The game is changing

My management team is made up of myself plus seven regional managers. Most of our communication is virtual because we are distributed around the globe. The bulk of it is via a blog. Of course, there is a lot of face-to-face contact as well and twice yearly I do a ‘state of the nation’ session with all staff. The blog is an open one, not only to Information and Knowledge staff but also users around the company. (Legal)

This corporate law company is, by turnover, one of the top 20 in the UK. The library and information service sits within a wider knowledge group. This includes various support services including IT and know-how/professional support lawyers who make up the team. This is a global group working across offices around the world.

The library and information service has repositioned itself, more closely aligned with our knowledge management colleagues. There is far greater collaboration between information and knowledge professionals across the company. This has improved our visibility within the business but this still is a work in progress. Global communication between us all is achieved by a variety of methods and technologies including WebEx. Because of time differences, collaborative meetings have to be split between time zones. Our services are becoming more integrated in areas like current awareness and generally there is a healthy attitude to sharing. But there isn’t much global procurement at the moment. (Legal)

There’s been no significant change in the organization arrangements this year except in one respect. This is the first time we’ve brought the global team under one group structure. My management reporting lines have changed. Now it is to the Head of Knowledge & Information who is a partner based in London. He looks after online content, social media, document automation and various other matters.

One of the major challenges is communication to all these information professionals and support staff across these time zones. To tackle this communication process we use blogs, communities of practice and a whole variety of ways to bring people together.

Clearly, we use teams, bringing individuals together for specific projects. An example is a project on document automation for which we needed to set up templates, biographies and company profiles. It’s reassuring that there’s really no significant cultural differences across this information community in these various, widely distributed geographical areas. We’re hanging a lot of the conversation between all staff on the concept of working smarter, not longer. Much of this is about establishing best practices that we use throughout the company and disseminating these and encouraging others to follow them. (Legal)

I run a primarily scientific and technical information service which supports the company globally. The Information Service was formed in 2001 as a mainly virtual library and information service, consolidating a number of small physical libraries. Four small physical libraries remain – in the UK, France and two in the US.

There is a matrix management system where the information staff in the non-UK locations report into their local managements as well as to me in the UK. There are seen to be major advantages in this degree of decentralization, with the staff embedded in the business units. (Energy)

I’m the manager of the Information Centre in London. We’re part of the Bank’s investment banking division and I’m responsible to the global information head who is based in New York. We also have teams in Japan, China and Australia. Up to 12 months ago we also had small hubs in two mainland European cities but these have been closed, partly because the overall number of bankers employed has dropped.

I don’t think that our workflow processes between the various offices and hubs on the information side are very integrated. I’m responsible for the licensing of market data globally and we manage the contracts for this out of New York and London as a shared responsibility. (Bank)

There are major cultural differences between us and our US colleagues. In our US parent company there seems to be a perception shift to taking sectors seriously. They have huge practice groups and are open to different kinds of management approaches. We have to behave strategically. Whilst we’ve nailed the cost side down on a budget of some $8M overall, the practice in the US and in the UK on recharging differs. Most costs are recharged in the US but we do not recharge legal stuff in the UK. We have to look at the charging model much more closely because clients are now examining their billed charges much more assiduously. (Legal)

My reporting line has been changed during the year. A year ago my manager was the Head of Quality & Compliance. But this has reverted once more to be the Managing Partner. The company has become a LLP, partly as a result of the preparatory work we did in advance of the ultimately failed merger in 2012. This corporate legal status makes future mergers easier to achieve. In fact, during the past year we’ve merged with a very small and sound London practice whose Managing Partner is about to take retirement. It has 10 good staff and a strong client list. The merger was smooth and everything came across in apple pie order. A previous merger was chaotic and we’re still trying to sort out issues. We’ve also absorbed a small, specialized service office which undertakes a lot of government and public sector work.

It’s worth re-stating that the company doesn’t employ professional support lawyers (PSLs). The Knowledge & Information Team fulfils this role. It used to be common for law companies to have a number of PSLs but this is much less fashionable now and more difficult to justify in cost against value added. The lawyers we employ are expected to be fee earners. (Legal)

In this global banking and financial services company there has been significant change in the organization of the information services function during the year. It has been split into two areas. My function now is to lead on market data procurement, primarily for content for our London office but also with some global contracts. I now report to the Chief Procurement Officer and have joined an eclectic team of support staff. Our Information Centre consists of just three staff members who are responsible for research and information seeking in various ways. This is partially outsourced now. These staff now principally serve the Compliance Team through their research efforts. (Bank)

There’s been a major structural change in the organization of the information service. This is proving a real challenge to the operations of the group. There are now two parts to the information service. Firstly, the research team continue to be focused on ‘information discovery’. This is a blend of onshore and offshore capability, with embedded teams in some locations. Their work continues to be broken down into tiers with the heavy lifting associated with the less complex tasks executed offshore: high volume/quick turnaround requests.

