Making FreePint Part of your Strategy
Jinfo Blog

By Robin Neidorf

Abstract

Making time to think strategically is challenging in a busy world. Pausing to review FreePint articles and reports, participating in a customer call or reaching out to get a bit of external perspective on a tricky internal question can help even the busiest professional take a fresh, more strategic view of change. Recent changes in suppliers, questions from senior leadership and reactive response to popular technology have all prompted FreePint customers to turn to us... and here's how we've helped.

Item

In an ideal world, we'd all have time and mental space to conduct thoughtful forward-looking planning. In this world, too many decisions happen reactively. We react to new technologies; we react to changes made by key suppliers and partners; we react to demands made by senior staff. 

There's no escaping changes and the need to react to them. But it is possible to maintain a strategic mindset. FreePint can help:

The Financial Benefits of KM

A FreePint Subscriber approached me a few weeks ago with a request for help. She was preparing for a meeting with her CFO and needed supporting material to help her make the case for the value of knowledge management in a global financial services company. 

This article explains how FreePint helped, with a collection of articles and observations that you could easily adapt to help your own CFO (or equivalent) become your best cheerleader. It was one of the most rewarding interactions I've had with a customer in ages!

Responding to Market Changes

Customers have been actively contacting me to ask about changes afoot with Factiva. (See Tim Buckley Owen's most recent coverage of DJX  for comment from both Dow Jones and customers.) We felt FreePint could best support customers in thinking about this market change by enabling them to talk with each other directly.

We offered a confidential conference call for FreePint Subscribers at the Team level and higher. Available seats were quickly spoken for, so we added a second session, which also filled. To support readers beyond those able to snag a seat, we also published the FreePint Report: News Aggregation Products and Trends

Each of these hour-long calls gave participants the opportunity to think strategically about their organisational needs for news content, independent of platform. Interestingly, the insights gleaned through the FreePint Series: Big Data in Action turned out to be germane to the discussion. 

These conversations will now directly feed development for the FreePint Series: News Needs in the Enterprise: Beyond Aggregation, coming in October 2013. (Be sure to register your interest to stay informed about the series as it develops and receive a free report from the series.)

Beyond the Buzz

I was struck by the usefulness of James Mullan's most recent brief article, Do Social Tools Help or Hinder Intranet Managers? Every organisation is falling over itself to make its intranet more social, more collaborative... and yet James points out that getting wrapped up in technology buzz may be contrary to your particular objectives.

Just because you can do it (and that's not easy, as our collection on social and collaborative tools will attest), doesn't mean it's strategic for you or your organisation.

Stay Strategic

You can't avoid changes, and you can't help but react to them. Pause in your day with a FreePint article, join one of our customer calls, email me (robin.neidorf@freepint.com) to ask for help with a C-suite question. It just might give you the mental space you need to stay strategic when responding to change.

If you're not yet a FreePint Subscriber, complete our online form, "How can FreePint help?" In whichever of the four FreePint Topics your most urgent changes are happening, we can help you stay strategic.

« Blog