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Scrap biofuels targets and focus on improved public transport

Kenneth Richter — 2010-02-09T15:37:00.000Z

Kenneth Richter, BusinessGreen, Tuesday 9 February 2010 at 15:37:00

Friends of the Earth’s biofuels campaigner Kenneth Richter argues that biofuel targets are a distraction from tried-and-tested ways of reducing transport emissions

In his article, Antony Blakey alleges that groups such as Friends of the Earth are “vilifying” biofuels. In fact, Friends of the Earth is supportive of biofuels such as biodiesel made from recycled cooking oil that deliver real greenhouse gas savings without leading to biodiversity loss, social conflict and food-price rises for the world’s poorest.

However, as part of a wide coalition of environmental and development groups including Oxfam, Action Aid, Greenpeace and the RSPB, Friends of the Earth is opposed to high EU and UK biofuel targets that cannot be met in a sustainable way. There is simply not enough recycled cooking oil to replace 10 per cent of Europe’s fuel needs. More importantly, biofuel targets are a dangerous distraction from the real solutions to climate change.

Antony Blakey complains in his article that the UK government had “reduced its own biofuels targets, inevitably stunting the use of biofuel and the growth of the industry”. The truth is that the UK has simply delayed its final 5 per cent target under the Renewable Transport Fuels Obligation (RTFO) from 2012 to 2014. Of greater concern is the looming EU target that by 2020 10 per cent of Europe’s road transport fuel will come from “renewable sources” of energy. According to the UK government 95-100 per cent of this will be first-generation biofuels.

Shell has just signed a $12bn (£7.7m) joint venture to form the biggest bioethanol producer in the world – hardly an indicator of a stunted industry.

Superseded

Mr Blakey quotes figures on greenhouse gas emissions reductions – 86 per cent for rape seed biodiesel compared with fossil fuels - drawn from a 2003 study that has long-since been superseded with new evidence.

The Renewable Fuels Agency (RFA) now works with a figure of 40 per cent emissions reductions for rape seed biodiesel, while the EU uses a value of 38 per cent. But even these figures are misleadingly high – in its Year One Report of the RTFO, the RFA admits that its calculations do not include one of the most important factors: emissions from indirect land use change.

The RFA states: “The Gallagher Review found that greenhouse gas emissions from indirect land-use change driven by the use of biofuels could be very large. If left unchecked, these could potentially cause an increase in overall carbon emissions rather than a reduction.”

Indeed, modelling carried out for Friends of the Earth in April 2009 concluded that if emissions from indirect land use change were taken into account, the RTFO could have led to 1.3 million tons of extra greenhouse gas emissions - equivalent to putting an additional half a million cars on the road.

The RFA’s report also revealed that currently only 9 per cent of biofuels used here is produced from UK feedstocks and this is unlikely to increase significantly. The Department for Transport estimates that by 2020, 45 per cent of Europe's biodiesel could come from Malaysian and Indonesian palm oil.

Orang-utans

Mr Blakey says, “Last time I checked, there were no wild orang-utans in Middlesbrough or King's Lynn." But if we continue to ignore the massive impact biofuels are having on rainforests overseas we might soon find Indonesia in much the same situation as Middlesbrough in that respect.

Mr Blakey’s company, Ultra Green Group, stakes much of its hope on an unnamed biodiesel forest crop “that can be cultivated away from food production land and utilise unused and waste land instead.” This is reminiscent of jatropha, a biofuel “wonder crop” about which similar claims were made until it was shown that its yields are negligible on waste land and its expansion was refocused on valuable African agricultural land where it directly competes with food production.

Mr Blakey is right when he says that the time for talking is over - we need urgent action to tackle climate change. But biofuels are a distraction from the emissions reductions and fuel solutions. The billions spend by the EU and its Member States in support of biofuels every year would be far better spent on solutions that are cheaper, not environmentally damaging, and proven to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The Government must scrap biofuel targets – which will never be met without grave environmental consequences – and instead focus on greener cars and improved public transport, fast and affordable rail services, and incentives to get people cycling and walking.

SaaS providers must work with the channel

Chris Baldock — 2010-02-09T12:50:00.000Z

Chris Baldock, CRN, Tuesday 9 February 2010 at 12:50:00

Software delivery as a service requires solid teamwork, notes Chris Baldock

SaaS strategy has an emphasis on proving value in the first 90 days. It is therefore necessary to modify your sales model, commission structures, and compensation plans.