The other main group now, which is split off is concerned with vendor management. This is the team that handles all content management matters although negotiating with vendors continues to be handled by the procurement group. This has always been a distinct group of staff but the focus has now shifted. This is because it’s so large an area that a new management team and a new approach has been necessary. All transactional work will be undertaken by supplier staff, both onshore and offshore. A small group of employees (onshore and offshore) provide the oversight and governance of the function and associated management software.

Managerially, this activity is the responsibility of the global head of vendor management. That person then reports to me, the head of the information service overall. There is no doubt that this change has improved our level of capability. We are managing a large content portfolio involving hundreds of contracts for thousands of products. This is a complex task. Given the level of spend, there is significant focus on managing these costs proactively.

Our relations with this third-party supplier are good but we do realize that we have to manage the concentration risk, through dealing with one particular supplier. This doesn’t make me comfortable so we’re looking for another partner to undertake some of this work. This will be offered out to tender in 2014. (Bank)

As head of the unit I wouldn’t say that I provide directorial leadership. Someone has likened it to more than 50 people in a boat rowing without a cox. It’s a kind of bottom-up management where the regional managers distributed across these offices have a lot of autonomy and report to me by exception. We use a global standards service model to guide us in the direction of the service. (Legal)

Personally, in the interests of succession, I’m stepping back a little from the hands-on leadership of Information Services and my management team are increasingly taking some of this responsibility. (Bank)

The research team remains within the research department of the Bank and has the same management as last year. Compared with past organizational homes, this continues to give us a higher image profile and we’re associated with a positive brand.

Most of our users are internal within the Bank but we also serve some external users. There’s somewhat more of a regional focus which means that needs are more scattered and somewhat less obvious. (Bank)

We are still located within the R&D function. This is a very creative environment and a suitable one in which to provide information services. In terms of hierarchy, we are one step down from the research leadership team. The Info Service operates globally and supports offices across time zones. We’re now leaner and more process oriented. The Competitive Intelligence function has shifted out of the Information Centre and is now outsourced. (Pharma)

My work is now undertaken as part of the Marketing team which has been my organizational home now for three years. This grouping is very effective for me in that I can keep abreast of the important business development in the business and contribute my own information skills as well as tapping into a number of other discussions about the development of the company. (Technology)

The place of the Information/Research Service is stable, sitting alongside Marketing & Business Development. This is functional and as good an organizational home as any other we’ve tried over the years here. There are synergies and commonalities between customer relationship management (CRM), market research and analysis and information/research functions. (Business Services)

The last 12 months have been very busy but, in some respects, in terms of the Information & Knowledge service, somewhat calmer. Following the implosion of the KM/Information team a year ago, this has been a period of stabilization and regrouping. I was the only survivor of the cull of staff, had become a ‘one man information band’ and was located in the Human Resources Department. A review of support staffing in April 2013 led to a re-think and a restructuring of the support services. I was moved to the Compliance Team and this has been a great improvement. Information sits much more comfortably there and I’m directly responsible to the director who is in charge of risk matters. Whilst he isn’t particularly interested in information management or KM, I do get on with him at a personal level (he was a director of the company I worked for before the merger) and through him have more direct access to the senior management of the company. (Legal)

We used to be located alongside the small training function and there were some synergies. The trainers have now gone and that leaves a gap for me in helping to deliver user training and ‘legal information literacy’. There are some 400 professional lawyers in the company and training is an important need. The Risk team is made up of six of us and we work well together. But I remain as the only information person and there’s no one to assist or mentor me in a professional sense. The company has established a new marketing team but they’ve yet to make any great impact as far as I can see. This is perhaps, once again, because of the difficulties of merging the fragmented elements of the previous four or five companies. (Legal)

I am unsure about the long-term viability of the information function. The hangover from the 2012 review still affects us. Despite trying to turn the service around, the situation is still very difficult. (Bank)

Below £5000 [ ]  £5000–£49,999 [ ]

£50,000–£99,000 [ ]  £100,000–£149,999 [ ]

£150,000–£249,999 [ ]  £250,000–£499,999 [ ]

£500,000–£999,999 [ ]  £1 million plus [ ]

We have a four-year budget cycle and we’re about to start the third year. We are likely to have the same base budget in 2015. This predictability is important. The content budget has increased by around 5 per cent plus and we have built somewhat deeper sector resources to meet changing needs. There are still major challenges to face given the overall demands on us on the one hand and the resources on the other. The ‘integrity’ element of our service is as important as ever and involves compliance checking, an onerous but necessary task for the business. A recent compliance audit reaffirmed the value of our contribution to these processes. We are concerned about the changes made to and by Factiva as this is an important product for us. We can provide some substitution through One Source but this doesn’t replace the need for Factiva. It looks as though multiple subscriptions will be necessary. Our content management is carried out by manual methods but there are some useful systems available such as Research Monitor from Priory Solutions. (Bank)

