Subscription Update for Banking & Finance
Jinfo Blog

By Eileen Steer

Abstract

Information professionals across all industries face a number of challenges and issues. We highlight recent pieces from FreePint's Content, Community and Consulting that would be of particular interest to information professionals within the banking and finance sector. Included are FreePint's Topic Series "Best Practices in Information Skills Development" which is of real interest within the sector. Training and development and how to balance time and resources, whilst being up-to date on the latest developments, is always an issue for information professionals within the banking and finance sector.

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Content (Articles, Reports and Webinars)

Information managers in banking and finance have been interested in FreePint's current Topic Series "Best Practices in Information Skills Development"; more details on what is available in the series can be found here. Of particular interest was:

• "Information Skills Development - Incorporating Resources from Industry Partners": what do external partners have to offer in terms of skills development? External partners can be vendors, publishers, professional associations, coaches or higher education institutes.

• "Identifying Skills Gaps and Fostering Information Skills": discussion on why information skills are so business critical to organisations. Looks at the ways in which information professionals can truly make a difference to the working lives of their colleagues - and the effectiveness of their organisations.

• Offering training in bite-size chunks. Author Andy Tattersall discusses staff development workshops, and the benefits of breaking them up into short 20-minute sessions that are informal, interactive and focus on the key aspects of a subject.

There have recently been a number of product reviews that are of particular interest to information professionals in banking and finance, including a Product Review of S&P Capital IQ which is widely used in banking and finance. Of particular interest was the section Development Plans, which highlighted S&P Capital IQ's plans to expand their private company offering.

A useful market map of key vendors in the company information space identifies key products, briefly describes their main features, notes the geographic scope, singles out special features of each service and highlights principal use-cases and value. 

Factiva is widely used in banking and finance, so the recent Source Update for Factiva, which highlighted that Factiva has recently added Local Company Profiles from Euromonitor, with 7,000 company profiles from 80 countries was informative and relevant.

Sources were also examined in Andrew Lucas' article "Crowdsourced Financial Information" where he looked at the strengths and weaknesses of crowdsourcing model, motivations of contributors, and how financial services companies are using social media. He also looked at companies which are using crowdsourcing to generate data, such as NetProspex Workbench, Owler and Estimize.      

As many organisations within banking and finance now allow end users and information professionals to work from home, information managers need to have a better understanding of how distance learning can solve some training challenges. The upcoming webinar on 4th June "Getting Started with Effective Distance Learning" addresses some of the issues. If you haven't already done so, please register your interest in this webinar.

Community

Information professionals possess an enormous amount of expertise; it is essential that they know how to select and work with information sources and that they know when and how to ask for help, and how to communicate results.

An upcoming Community of Practice teleconference "Turning Content into Curricula" on 4th June looks at how to turn this expertise into useful, productive training.

At a more strategic level, it's critical for organisations to recognise that their future success is closely tied to the information-related skills of their workforce. If you recognise the importance of this discussion, make time to attend the session on "Getting Information Skills Development on the Strategic Agenda". Two dates are available for this teleconference: 9th and 25th June.

Consulting

What will that future workforce look like? Good question, and one that's at the heart of a just-launched consulting project. We're collaborating with the information team at a global organisation to investigate trends in information centres, services and structure to identify what their future model might look like.

A FreePint Subscription at the Content level gives access to all FreePint articles, reports and webinars, at the Community level gives access to all FreePint Communities of Practice (as well as all FreePint Content), and at the Consulting level adds a credit for up to six hours of annual consulting time. Find out more.

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