With SaaS, commission is by ongoing customer use and revenue, rather than licence sales. Dealing with renewals and churn is especially relevant and should be built into the wages of sales staff.

The SaaS provider should supply sample commission plans for channel guidance to help resellers offer a deal that suits each customer.

The development of general or customer-specific software that sits on a shared platform requires more up-front resources than packaged software. And it may require solid SaaS-platform-specific skills.

The contract strategy and duration of contracts need to be reviewed together. Mixed contracts with traditional and SaaS elements must be examined, with clear Service Level Agreements (SLAs) including termination and migration conditions.

Security, data privacy, data use and legacy account transition should also be reviewed, and again the SaaS partner can provide the reseller with examples to guide them.

With SaaS, bills are generated dynamically based on the user count and the amount of services used. Remote server diagnosis should also be replaced by system and network monitoring, focusing on the risk of failure – as one outage or crash may affect the entire customer base.

SaaS customers reviewing their SLAs will look to the channel partner for confirmation of how those service levels will be achieved. Channel partners in turn are likely to need the support of their SaaS provider here.

SaaS providers with the right skills and infrastructure should be able to give the sector a rapid start that will increase the number of services and the average spend per customer. Tight integration and simple billing will boost take-up, while clear differentiation between SaaS and software as a product should help generate sales.

Chris Baldock is managing director at intY

"Nudging" the UK towards greener habits

Trewin Restorick — 2010-02-08T13:31:00.000Z

Trewin Restorick, BusinessGreen, Monday 8 February 2010 at 13:31:00

Trewin Restorick wonders if the concept du jour of "nudging" behaviour change can help curb UK carbon emissions

A new report this week believes that food accounts for 30 per cent of the UK’s carbon footprint and that if the food industry is to play its part in keeping temperature rise below two degrees emissions need to be cut by at least 70 per cent by 2050.

A breakfast meeting I went to on Wednesday (which ironically massively over-catered) highlighted how difficult this will be to achieve.

Our food choices are wider than ever. I don't know how any of us were ever happy before the arrival of the loganberry and quince yogurt. Fortunately for our overall well-being you can now find it at most supermarkets. The downside of this choice is that in the UK we throw away 1.2m yogurts every day.

Until last year the relative price of food had dropped which has made it less expensive to throw food away leading to the mountain of food waste that we now produce. As most of us buy food at supermarkets and pay for everything together at the till we have far less idea how much each item costs which again leads to a throwaway mentality.

Finally, despite the rash of cooking programmes, as a nation we are losing our cooking skills making it harder to conjure up recipes using up the leftovers in the fridge.

Changing these trends is a political nightmare. No politician is going to stand up for higher food prices and less choice. Instead we are seeing an emphasis on local solutions and initiatives. Community shops, grow-your-own schemes, more allotments and better education (including our own Appetite for Action initiative) are all on the agenda.

This localism angle will take us a long way but it needs to be accompanied by wider structural changes including improved efficiency in the farming industry, changes to animal feeds and a significant switch to non-carbon fuels. Achieving this will require collaboration across all sectors and a strong Governmental lead.

Travel

Complexity was definitely a theme of the week. On Monday I went to a workshop looking at how carbon can be reduced from the UK travel industry. The workshop was attended by a diverse range of companies and academics, but significantly nobody from key Governmental departments, which rendered most of the event pointless. The ability to hold lengthy discussions which come up with great solutions without anybody being in a position to act on them is a speciality of most of the events I attend.

What was interesting about this event was the initial overview that clearly demonstrated that new vehicle technology alone cannot achieve the carbon targets required from the UK's transport sector. Alongside the introduction of this technology, we have to encourage people to use video and teleconferencing more, and we need to persuade people to drive more efficiently. This is something that we have recognised as key and have created an eco driving simulator.

What the debate made me realise that the best time for people to use this simulator is when they are learning to drive as this is when driving habits start to become embedded. This may be as obvious as saying that Portsmouth FC's financial position looks a little precarious but is not something we have done to-date, which we will now change.

Nudge

Both the food and travel debates highlighted the role of encouraging people to change their behaviour. Politicians and companies are increasingly recognising this and are starting to use a new language. There is much talk of "nudging" people into making better decisions and of shifting social norms. But if I hear one more person use the example of how a hotel changed the behaviour of its guests with different messaging around the use of towels I will throw-up.