We’re holding our costs steady, flat in fact, and are trying to establish more standardized provision across all information services in all domains. This encompasses 26 offices in 31 countries. There has been tight cost control but somewhat more relaxed than the previous year. However, we have to be very vigilant as we use a zero-based budgeting model across information services globally. We set budgets each January and start the financial year in May. The process involves close questioning of requirements internally plus involvement of the local business finance manager in the distributed offices in London or New York then the budget is built up from local agreements. (Legal)

Resource conditions are tight though stable. There have had to be reductions in content expenditure but ultimately the subscriptions renewals aren’t significantly different. We’ve had to adjust the content portfolio but did this in good time so as to ensure a smooth transition and avoid a sense of crisis. We have maintained a ‘business as usual’ approach, been ahead of the game and are now working to a three-year plan. (Pharma)

We’ve been out to the business to check out those services which are seen as essential and those that are dispensable. It’s transpired that some of the cancelled material hasn’t made a difference in terms of information support to our users. For instance, we subscribed to three expensive, specialist pharma sources covering competitive drugs in the development pipeline. None of the three were error free but we felt in the past that we needed to combine all three to get an overall view. We took the decision to cancel two of them and none of our users has batted an eye since then. So there was surplus in the content collection but after this round of cuts then we are down to the bone. I’ve worked hard to convince both my management and user community that we’ve reached the limits. I have to say that the senior management of my division, Business Services, has given me great support. (Pharma)

For some data resources we act as gatekeepers, as middlemen, as we can’t afford the licensing costs of putting it on desktops. The company is extremely dispersed, with 26 offices globally. Obviously, with this degree of distributed staffing, we have to keep data licensing costs within reason. This is down to hard negotiations with the vendors. In terms of resources we have enjoyed an increased content spend in this last year. However, we have to be very precise in business planning and in drawing up budgets which are realistic. (Technology)

We overspent our budget last year but no one seemed overly concerned given that the data was needed for the business. We keep our content under close review and this has been a year of big changes exemplified by the Factiva situation. News aggregation is important for us and we keep in close touch with ongoing developments and professional communities of practice discussions such as instigated by Freepint. A global business has to be concerned with global news, and not just from Anglo-American sources. (Business Services)

The content budget is stable, with a 3 per cent increase for inflation. I never submit an inflated budget, only bidding for what is needed, and I always work within that budget envelope. We have a new Head of Finance so it remains to be seen how this new broom looks at our operation. (Legal)

The content budget has increased slightly with a rather new emphasis on ‘intelligence’ type products. I’m coaching my team to review content constantly. A number of aggregators have sprung up in recent years and we deal with them. However, there is a countervailing move for some publishers to withdraw their material from the aggregators and serve it themselves directly. News aggregation is an issue for us as we subscribe to Factiva. We’re not certain about the middle- to long-term option or if we should move to another supplier. E-books are important and are still much debated between the LIS and our users who need some of them. The publishers seem to take very different approaches to making these available and to use varied business models. We are quite happy to buy access to a number of key books for our users but don’t want a huge bundle of irrelevant material. This model may be quite appropriate for an academic library but not for us. It’s quality rather than quantity that is important in our case. (Energy)

There’s strong pressure on costs and this obviously led to the staffing reductions over a year ago. Yet despite the damage to my professional pride and the limited budgets we have, I think there is a greater understanding of the information management/KM agenda than 18 months ago. The content budget is stable, some £500k, and has actually increased by 3 per cent. I don’t have input to the budget setting process and am just told by our Finance people what has been allocated. Lexis-Nexis is the major single item of expenditure and is obviously an essential tool for our lawyers. I completed a very time consuming, thorough essential audit of information resources in the new merged company in July. From a situation of confusion about these resources immediately post-merger, the position now is much clearer. One of our book suppliers helped in the process by assisting me in tracking content, clarifying subscriptions and creating a spreadsheet. The company is very keen on digital resources rather than print and in the circumstances we now face with staffing and space then this is obviously a sensible strategy. We’ve made strenuous efforts to reduce duplicated paper subscriptions to standard works that are usually around in law firm offices. We merged with two small legal practices in the autumn, taking on another 100 staff in all, and have encountered more duplicates, a number of which we have been able to cancel in favour of networked digital equivalents. (Legal)

Our content budgets have been reduced and this has meant we’ve had difficult choices to make. The cuts have been in the order of 10 per cent during this last year and have meant difficult negotiations with vendors. The possibility of substituting one product for another is difficult because often we are served by niche providers who are most aggressive in their pricing strategies. The reality of the situation is that we have fewer licences than we had before and less desktop machines which are authorized to access these various data resources. We are a second-tier investment bank and therefore don’t have the budgets of the giant banks with whom we compete in certain markets. (Bank)

The resource climate in the last year has been very tough, with a 25 per cent reduction in our content budget. It’s too early to assess the impact of such a draconian cut on the support of R&D and other aspects of the business. We’ve not been singled out as other areas of the company have been similarly affected. Our users were prepared for this, so haven’t protested too much. (Pharma)

