Mini Review: Manzama
6th January 2014

Competitive and business intelligence requires information from multiple sources, both traditional and new, along with ways to filter and make it into decision-ready information. James Mullan's Mini Review of Manzama examines how the tool performs for its legal and professional services clients and how it can help them to gain a better understanding of their competitors, clients and industry and to better identify business development opportunities. 

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

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Large Software Vendors Bet on BYOD
3rd January 2014

The subject of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) continues to make headlines and despite the security issues this presents, less than a third of businesses in Europe have a formal BYOD policy. Given recent acquisitions by IBM and Oracle in the enterprise mobile management market, maybe it's now time for companies to review their BYOD policies as the use of mobile devices in the workplace continues to gather momentum.

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How Do You Solve a Problem Like CVs?
2nd January 2014

CVs, resumés and skill sets are an essential part of new business proposals, particularly for professional services organisations such as legal firms, consultancies and accountants. How best to manage the CVs is a challenge for knowledge and information professionals who have to facilitate fast access to the information, ensure the documents are accurate, can be easily shared and that the formatting allows easy output, copying and sharing.

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2014 - Reasons to be Cheerful?
2nd January 2014

Businesses still have a long way to go before they can be sure they're exploiting all their available data effectively, suggest recent comments from the Business Information Industry Association and the European School of Management & Technology. But do the exciting developments in big data, business intelligence, analytics and regulatory compliance predicted by analysts such as Gartner and Ovum necessarily have to be information technology led? Perhaps not; some of the skills involved include procurement of increasingly commoditised services and exercising judgement over trends highlighted by the data. And The Economist predicts a growing role for a chief digital officer, charged with embedding technology into products and business models.

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Lost in Translation - Online Tools for Foreign Language Research
31st December 2013

With the globalisation of information via the internet and English rapidly losing its place as the predominant online language as Chinese, Japanese and Spanish content grows, Sophie Alexander explores the increased popularity of online translation tools. She highlights some useful features of a few of these. Social media site Facebook recently acquired a translation tool and search engines such as Bing and Google have quite well developed software. However, Sophie suggests researchers also consider more specialist tools such as Linguee, Systransoft and 2lingual. 

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Big Data - Help or Hindrance?
31st December 2013

Apple's recent acquisition of the Twitter analytics firm Topsy, a series of enthusiastic articles by Pinsent Masons on the health and pharmaceutical benefits of data analytics, a report from Forbes Insights on big data's marketing potential, and Google's attempts to interest small businesses in analytics, all suggest that big data may be at the top of its hype cycle. But recent FreePint comment indicates that its impact on knowledge management has been limited so far, and evidence from Thomson Reuters suggests that big data may even be hampering companies' efforts to find the figures they need to comply with tax regulations.

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Knowledge Management in Law Firms is Changing!
30th December 2013

James Mullan looks at what the future holds for knowledge management in legal firms. He discusses how KM is now going beyond the "traditional" into new territories such as using KM principles to manage a firm's risk and compliance processes. Tips for making knowledge projects more likely to complete successfully are also covered.

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FreePint Report: Information Services Management Monthly Update (December 2013)
30th December 2013

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Getting the Most Out Of Expert Directories & Staff Profiles
27th December 2013

Sarah Dillingham asks how you can maximise the usage and usefulness of your organisation's staff or expert directory. She examines how companies can ensure their people data is current and how they can best manage information across multiple sources, from Active Directory to Outlook, intranets such as SharePoint, internal social media like Yammer and external social media sites including LinkedIn.

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Intranets: Don't Write the Obituary Just Yet
24th December 2013

It seems that a day doesn't go by without yet another website or blog trumpeting the death of intranets, or that intranets are becoming obsolete. The question is whether intranet managers should be up in arms about these posts, or is there some truth behind them? James Mullan explores the evolution of intranets, social enterprise networks, CMS and collaborative systems.

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