What is clear is that decision-makers are finally starting to take note of what academics have been telling us for years. Changing behaviour cannot be achieved simply through mass advertising campaigns but needs a far more complex set of drivers and approaches.

What is encouraging for me is that the approach Global Action Plan has taken for more than 15 years is now being recognised as an integral part of the policy arena. It is also something that we are increasingly doing internally as a matter of course.

When we moved into our new office, I made a conscious decision that the cycling racks should be placed in a prominent position right next to our reception. This goes against all the recognised aesthetic that bikes should be hidden away in a dark corner and be virtually inaccessible to anybody not in training for an Iron Man competition.

The result of the prominence of the cycle rack combined with the provision of a good shower is that the number of people cycling into the office is slowly increasing and the social norm is changing.

UK Aware

Climate science took another battering this week with an in-depth exposure of UEA by The Guardian. I think it was a great piece of journalism. Climate scientists have to be able to stand-up to intense scrutiny as they are providing evidence against which massive investment and policy decisions are being made. None of the investigation I have seen has shifted the underlying basis of the science but what is clear from a recent BBC poll is that the interrogation is increasing the number of climate sceptics significantly.

A large number of people don't want to believe the science because they think us nasty greenies are using it to take away their basic rights and force them to live a puritanical and miserable life. This belief is a sad indictment on the environmental movement.

I believe that a low carbon lifestyle can be massively fulfilling and enjoyable and we need to be able to communicate the sense of liberation, control and fun that such a lifestyle can provide. It is for this reason that I was chuffed to bits that UK Aware has chosen us as their charity partner this year.

UK Aware takes place on 16 and 17 April at London Olympia and is the UK's only green and ethical lifestyle exhibition. UK Aware actively shows the positive side of a greener lifestyle. It isn’t about giving things up, it is about living differently and we are delighted to be associated with this message. Learn more about UK Aware and purchase tickets.

Trewin Restorick is chief executive of environmental charity and advisory body Global Action Plan

This article first appeared on his weekly blog Trewin Says

Ofgem needs a bigger rethink

Joel Hagan — 2010-02-05T15:51:00.000Z

Joel Hagan, BusinessGreen, Friday 5 February 2010 at 15:51:00

Joel Hagan, chief executive of Onzo, argues for a fundamental shake-up of the energy sector to create a Californian-style three-way split

It’s good to hear Ofgem touting radical solutions to the challenges faced by the country in relation to energy in its Project Discovery announcement.

No doubt Ofgem has been stung into action by the Conservative Party’s plans for drastic job cuts at the energy regulator, as part of a sweeping overhaul of British energy policy and suggestions that it would be stripped of all its strategic powers on energy security. It may also have been stung by criticism of its abject failure to deliver on its principal statutory objective to protect the interests of customers by promoting effective competition, mistakenly believing that switching is the key performance indicator for competition.

The energy industry needs a bigger rethink. An industry structure is needed that responds to the enormous challenges of the next 50 years, not one that arose from political ideology in the 1990s and has been found to have shortcomings. We changed the railways. We can change the utilities. We need to cut the industry into three pieces like they did in California.

Generation

Generators should be licensed by the regulator for generation capacity by fuel type in line with Government policy. This allows the mix of fuels to be controlled to achieve environmental and energy security objectives. It enables long-term planning for capacity. It also enables influence over the geo-political imbalances created by such choices.

If these decisions are left to the market then the lowest cost solution will be the only certain result. Generated energy should be compulsorily pooled. This ensures that vertical integration cannot be exploited. Regulators worry too much about horizontal integration in narrowly defined markets.

Distribution

The national grid should be merged with the regional distribution networks r ight up to and including the meter.

There are currently five entities associated with the meter which is self-evidently a mess. The resulting entity should be owned and run like Network Rail because it’s a natural infrastructure monopoly like the lines and signals on the railways. It needs significant investment over the coming years as generation from renewables is plugged into the grid in locations that are different from the places where historically we have sited generation (close to coal mines for coal-fired, close to gas terminals for gas-fired, and on coasts for nuclear), smart metering (communicating meters and the communications infrastructure) is rolled out, and the smart grid (efficient networked assets, plugging local generation and storage into the grid etc.) becomes a reality.

The new entity would be responsible for collecting and making available raw billing data.