IS is made up of four staff manning the four service points globally. We have lost two staff in the past couple of years because of company-wide pressures on headcount but made up some of this capacity by increasing the hours of some of the part-time staff. But staffing is down a little overall. This doesn’t reflect doubts about the efficiency and importance of the Information Service which is highly regarded throughout the Company. The service delivery has been impacted by this reduction in capacity. We have had to make decisions on priorities and find smarter ways of doing things. But I am concerned about the long-term effects on the service and have made this clear to my management. (Energy)

I have five staff, as last year, but we have added a three-days a week administrator. I’m really pleased with this development and it has made a big difference. The company lost an IT trainer a few years ago and now this post has been filled by a two-days a week trainer and a precedent administrator in K&I. We justified this by a KM argument about capturing more efficiently the internal know-how. Labelling it ‘information’ would have made the task of getting it approved much harder. Compliance work is important for us but I have only a day a week input from a compliance officer. (Legal)

I have no staff so I continue to work as a ‘one man band’. Just one good additional person would make a huge difference. There’s a real growth in the demand for business information and if I had the time and the tools then I could make a real impact. Every day I feel that I’m working out of my comfort zone. (Legal)

I have 11 staff in London and there are 30 in the information centre in New York. In addition, of course, we have the offshore operation. The focus in London and New York is the more complex, non-standard work (20 per cent of the total) whereas the high volumes are handled offshore by the outsourcing company. The latter makes up around 80 per cent of the overall volume of our work. (Bank)

We lost posts a couple of years ago and the remaining staff have had to pick up the extra work. This has rather stunted personal development as there is no time left for this. But the streamlining of processes in the last 24 months is beginning to free up time. Our staffing is very stable with most of the incumbents being here for many years. This obviously has major benefits but it would be healthy to inject a new freshness with a new professional or two. (Pharma)

One of the principal ways that we add value for the Bank is through deep integration of our information staff. Pretty much everybody is embedded in business units or associated closely to business teams. Most of our staff have been here with us for a long time and there are very good team affiliations. They are also well connected into the business which can never be underestimated. However, we do have to be mindful of the problem of these staff ‘going native’ but in practice that hasn’t happened. (Bank)

A large chunk of our work has been to embed information staff in the business function. The analyst is a real asset and part of the research process, a core function of the company. We need to proceduralize this embedding and although we’ve gone some way this is not as extensive as I would want. A big concern for us is that the staff might go native in the business/research/consulting units. (Technology)

Half of my staff are out in business units. We’re keeping this under review as there is a business case for keeping them there and another for centralizing them more fully. The more experienced staff are embedded. There’s always a danger of them ‘going native’ so we have to manage that issue by keeping them involved in more centralized projects and developments. If we incorporate them in mixed teams then it’s less likely that they’ll be lost to us. (Business Services)

We’ve been rather successful in increasing the headcount in this last year. It’s modest but there are three more posts globally in Information and Knowledge Services. Our staff are based in central locations rather than embedded in business units. It is the responsibility of our engagement managers to work with business units to ensure that we supply the right services to them. We believe that the centralized model works best for us because it allows us to process higher volumes of work and it’s of a higher quality. (Legal)

On the resources front we have done well overall with budgets, 10 per cent up over the previous year. The staffing is stable and, apart from a current maternity cover, the numbers are even and sustainable. Of course, there is a phenomenal difference in the costs between staff in regional cities on the one hand and in London on the other. There is a rebalancing of the job market going on. We have to pay a lot more money now for good people. Perhaps inevitably there is a flow of jobs and people to London so attracting good candidates in the regional offices is much harder. (Legal)

There’s no particular pressure on my staff numbers and this is very stable. Personally, I’m still involved in the quite separate ‘people development’ initiative. [This is part of my exit strategy and succession planning as I have been able to progress the leadership development of other LIS staff]. The project is currently a two-year half-time secondment and is likely to be renewed. Part of my role in this is to ensure that staff are engaged with the company’s R&D strategy. I run engagement sessions, meeting with globally distributed staff face to face to discuss the company’s overall strategy. These are then cascaded down through the company. The assessment of this programme has been very positive, with 80 per cent of participants rating it as such. (Pharma)

Any new recruit has to be able to communicate well. We use interns, new graduates, but they are often poor in certain respects. We need our staff to be confident in meetings, to be able to express themselves clearly. We have one very competent member of staff who is pretty much mute in meetings. We need staff who will raise their heads above the parapet. So information management graduates who are attracted to a company like ours have to have lots of skills not covered in the conventional information science/management curriculum.

