Eikon: Hitting the Headlines for all the Right Reasons
23rd December 2013

Andrew Grave examines the transformation of Eikon from a product with disappointing sales into a solid competitor to Bloomberg with over 100,000 installed terminals. The desktop market data solution for financial professionals now offers a wealth of content, secure messaging and powerful mobile apps. 

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Product Review of Euromonitor Passport: Executive Summary
20th December 2013

Whether you're looking for an overview of an industry or country or need more detailed analysis, Euromonitor's Passport offers a wealth of data on consumer-based market research. Providing statistics and analysis on 28 industries and with over 1,000 analysts covering 210 countries, Sophie Alexander's executive summary of Passport shows how it could be of value to any company that needs consumer market research data.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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FreePint Report: Product Review of Euromonitor Passport
20th December 2013

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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.

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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.

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Product Review of Thomson Reuters Eikon
19th December 2013

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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.

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