The complexity of the current structure is a major hindrance and a significant contributor to the cost of adapting to the future. Compare our progress on rolling out smart meters with that of California.

The costs of this entity would be charged to retailers, allowing the cost of universal service obligations to be shared equitably.

Retail

The retailing of energy to customers should be separated entirely from the rest of the industry and enabled like mobile virtual network operators.

This will lower the barriers to entry and increase competition, ultimately improving value for money. It will enable companies with strong customer propositions to extend their offerings.

Tariffs can be designed quickly and flexibly to meet customer needs and energy can be bundled to be sold as a service not as a commodity. Meters installed by the new national grid will be designed in a modular way so that retailers can easily add/remove functionality; this gets over the so-called ‘stranded asset’ challenge.

Let’s hope Ofgem now brings forward radical proposals for areas of the industry other than generation. It might also turn its attention to its own role, governance, and composition. What’s needed is little short of a revolution.

The challenges for the industry will be very different from the regulation by price that was required when privatisation first came along. Let’s hope too that this Government or the next is listening or the lights may yet go out.

Communications in a post-recession world

James Campanini — 2010-02-05T15:24:00.000Z

James Campanini, CRN, Friday 5 February 2010 at 15:24:00

Online communications can build cost-effective bridges between colleagues, partners and customers, says James Campanini

Many companies are still mainly focused on survival. Short-term measures that may have been introduced during the downturn – such as freezing business travel or cancelling expense accounts – may continue.

Consultancy McKinsey & Co has called this "the new normal" – not merely another turn of the business cycle, but a restructuring of the economic order. So it makes sense to assume that some business practices, under this new economic landscape, will no longer serve.

I believe business travel has been a major casualty of the recession, with perhaps three quarters of private sector employees being forced to slash their travel expenses, and maybe half in the public and voluntary sectors.

As a result, employees will have less face-to-face time with colleagues, partners or customers, especially as companies try to become more environmentally friendly.

This doesn’t mean just using the internet and email, or just videoconferencing – which first appeared more than 25 years ago. Sticking solely to these options could damage relationships, especially if customer rivals are taking a more efficient or innovative approach.

High-definition video collaboration or telepresence can re-create the nuances of a face-to-face meeting. However, the cost of a dedicated system may be prohibitive for smaller businesses.

For productive, effective meetings where the customer has set goals to achieve, web conferences or online meetings might suit. Attendees can work together on documents or other computer-based resources in real time.

Webcams can turn an online meeting into a videoconference.

Instant messaging (IM) provides instant contact and short, real-time conversation, making it ideal for one-off queries that need a fast response, but it is not so suitable for more involved work.

IM can give presence information on the people you need to work with. The network can be told when people are busy, away from their desks or on another call.

Social networking tools such as LinkedIn and Facebook status updates can be used to announce company news, and users can see who is connected with their contacts – improving knowledge of existing clients, and perhaps identifying new ones.

Twitter is best suited to short, one-off requests.

And blogs and podcasts might not be obvious choices for workplace communication, but can disseminate information across a company.

The world has changed, and it won’t always be possible to return to previous ways of working. If travel budgets remain low and resources stretched, you need to communicate in new ways.

James Campanini is EMEA managing director at Cisco WebEx

Smell the coffee – it’s good enough to drink

Archana Venkatraman — 2010-02-05T10:38:00.000Z

Archana Venkatraman, Information World Review, Friday 5 February 2010 at 10:38:00

Why let old technology limit what you can do?

There are plenty of signs that the tech-and-web world is becoming more balanced, open and competitive. Nexus One – Google’s smartphone or, in its own words, the “web meets phone device” – is the first gadget to give Apple’s iPhone real competition and customers a real choice.

And in the web world, Microsoft is offering Windows users in Europe a choice of browsers. From next month, users of Windows XP/Vista/7 who have Internet Explorer as their default browsers will be greeted by a pop-up allowing them to install, among others, Google’s Chrome, Mozilla’s Firefox, Apple’s Safari, Opera and AOL.

The search engine world is changing too. It’s moved beyond Google to Bing and WolframAlpha, bringing colour to your search palette. It’s happening at the same time as a strong push for net-neutrality – the principle that all internet traffic should be treated equally, without being tiered and without network providers deciding what data users should see.

And as well as more phones and browser options there are more types of e-readers, e-books, micro-blogging sites, social networks, feedreaders and technology tools and applications.

