an organisation that wants to stay ahead of the competition. 

These days the competition comes in many guises and perhaps one of the largest impacts on the recruitment industry has been a sharp increase in people leveraging their own professional network to widen the opportunities available, combine this with astute organisations and their hiring managers effectively using a variety of tools and techniques as part of their talent management strategy and as the middle man you are in danger of being kept out of the loop. 

These tools include Linked In, Viadeo, Twitter, Monster, Facebook to name a few and reach an audience that perhaps aren’t always aware they are actively job seeking.   The power of a casual internet search for a new opportunity should not be underestimated by any recruiter.  These are the people we need to work hard to attract.  In addition they allow individuals to maintain contact with organisations and colleagues that perhaps would not have happened before the emergence of these tools. 

So in today’s world, with much talk about Recruitment 3.0, what should we be doing?  At TFPL we believe that the combination of our expertise, market knowledge and strongly developed professional relationships with our clients and a robust strategy for using social media tools and techniques is truly the winning combination. 

From a job hunters perspective these tools give you valuable market insight into roles that are being recruited and salaries being offered  but also offer organisational intelligence, who are the growing organisations and which industries do they operate in.  They should certainly be in your job hunting strategy.  However, it is worth remembering that a TFPL can and will offer you this and more.

At TFPL we use a variety of tools and techniques to manage existing relationships with our clients and candidates, sell our services, give distinct marketing and pr messages to a wider audience whilst remembering that doing all of this makes us more visible to our market place and also people sitting on the edges of current market.  In addition we also remember that doing this makes us more visible to the masses than a well developed website ever will, so quality assurance of our message is an important part of this. 

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.

 

 

London Information and Knowledge Exchange, 31 March 2011

Matthew Woods, Consultant
TFPL Intelligent Resources

Is mobile information technology really as new as we think? Perhaps not, as Mark Needham, founder of Widget UK explained to the London Information and Knowledge Exchange at the Crown Tavern, Clerkenwell.

Quoting from 1974 science fiction, Mark suggested that much of the information sharing devices we now take for granted have been around in concept and technology for longer than we might think, even if only in the pages of novels. Recent developments coming mainly as a result of improvements to hardware have enabled smaller, faster processors and storage devices that resemble the sleek hardware we all know. Mark drew on his personal experience as a graduate with Psion, makers of the Psion Organiser, the world’s first pocket computer, to his present day role as Chairman of Widget and an i-Phone user.

From the recruiter’s point of view, the ubiquity of mobile technology poses interesting questions in terms of how to keep abreast of required skills and competencies, as well as having to consider the potential changes to traditional Information and Knowledge Management roles in a variety of sectors. How might different sectors respond to the changing face of the way we share information in our work as well as social lives?

Being asked to consider the potential for mobile information sharing in different professions, LIKE members were soon able to come up with all manner of ways in which information sharing on the move could be applied to doctors, teachers, aid workers and business people. What of the limitations of technology? Could it be that we’re heading for some technological asymptote?

Many of the limitations and potential obstacles to the proliferation of this technology suggested by the assembled information professionals were human factors: suspicion, resistance to change, technical ability and data protection fears. This was perhaps a good reminder, reinforced by convivial talk and mingling over dinner and drinks, that the sharing of information and ideas will always be, at its heart, a very social and human endeavour.

Matt Woods attended the LIKE meeting on Mobile Information Sharing. Details of the London Information Knowledge Exchange can be found on LinkedIn