I become very dispirited when I look at the products of information management courses. Recently we appointed two interns from one of the major schools. They showed little interest in the commercial world even though if they had proved themselves in our environment they would have put down a marker for possible employment in the future. Many graduates from the schools seem locked into a public or academic library career. It seems extraordinary to me that in a regional business centre which has relatively few large information teams there aren’t more candidates with the necessary commercial skills mix that we need. Many seem utterly unprepared for this business world. (Technology)

On the skills front I think we have to revisit professional education. Whilst the products of our postgraduate courses in information work are competent at traditional information skills, they lack the capacity for real critical thinking. (Legal)

The types of professionals that we now appoint are non-traditional. Many of them are embedded in business units and need to be very commercial, confident, outgoing and can market themselves within the company. These are not easy to find in the current recruitment market. (Business Services)

We are interested in the very fashionable role and function of ‘data scientist’. We do need to enhance our analytical skills. We are responsible for a massive amount of data in our online library. We might be able to handle this more effectively with enhanced data analytic and maybe some rudimentary programming skills. This would at least enable us to have more confidence and influence when working with our IT colleagues. (Energy)

The information service has embraced global tasks including, for instance, producing sector newsletters, the kind of work that was undertaken in the past by analysts. The skill mix in London has to be carefully balanced but there is no doubt that this needs to change. We need to upskill some of our staff, particularly in sectors specialisms. This is hard stuff because they need in-depth sectoral knowledge to add real value. It has to be remembered that we are a small team in a big operating bank. We don’t have ‘data geeks’ in the information centre. We have to be careful about what work we can sensibly expand into, what skills we have and what skills we don’t have nor could ever have. (Bank)

There has been a delay in recruiting these [two new] posts, but that is because we have struggled to find appropriate people. I’m not sure if this is because we’ve been too fussy or maybe we’re not paying enough. My general observation is that good people are tending to stay in their posts rather than looking for moves. Or perhaps there are ‘pipeline’ issues given the loss of so many information sector posts in the past five years. We look for professionals who are very commercial in their outlook, interpersonally confident people who can easily make connections across the business. (Financial Services)

Traditional library/information skills of the staff were adequate in the past. But the game has changed in the last 18 months. We need staff now to be more creative and with greater analytical skills if we are to meet our five-year plan. We have made an investment in text and data mining and we need to do more of this in the future. The competitive intelligence work is now outsourced and is produced in packaged form. In this context the primary research is wholly outsourced whilst some secondary analysis is carried out internally. (Pharma)

In terms of the skills that I require for this new procurement job, all I can say is that I’ve been willing to embrace this difficult transition and to find interest in it. Managing subscriptions with lots of variables make the job interesting, more interesting than many I have done. (Bank)

The last information officer whom we recruited had experience in legal information but not in a corporate context. Legal experience is certainly useful and is more important than information searching skills. These can be learnt on the job. As you would expect, we work under acute time pressures. (Legal)

If and when I’m in a position to recruit staff I will be looking for a broad range of skills. Whilst some background in the legal sector would be useful, that isn’t critical. Personal skills are much more important – speed, accuracy, commercial awareness and, increasingly, analytical skills. (Legal)

There is a very close connection now between investment banks and risk management. This has never been more sensitive. And the role of information in decision-making is particularly interesting in this climate. For instance, there was a recent multi dollar deal that the Bank was involved in negotiating, that only a handful of people knew about what was going on. So we have a regular tension between transparency and high commercial sensitivity and security. This creates another level of complexity for anybody involved from the information research side who is caught up in contributing to such deal making. (Bank)

We do need to enhance the skills of our staff and a major investment in our people is needed. The biggest challenge is a cultural one. We used to focus on operational work but we have to raise our aspirations beyond day-to-day targets. We need a different mindset if we’re to cope and flourish in this changed environment. For instance, there is increased pressure on embedded information and research staff as bankers in the business units face their own changing demands. In summary then we need both to develop skill sets in staff and secondly to implement cultural change. (Bank)

There’s no perceived need for a substantially changed skill set in our staff. But we could always do with more sector-specific resource support. (Bank)

We issue Westlaw alerts to selected lawyers and used to do more of this. However, we didn’t judge this to be delivering sufficient value to be worth the effort. We have to be strategic and hard-nosed in deciding where to put our limited and precious staff time. For instance, at one stage we carried out a great deal of background work for tenders that the company was bidding for. This proved far too speculative so we’ve rationalized it. The company is much more selective and focused now in such bids. If we don’t think we have a very good chance of winning then we don’t bother. There has to be a serious estimate at the likely return on the investment made. (Legal)

I talked last year about ‘matter management’ which is concerned in law firms with the organization of information about documents and email, time worked or billed, people inside and outside the firm associated with case, deadlines, files, and similar. At the moment there is an example of my Knowledge and Information team contributing to a major project for a government agency. This will involve us working directly with the client, constructing a suite of pages on our intranet and then establishing and organizing procedures for the project. This and the central management and quality control of precedent documents for the project will be one of the biggest ventures that my team have undertaken. In another project for an educational agency we are modelling and setting up processes and frameworks which involve a lot of people across the company. We’re getting a solid reputation for undertaking such work and this helps us to be very integrated into the heart of the company’s legal business.