It all represents a broader choice that should benefit the user. But are we shopping around enough to decide what suits us best? Are we using the right tools? And do we have the ability to move to a new one if it suits our needs better? The answer to all these is no.

Here’s a quick statistic. A study by oneDrum found that while 72% of UK small businesses offer staff the option to work from home, 61% of their staff never take it up. Why? Reasons range from not having the technology in place to the need to use documents that can only be accessed from the office. Businesses and employees just need to look around. By combining free and paid-for tools they would be able to connect, network, collaborate, access information and work securely and efficiently.

Within organisations, professionals can instantly connect through instant messaging, but more than half still use email – a technology that is slow, time-consuming and limited in reach.

In addition, social media is restricted to just a few names. It needn’t be: Twitter is good for microblogging, but so is Tumblr and identi.ca. For more specific needs, there is Pownce for file sharing and microblogging, and Squeelr adds location and pictures to information while hiding user accounts for microblogging from phones.

Now is the time to make a shift to faster search and content processors. For instance, search engine CrowdEye and aggregator Scoopler include social media in their indexation and aggregation of information, and they present content on the basis of the discussions devoted to it and its importance.

Push the boundaries and test technologies such as vlogs, crowdsourcing, VoIP, podcasts, social bookmarking, social tagging, internet forums and social network integration. The chances are that you can get precisely what you want if you look for it.

IT accumulates data but Web 2 shares knowledge

David Tebbutt — 2010-02-05T10:36:00.000Z

David Tebbutt, Information World Review, Friday 5 February 2010 at 10:36:00

Social tools are essential to manage knowledge

Most discussions of knowledge management (KM) pay lip service to the idea that it can’t be managed, then talk endlessly about IT systems that supposedly support it. You know the sort of things: knowledge capture, information and content management, search, tagging, taxonomies, and so on. However, social tools such as forums, wikis and microblogging are more likely to be the killer supporting tools for KM.

It is important to separate information and knowledge. Once data has been processed and patterns emerge, it becomes useful information to people who can make sense of it. They possess the necessary knowledge to interpret the information and set it in context. They may then share their knowledge or insights from the process with others, at which point it becomes information again.

The rest of the inbound data and information has now become waste, which may or may not nourish future seekers of information. A lot of IT energy goes into storing and backing up this stuff, a sort of digital slag heap. It’s often kept just in case it’s needed, which is great news for storage vendors, but not for organisations.

We need to consider what we’re trying to do with KM. It has to be something like “to enable people to make the most informed decisions in the most timely fashion”.

Few people, especially in business, can get hold of all the information they need by plundering frozen-in-time forum discussions or using a search engine (external or internal). Some information will always remain beyond timely reach, no matter how you phrase the search. Then, by far the quickest way to get an answer is to ask someone who can either tell you or knows where it can be found.

We need to create an environment in which such knowledge can be readily accessed. A lot of it is between people’s ears, which is where the social stuff comes in. We’ve always “asked Fred” and Fred has been happy to help – it takes only seconds of his time and saves hours of yours. Nowadays it is possible for all those Freds to be online, tagged and accessible to those who need to reach them. And (this is the culturally tough bit) they need to make themselves available on a grander scale to complete strangers. Mind you, Fred can use the questioner’s own profile page to decide how best to respond.

Businesses of all kinds are undergoing a slow culture change, sometimes in pools of common interest and sometimes in the organisation as a whole. True knowledge managers will be able to take a holistic view of their organisation’s commercial, human, information and knowledge needs and create a suitable environment for this change to happen. It will comprise both online and offline activities: meetings, brainstorming sessions, forums, discussion groups, e-learning resources, work shadowing, blogs, microblogs, wikis, profiles, instant messaging, even email.

Experts who are asked something more than once might prefer to write a blog post to point new enquirers to. A disparate group of people wrestling with a common problem might choose to hold an online chat using something like Twitter.

Knowledge is exchanged and built on: the flow takes it out of their head as information, back into someone else’s where it blends with their knowledge and comes out as fresh information, and so on. It could be an intense hour.

Or thousands might participate in a knowledge jam over several days. Insights and recommended actions can be written up and made available to participants, especially those prepared to capitalise on it.

The underlying intention of knowledge sharing is to enable its timely re-use. Without question, social tools will become a core element of the knowledge manager’s armoury.

