Subscription Update for Professional Services
Jinfo Blog

By Jan Sykes

Abstract

Professional services firms make up a significant portion of FreePint's customer base. We work closely with our customers in this industry to produce resources that speak to their broad-based content requirements and particular needs for information strategy, procurement, skill development and collaboration with other parts of their businesses. Here we highlight recent and upcoming items from FreePint's Content, Community and Consulting.

Item

Content (Articles, Reports and Webinars)

FreePint's Topic Series "News, and Beyond" was followed closely by information managers in professional services firms as demands continue to evolve for cost-effective access to comprehensive, global news content, both for ad hoc research and for current awareness.

We highlight two summary-type resources that are certain to be valuable as you continue to monitor news resources for your organisation:

• The FreePint Report: News, and Beyond is a handy compilation of articles on the topic of news resources and current awareness included in the series

• Survey on News Needs & Preferences 2014 covers: Providers, Purchase Criteria, Key Suppliers and Satisfaction, Non-Cost Resources, and News Use-Cases.

With the launch of the new Topic Series "Making Information Visible", Robin Neidorf's article titled "What is Visibility?" describes her research into differing definitions of discovery, key components, and how information professionals are tackling issues such as technology and tools, content and user behaviour.This article provides an excellent framework and common language to use in discussing information discovery and will be a useful resource as the series unfolds.

A wealth of resources are being created for this Topic Series; register to find out more and to be notified of new resources added. 

Additional perspectives on the visibility of information are discussed here:

• Making Internal Information Visible Using Enterprise Content Management
• Eight Steps to Good Management for Visible Information

Upcoming webinars cover multiple facets of information visibility and discovery, including:

• Beautiful Information is Visible Information, 18th March.

Community

We have recently begun offering Community of Practice (CoP) sessions for information managers in specific industries, with the next session focusing on professional services. 

Strategies for Information Managers in Professional Services is a CoP event on 5th May that is directed to information managers (buyers). It will look at the unique challenges faced by consulting and professional services businesses, including complex needs, multiple stakeholders, overheads versus billed services, and measuring success against objectives.

The list of upcoming teleconferences and CoP briefings can be found here.

Consulting

We've had a query from a professional services firm who would like us to help them better understand how they might move some of their lower-value activities to shared services, offshore or outsourced model.

This is a complex challenge, and the only way to tackle it is to break it down into smaller pieces. As a preliminary step, they know that their researchers may have to alter how they interact with internal customers, so that some components of their current scope-of-work can be moved from their desks to shared services.

To do so, the staff managing those researchers needs a tool or protocol to gather and organise the different steps of their work. Developing this tool and then letting the managers run with it is a practical, "next step" approach to making progress on the complex challenge without becoming overwhelmed by it.

Editor's Note: 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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