Our document standards work in which we invested a great deal of time a couple of years ago has taken a back seat of late. With the company going through re-branding and incorporating these small companies into the mainstream, all the previously established formatting standards and templates have to change to the new house style. This has created a huge backlog of work which is being tackled by our new part-time precedents administrator. This is a big learning curve for her as she’s coming cold to legal documents but she’s progressing well. (Legal)

We provide a range of desktop information products to our users covering news, companies, patents, specialist areas like venture capital and so on. I undertake some patent work at the margins but also do due diligence checking and, still, traditional information searching for users.

I also try to assist my users by pointing people in directions, mining contacts, for instance searches on LinkedIn. Our senior management used to be rather against social media but these attitudes have changed and these are seen much more positively now.

Managing my workflow now is more difficult, I have to say. Another development has been for me to undertake a number of pre-meeting briefings of senior staff. I don’t charge out for this work. In comparison, my fee-based work has dropped off slightly. This work is not as major a commitment for me now as it was in the past. However, I still act as ‘one person information/research band’. (Technology)

There has been a growth in the company’s business so with pretty much a static staff the workload has increased. We’re adopting more self-service provision for our lawyers to assist with this position. One of our important projects is to upgrade our intranet news coverage through integrating Linex and Nexis; this is a major piece of work. We have a team of three information scientists and IT people working on this project. SharePoint 13 is still the core infrastructure for our intranet.

In terms of other social media we’ve just appointed a social media manager within I&K Services. We have already started a pilot project to use Yammer as a collaborative social media system within the company. (Legal)

The real pressure point is how we get the greatest leverage on our technologies. We use a variety of media in this respect, from RSS feeds to cuttings in newspapers, all through a standardized current awareness service. We feel we’re slowly getting there. (Legal)

We’re in the final stage of deploying a service desk management system which is rather important to us. Interestingly, we had a proposal to spend 10 times as much to do the same thing by consultants. This kind of project is a way of involving staff globally in a common initiative. (Legal)

We assess quality in various ways but we’re keen to maintain at least a base level standard. The quality of the reference interview with users in order to determine their needs is fundamentally important. (Legal)

The reference interview needs to be more skilfully undertaken. (Energy)

The advisory work can be more or less subtle such as asking questions ‘is there a tax consideration here?’ or ‘have you thought about this matter when discussing this project with your client?’ (Financial Services)

Training our end-users has become more important in recent years. (Legal)

We are very fortunate to work in an extremely collaborative environment. There is no ring-fencing and everybody is happy to help. We consider ourselves equal partners in the venture. There’s lots of good practice in knowledge management going on within the business. Collaboration and knowledge sharing is part of the ethos of the company. Indeed, these are also corporate objectives included on assessment forms for all staff. No bonuses are paid to staff unless they meet these collaborative criteria. (Technology)

One of the company’s three core values is ‘team work and collaboration’ and social media obviously has its part to play in helping to achieve this. On the key matter of transferring knowledge across the company, we’ve fallen away a little partly due to the organizational changes and mergers. We need to bring people together around projects and methods. We’re missing out as knowledge isn’t always being applied at the right time. This leads to delays and the duplication of work. We can be a lot more efficient if we can share knowledge appropriately. New software for private client work will help us tackle this. This has been acquired and there’s now ongoing training for staff. I am looking at how K&I can contribute to this change. To a degree it comes down to time and costs. As a company we can be smarter at publicizing the movement of staff and the transfer of work around offices, some of whom have available capacity. The success of this will, as always, depend on trust and reciprocity between staff. (Legal)

Collaboration in such a diverse, globally distributed company is high up the corporate agenda. Whilst the company realizes the importance of social media externally and internally, it’s hard to see a clear strategy as yet. Clearly, across the company the use of some social media tools is helping to get leverage on our knowledge assets in a collaborative way. However, there has been limited progress, sometimes constrained by other corporate initiatives. We see a change in the behaviour of our users in their willingness to embrace social media tools, especially in a personal capacity more than acting for the business. Progress is gradual and change takes time. (Pharma)

We have an established knowledge structure under a group director of knowledge and experience is disseminated through the company. We use stories as examples to publicize our offerings. These are effective as they stick in people’s minds. External social media such as Twitter are used corporately by our marketing staff. The competition team also has a twitter account and use it for public information. The company has a number of guidelines for its staff in using external social media from personal accounts. Such guidelines also cover wider social network use such as blogging, using a house style and so on.

The IT team launched enterprise social media product Yammer a couple of years ago but this didn’t take off and it has since died a death. We couldn’t find a professional purpose for it. In contradistinction, our Knowledge team has implemented HighQ which combines document management and file sharing with enterprise social collaboration and knowledge sharing tools. This is proving popular, although almost inevitably it is used by some staff more than others. Collaborative working on a wiki is growing across the company. This might be rolled out for the company’s users too. (Legal)

We must look at and use success stories about our operations and services. We’ve got powerful stories to tell about how sharing knowledge can improve business performance but these stories have to be targeted at the right people at the right time. (Legal)

Social media are also very important to us for communication, discussion and collaboration. We encourage staff to contribute to corporate wikis and to write internal blogs. We also use Chatter, the enterprise social network and collaboration software, which is popular. (Technology)