David Tebbutt is an IT industry watcher

Real time takes a licking but keeps on ticking

Stephen Arnold — 2010-02-05T10:36:00.000Z

Stephen Arnold, Information World Review, Friday 5 February 2010 at 10:36:00

As demand for real-time search rises the ability to supply it is edging closer. Low latency is the watchword

"Real-time information isn’t,” wrote someone who listened to a series of lectures about real-time search on a speaker evaluation form. Search technology is not as resilient as a £50 Timex watch on the high street.

The observation that something in the world of electronic information is not what it seems makes miscommunication the baseline for many discussions. One example is the paradox of Twitter messages. On one hand, it is bursting with nonsense; on the other, it contains useful intelligence for some organisations. Twitter is a waste of time, yet it can slash the time and cost of promoting certain types of events. Paradox? Paradigm?

Organisations have to look at real-time information and understand what specific benefits can be gained from low-latency systems. Low latency – not quite real-time but delays of milliseconds only – is a useful concept.

Famed for 15 minutes

Exalead, a Paris-based information systems company, built a system search-enabled for logistics company Jefco. Before its implementation, an employee could spend half a day or more answering a routine question like “Where is my delivery?” The system delivers the report in milliseconds using data that is no more than 15 minutes old. Exalead makes clear that in complex distributed systems, latency is an engineering problem, and the 15 minute delay for a report that once took hours is a significant improvement. Exalead describes its system, quite accurately, in terms of specific performance metrics.

Other vendors take a different approach, using terms like “acceptable performance” and “rapid content processing”. Thus, the definition of what is meant by “low latency” becomes one of the key ways of determining what real-time means.

Real-time is becoming an important component of business intelligence, enterprise resource planning systems, and consumer services. For these, delays between receiving fresh information and its being available to the user of an information access tool have become an engineering challenge.

Google Wave (http://wave.google.com) enables a business to collect information and have it updated and available to authorised users of that digital container with low latency. A test product from Google’s engineering labs, it provides a glimpse of one way to make communications and collaborative work more real-time; that is, tasks can be accomplished without the standard hunting for a specific document or flipping through a calendar looking for the date on which a specific decision was taken.

A second glimpse of low-latency applications foreshadows how some complex concepts will be presented to students, and to staff on training programs. Using Google’s mapping technology you can explore the ruins of Pompeii in real time (http://tinyurl.com/yl7jkwu). In this low-latency application, the notion of “time” is that of a tourist exploring the city devastated by a volcanic eruption centuries ago. Google delivers an interactive experience that puts the user in control of what is viewed either from a distance or close up. With a mouse, the visitor to the ancient city can walk down its streets in real-time. Without wandering into the philosophical aspects of a real-time exploration of an ancient city, let me point out that many complex concepts can be conveyed with this type of rich, low-latency system. A person learning the Byzantine pathways of London to pass the test for “the knowledge”, or a doctor learning a new medical procedure, can use these low-latency systems in useful ways.

Different approaches

Microsoft and Yahoo have added content from Facebook and Twitter to their searches. Microsoft offers BingTweets (http://bingtweets.com) which is a combination of Twitter trends with Bing search results and BigTwitter (http://bing.com/twitter), which is Twitter hot topics. Microsoft licenses content directly and uses its own method for processing and ranking results from the sources. Most users perceive the Tweets and Facebook content as real-time i nformation.

Some latency is introduced but, speaking broadly, the content in the Bing services is available within minutes of becoming available to Microsoft’s crawler.

Yahoo has integrated the OneRiot (http://www.oneriot.com) real-time system into Yahoo. OneRiot processes a wide range of content, emphasising that it is a “real-time search service”, although it does not define precisely what that means. My tests indicate content freshness is on a par with the Microsoft system’s index.

The inclusion of these real-time results makes it clear that users have an appetite for content that comes from non-traditional sources without the lengthy editorial production cycles that were once the norm for print and online information services. Consumer expectations have changed.

When I look at what these examples trigger in my work, I see several important glimpses of real-time (low latency) systems in the months ahead. First, users expect online systems to deliver snappy performance and fresh content. Users may not know what “low latency” means, but a failure to deliver on both counts could damage companies or even put them out of business.

