Compliance - Cautionary Tales To Help Your Budget
20th December 2013

FreePint's Topic Series: Compliance in Context has drawn attention to an enormous range of useful sources and tools, but persuading enterprises to provide the budget to acquire them may still prove challenging. Some cautionary tales may help information managers demonstrate their value. Britain's new register of beneficial company ownership, criticism by the Financial Conduct Authority of weaknesses in financial firms' Anti-Money Laundering, bribery and corruption procedures, and the more proactive approach now taken by Britain's Revenue & Customs are among the developments covered. Governments' greater inclination to regulate to please voters, and banks' willingness to pay huge fines rather than fight the regulators, may also make spending on a few more compliance tools seem a bargain by comparison.

Read

Merger Mania in Biopharma: Will Information Professionals be Victims, Witnesses or Winners?
20th December 2013

With biopharmaceutical companies under pressure to maintain revenues and suffering from the upcoming expiry of key patents, more mergers and acquisitions are likely to take place. Yulia Aspinall examines how information professionals can put their skills to good use to change the challenge of possible redundancy into an opportunity, where the information services team emerges stronger post M&A.

Read

Product Review of Euromonitor Passport: Outputs, Pricing, Help & Contact Details
20th December 2013

Examining Euromonitor Passport's output options, help and pricing, Sophie Alexander finds that the help options have improved significantly since FreePint's 2011 review with a number of videos now available in seven languages, covering aspects such as manipulating statistics and creating custom datasets. Help is also available from every screen and covers areas such as methodology, which includes a detailed description of how the global market research database specialist obtains its data.

Read

Securing Senior Management Buy-In
19th December 2013

The recent ASLIB AKISS conference gave delegates the opportunity to share ideas with peers and hear from speakers their views on the best way to secure management buy-in for projects both small and large. Richard Newton introduced a valuable three-step process to identify what you want supported, who you want to support you and how you plan to get the support you want. The SLA's president-elect, Kate Arnold, highlighted survey findings from the SLA-FT research into the evolving value of information management. She discussed how the results show that library staff must become client-centric decision enablers who are able to communicate, understand the business and present well.

Read

Product Review of Euromonitor Passport: Search
19th December 2013

The third part of Sophie Alexander's review of Euromonitor Passport examines the extensive search options available. The Passport database contains statistics, analysis, surveys and news on 27 industry sectors covering 210 countries. Sophie finds that the quality and quantity of information available is very impressive and irrespective of your chosen category or which page you’re on, the layout is reassuringly similar with search filters along the left of the page, usually with the option to change the geography, currency, date and categories. There is the possibility of going deep into the data or choosing overviews complete with visualisations.

Read

Arup: Engineering a Worldwide Community of Practice
18th December 2013

Arup's worldwide Communities of Practice enable its staff across 92 offices to share expertise openly internally to solve problems or share ideas, finds Catherine Dhanjal at the recent ASLIB Knowledge and Information Strategy Summit (AKISS). The CoPs, known as Networks in Arup, allow staff to look beyond the constraints of their own specialisms. Since it was founded in 1946, Arup has chosen staff not only for their professional competence but for their emotional intelligence and their willingness to engage in a community-based approach to problem solving, creating a virtuous circle which helps to improve skills and win new pieces of work.

Read

Product Review of Eikon: Executive Summary
17th December 2013

Thomson Reuters Eikon is the company's key desktop offering for financial markets professionals including those currently using Bloomberg. It offers global market data, news and analysis across financial markets for traders and other users and succeeds both Thomson ONE and Reuters 3000 Xtra. Eikon Answers offers a simple way to retrieve and analyse market data and Messenger offers secure messaging not just with Eikon users but also eight investment banks, two of Eikon's most powerful features, finds reviewer Andrew Grave.

Update: A new review of this product is available here »

Read

Product Review of Euromonitor Passport: Value & Sources
17th December 2013

With market research a strategic investment for companies of all sizes, the second part of Sophie Alexander's review of Euromonitor's Passport examines the value that the strategic intelligence tool can bring to companies. Clients range from a small ice cream manufacturer that used the data to increase its sales by 5% a year to larger companies and government organisations; 90% of clients renew every year. The resources are extensive, encompassing official sources complemented by the network of Euromonitor analysts based around the world who offer unique insights.

Read

Product Review of Eikon: Customer Support, Pricing & Contact Details
17th December 2013

The final part of Andrew Grave's review of Eikon explores the customer support options and pricing of this market analysis and trading software from Thomson Reuters. He finds that Eikon possesses some extremely comprehensive support pages and sets a high standard for content, ease of use and having everything in one place. Various pricing options are available, from a per-seat to corporate basis.

Read

Product Review of InfoNgen: Executive Summary
17th December 2013

A discovery engine for competitive information professionals in fields such as finance, legal, pharmaceutical and retail, InfoNgen is an invaluable tool for workflow automation, finds Yulia Aspinall in her executive summary. Acting as a news aggregator or listening platform, InfoNgen can save researchers time by aggregating and indexing internal and external information and automatically tagging it with metadata. Tools to share and re-publish content are included, with the ability to create custom newsletters as one output choice. Cutting down on tedious manual processes allows researchers more time for analysis of information.

Read