The Sharepoint implementation is well embedded in the company and is the underlying basis for a number of portals. The use of internal social software has been given a boost by the introduction of the collaborative software system Yammer, acting as a kind of internal Facebook. This implementation is still modest but has become very popular, summing up the general reaction to such systems in companies of all kinds. (Pharma)

The use of social media within and outside the company has ramped up a level since last year. This has become a powerful source of communication outside the company and is driven in part by peer pressure. A lot of news now appears first on Twitter, ahead of conventional trade and industry media. Twitter feeds about the company and about our industries are very carefully watched by our Marketing team. Within the company we have adopted the enterprise social media system called Chatter from Saleforce.com. This is proving a very popular collaborative and news system which is becoming increasingly widely used within the company. It is useful as an internal tool because it is possible to integrate various communication media and client systems such as customer relationship management (CRM) into one environment as well as posting news and exchanging email. (Technology)

We’re implementing the Spark/Jive social and collaborative software system. This is being pushed hard as a product by the KM team by whom it is being managed and implemented. Marketing & Business Development (including Information Services) are using the system but not as front runners in the take-up. Personally, I have some reservations about the product. It acts as a document repository but it isn’t easy to find material included. This problem is being looked at and hopefully resolved. The system also generates a torrent of email notifications as there’s a close link between the software and the company’s email system. After saying that, it is leading to greater collaboration between staff globally, and encouraging a greater sense of community. For us, it provides a vehicle for raising our profile and encouraging information sharing. Across the entire company it is used to a greater or lesser extent, with some areas enthusiastic and others not really engaged. Whilst it is run by the KM team, there are a number of stakeholders including us. (Business Services)

There’s significant progress in the internal use of social media. The Company is rolling out the Yammer collaborative enterprise software. There’s real energy behind this project and the LIS is involved along with other colleagues. We are one of the leading players in the initiative as we believe there are a number of ways we can provide services and benefits to the business. (Energy)

The use of social media such as Twitter for external corporate purposes is the responsibility of the corporate communications people, not us. In internal terms, the company is piloting a bespoke version of the Jive enterprise communication and collaboration software. It is very flexible and we use it for the distribution of news and press material. The project is being led by the internal communications team and incorporates PR, marketing, information services and IT. It’s a real team effort and is proving very popular and could ultimately replace the existing intranet. (Financial Services)

The Information Manager reports into the Knowledge Management section of the Company. There is a strong KM culture throughout the business which was initially established 15 years ago. Interestingly, this has been a bottom-up initiative which has grown organically not imposed from the top of the company. This has been the major reason for its success. The ethos of the KM function is to focus on operations and services which are crucial for the company’s development. It concerns itself with both explicit and tacit knowledge. In this large company about 30 per cent of the staff are part of the KM community and contribute to it in various ways, through communities of practice, special interest groups and leadership teams. These are peer-driven and integrated into the ‘technical ladders’ in the company. Positive contributions by individuals to the KM community through knowledge sharing and other initiatives are financially rewarded. The Information Service explicitly supports communities of practice throughout the company. (Energy)

There’s heightened awareness around the bank about the importance of social media promoted by our communications colleagues. We don’t use these external media as part of the professional information service. They are used personally for general alerting, twitter following and blogging. There is no problem with us tweeting as individuals as long as we don’t suggest that we represent the views of the bank. (Bank)

We don’t really have a knowledge management presence in the Bank. In terms of internal social media there is no serious capability, in part because this is inappropriate in an investment banking community. The ethos here is about ‘need to know’. (Bank)

When we talk about Information Services within the business, I think there is an inherent problem about using the word ‘knowledge’ more prominently. It has connotations, it’s value laden and it rather scares people. If we talk about ‘capturing knowledge’ it seems to me that many people actually ‘clam up’. (Bank)

The 40 per cent of the IS work that is outsourced has increased a little since last year and I would say that we’re rather more aggressive in its use and management. It’s a mix between onshore and offshore people employed by a third party services company. This arrangement gives us useful flexibility and the quality of the work has definitely improved. The provider understands our needs better and the benefits of improved training of the outsourced staff are clearly visible. There is a thorough quarterly review process to monitor performance, what’s working well and what isn’t. Our retained in-house Information Services work tends to be of a more specialist research nature and is mainly carried out in our US offices. Some of the service company’s staff work on our premises alongside colleagues on our payroll. This is really only so in the US as there are physical libraries there rather than in London where space is at such a premium and we work virtually. (Energy)

The relationship with the offshored team, who work for a third party company and are based in India, is positive. The work is split roughly 50:50 between the company and the outsourced staff. The onshore team is integrated within the company, working with client teams, undertaking packages of work. The offshored activity in India (via a business process outsourcing company) concentrates on back office, desk work using public sources. They have no direct contact with clients. It includes scientists, staff who have undergone career changes. They have developed to be able to add more value through searching and analysis. A change during the year is that competitive intelligence work has now been outsourced too. (Pharma)