Second, vendors have a market signal to which to respond. Saying a system is real-time when it delivers outdated information is risky. My view is that users’ expectations will make vendors more accountable. Perhaps the disinformation and outright fabrications in some marketing collateral will be replaced with clear, factual statements about what a system can deliver. In my experience, vendors exploit buzzwords and the customer often learns too late that misdirection or fuzziness was an intent of the vendor.

Finally, business professionals have an opportunity to make use of technologies that can present related information in a way that is compelling and more accessible to some constituents. Awareness of companies like Apnoti (http://www.apnoti.com) – a German firm able to index real-time pricing data – helps trigger new ways of thinking about solving somewhat routine, often time-intensive business tasks.

Looking forward, real-time information is one of the next frontiers in online access. You are welcome to Tweet this opinion, post it on your Facebook wall, and distribute the idea via RSS. Real-time has “taken a licking but keeps on ticking” as John Cameron Swaze said in the 1950s.

Stephen E Arnold is an IT consultant

Government faces Berlin Wall moment on data access

Tim Buckley Owen — 2010-02-05T10:35:00.000Z

Tim Buckley Owen, Information World Review, Friday 5 February 2010 at 10:35:00

Politicians may be smashing the barriers blocking access to public sector information, but will they really build something better?

After years of steady but piecemeal change, public sector information in Britain at last seems to be experiencing its ‘Berlin Wall’ moment. Politicians from both left and right are enthusiastically wielding the sledgehammer, attacking barriers that seemed unassailable only a year ago.

Painstakingly, officials have done what they can to help things along. The Office of Public Sector Information is working on a replacement for its click-use licence, favouring a Creative Commons type solution for the reuse of Crown Copyright and other public sector data. And Information Commissioner Christopher Graham has reminded the public sector that it should release more information proactively instead of waiting to be asked.

But officials can’t do it all on their own. Since January 2009, for instance, public bodies have been required to adopt the new model publication scheme, setting out what information is routinely available to the public. One year on, however, research by the Information Commissioner’s Office shows that four major government bodies still haven’t adopted the scheme, and some are making it harder than necessary for citizens to find out how public money is spent.

Conviction politics

The Parliamentary expenses scandal may be what finally convinced politicians that being more open about what government did might be one way of clawing back some credibility and crawling back into public favour. Be that as it may, the amount of heavyweight political attention devoted to information in the scandal’s aftermath has certainly been striking.

It’s the Tories who seem to have kicked it off, with a pledge of a new ‘right to data’ plus promises to publish every item of expenditure above £25,000 and make the top 20 datasets freely available for mashing. But the Tories don’t run things yet – so it’s this government that’s actually been able to deliver, and it’s doing so on a spectacular scale.

Labour began by taking a sledgehammer to one of the most stoutly guarded bastions of public information: Ordnance Survey. Prime minister Gordon Brown himself promised last November to consult on making data on electoral and local authority boundaries and postcode areas, together with mid scale mapping information, freely available from April –shovelling aside years of argument that UK plc was better served by a mapping service sheltered behind a paywall.

But that merely prepared the ground for the much more comprehensive demolition job contained in Putting the Frontline First: Smarter Government. Once again, it was the PM who fronted the launch, with more pledges to open up datasets and promote transparency. Public data of all kinds would be published in reusable, machine-readable form, increasingly under an open licence – and it would include data from another hitherto fiercely protective body: the Met Office.

Latest round to Labour – and the hammering from the Conservative side of the wall has since sounded a bit muted by comparison. But they have promised in a draft manifesto to ‘unleash health information to the public’ like never before. And in London the Tories’ colourfully tactless mayor Boris Johnson has launched the London Datastore, to ‘unleash valuable facts and figures that have been languishing for far too long in the deepest recesses of City Hall’, as he puts it.

Nationally, shadow culture secretary Jeremy Hunt wants to create a technology platform that will allow a future Conservative government to harness crowdsourcing to help it produce new policy ideas, and they’ll offer a £1 million prize for creating the platform if they win the election. Cabinet office minister Tessa Jowell has dismissed this as a ‘gimmick’ but – hang on – wasn’t it her former boss Tony Blair who created the equally gimmicky People’s Panel just after Labour was first elected?

Big guns

Which raises the question: Will all this sledgehammering amount to anything after the election, regardless of who wins? It’s impossible to tell at this stage – especially since there will be more pressing matters on the incoming government’s plate. But perhaps we can take some reassurance from the credibility of the information champions that each party has managed to recruit.