The offshoring operation is based in India and is a mixture of captive staff (that is those who work for the Bank) and employees of a third party outsourcing company. About 45 staff in India are undertaking analytics work of one kind or another, and are serving mainly junior bankers. One of my jobs is to manage the contract with the outsource provider, generally monitor the quality and hold the service provider to account if there are any difficulties. I do this by monitoring output from the services quite carefully, noting complaints and looking into them, sampling work and so on. Most of this outsourced work is at a low level and it is now a mature service. (Bank)

We continue to outsource some of the information/research work to extend our resources. Until the recent recruitment of two new staff, we were under-resourced and this led to us stepping up the outsourced work. The relationship with our established third party supplier works well. Part of the reason for this success is down to one of the key members of staff employed by the outsourcing company who previously worked in our company. It is possible that we might move more work out in the future, maybe in the analytics field depending on the internal debate about this area that I’ve already mentioned. There is a balance to be struck between the company’s needs and the capability available externally. So we will keep other providers in sight to see what they can add to our service portfolio. But not all ideas fly with our management who can sometimes be rather too reactive. For instance, we made a proposal for a technical solution to establish a new portal. It looked a ‘no brainer’ to us but the senior management weren’t convinced. ‘It’s very similar to what you do already’ was the judgement and I clearly hadn’t made the case sufficiently persuasive. (Financial Services)

We conducted a skills and capabilities analysis and drew up a five-year plan informed by this. It was decided to outsource (actually offshored) the basic information tasks in 2012. We had a transition period in 2012/2013 and have just completed our first full year of the third party service. The remaining few onshore staff including me handle the more demanding work, manage the relationship with the outsourcer and do the content negotiating. We spent a long time developing a robust system of quality control focussed on a service level agreement with the supplier including a very clear description of the workflow and with key performance indicators. We conduct regular performance reviews and these identified some initial problems. The quality has now improved. I played the issue of deciding to go to an outsourcer openly and the project has led to cost savings as a substantive post was lost onshore. We gather and analyse the data supplied to our users from the outsourcer and as a consequence can align our staffing investment with more granularity. (Pharma)

Collecting good metrics for our service is ridiculously complex. We use all kinds of methods including tape recording of some of our output and the use of SharePoint to gather user feedback. We’re also looking at the adoption of a technical helpdesk system such as the cloud-based SalesForce or Remedyforce systems. This would give us much better control of our work on a day-to-day basis and produce more data on usage and metrics. As a result of an historic oversight we have no service level agreement with the business. We need to resolve this matter this year. The company uses a service delivery framework methodology for technical and IT management called ITIL. I’ve been looking for an equivalent methodology in information management. There doesn’t seem to be one so we will probably use the ITIL framework as deployed elsewhere in the company. (Technology)

We collect metrics for two streams of our work – ‘integrity’ (compliance) and research. We did consider extending this to ‘resource management’ but backed away from it as the ramifications are complicated. We collect usage data from vendor reports but we considered collecting workload data on requests from users for business information sources, ordering products, adding users cumulatively and so on. We may go back to it in the future. (Bank)

Many of us try to use balanced scorecard or return on investment methods in terms of justifying our services. I just don’t think that our alignment with the business is quite right. We must try to get into a strong position when the opportunity arises and not lose traction on the resources that we have and the success that we’ve achieved. (Legal)

We’re still collecting data on e-usage and working with vendors on the production of these. The usage statistics are variable between vendors with some more useful than others. This is an important area to focus on as we have to be able to demonstrate value. And go beyond simple output measures in the process. (Energy)

Our managers are now more engaged than they used to be in looking at regular measures of performance. The two main key performance indicators (KPIs) that we use regularly are (i) turnaround times on document delivery, and (ii) market penetration. Obviously, in relation to internal usage of resources, we are very carefully monitoring statistics from the vendor. This is a lot of data and we’ve created a big database which we match with HR data across the company to associate usage with individuals and departments. This data informs purchasing decisions and future marketing plans. (Pharma)

My senior management isn’t really too bothered about measurement. There is concern around cost of content and services but not really much interest in benefit or value added, at least not conspicuously so. (Bank)

We undertake detailed analysis of our enquiry handling and e-resources user statistics. These are gathered from the vendors as well as internally analyzed by the use of the Onelog software package. We have found that vendor statistics are not always reliable so Onelog tracking and analysis is very useful. (Legal)

I subscribe to the old adage ‘What you can’t measure you can’t manage’ so I’m very keen to develop a set of metrics which indicates what we are doing and how well we are doing it. We need to know, for instance, if our suppliers are giving us value for money. We are now more focussed on quality than just output measures and as we are about to take on another offshored partner this is increasingly necessary. The key criteria are accuracy and timeliness, ensuring that the user gets exactly what they require and fast. There is always a challenge, especially with an offshored partner, that they think about and understand the context of what is actually needed. The subtleties of language and the complexities of understanding sometimes make this difficult. (Bank)