Labour has some really big guns: World Wide Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, lastminute.com founder Martha Lane Fox and artificial intelligence guru Professor Nigel Shadbolt of Southampton University. Meanwhile the Conservatives are being advised by Tom Steinberg, head of the social networking site mySociety and co-author of The Power of Information, the government-commissioned report that arguably kick-started the whole of the current data opening process.

Valuable integrity

In a rare lapse of judgement, the independent minded Labour information champion Tom Watson MP criticised Steinberg for accepting the Tory job, saying that it was incompatible with his position as boss of mySociety. But to their credit, several bloggers wisely pointed out that it was far better to have someone with Steinberg’s integrity advising the Tories than not.

What could go wrong? Well, cost for one thing. But with Google boasting on its European Public Policy blog that it’s only too happy to seize any opportunities offered by the further opening up of government data, perhaps we shouldn’t worry too much about that.

What really matters is that any one of these high profile advisers could resign publicly and very embarrassingly for the political party concerned if they felt their advice wasn’t being taken seriously. If that were to happen, it’s not too difficult to imagine where public sympathy would lie.

Tim Buckley Owen is a journalist

Springing into action

Archana Venkatraman — 2010-02-05T10:34:00.000Z

Archana Venkatraman, Information World Review, Friday 5 February 2010 at 10:34:00

Mergers and acquisitions offer hope during recession, but can backfire if not carefully handled

The information industry looks set to continue its merger and acquisition (M &A) activity in 2010. But with recession clouds lingering over the economy corporate ambitions could still be thwarted by wary shareholders and bankers without the cash to back the proposed deals.

This was certainly the case for publisher Informa and German academic publisher Springer. At the end of 2009 Informa turned its back on the purchase of Springer Science + Business Media because, according to Reuters, it felt it couldn’t do a deal in the time required by the debt-laden firm’s private equity owners.

Informa’s share price rose 10% on the announcement of its pull out. And it left the way clear for EQT, the private equity arm of Sweden’s Wallenberg family, to snap up Springer in the biggest private equity deal for more than a year.

The information industry may struggle to match the Kraft Foods Company’s £11.5bn takeover of Cadbury in January, but the M&A scene within the information sector has been buoyant and busy in the last few months.

Early in 2009, we saw UK software firm Autonomy acquire content management systems developer Interwoven for $775m (£561.5m). Autonomy expected to generate annual costs synergies of approximately $40m (£28.9m) during the 12 months following the deal completion (Q2 of 2009) from the elimination of duplicate costs. Last month it told the market its figures were in line with those expectations.

This was followed in April by enterprise content management company Objective’s £3.18m acquisition of Limehouse Software, the developer of unified software solutions. With this move, Objective aimed to accelerate its growth within the public sector market.

And five months later, in August, Objective’s European revenue grew 50% to $9.4m (£5.7m) despite tough market conditions, because the deal brought with it over 200 extra UK local government clients.

Meanwhile, according to data on merger deals from Thomson Reuters, the global mergers and acquisitions finished the year at $1.97tr (£1.23tr), down 32% from the 2008 total ($2.89tr) and down 53% from the record high reached in 2007 ($4.17tr).

Rising Challenges

However, even as economic challenges soared in 2009, information providers considered merger deals to diversify, enhance product offerings, synergise, improve market share, boost product portfolios and to become a one-stop-shop for cash-strapped customers looking for discounted bundled deals.

The momentum only accelerated in the last quarter of 2009 with significant developments involving major information providers. In November, Informa had a keen interest in acquiring ailing Springer, only to end talks in December after failing to agree on a price. Only a week later Springer was sold to EQT Partners and Government of Singapore Investment for E2.3bn (£2.1bn).

The Springer-EQT/GSI deal is expected to close by end of this month. The agreement has left Springer owners Candover Investments and Cinven to share just about E100m from the sale proceedings. This is because Springer’s existing debt pile amounted to a whopping E2.2bn.

After the completion of the deal, Springer will be owned 82% by EQT while the remaining 18% will be held by the Singaporean co-investor. Then Candover and Cinven will leave the business they formed in 2003 through the merger of the former’s BertelsmannSpringer with latter’s Kluwer Academic Publishing. Springer had initially planned to raise up to €500m by selling 49% of the company, but as offers failed to meet its valuations, it decided to sell the whole business.

While the Springer deal is formally being completed, another global intelligent information provider for businesses and professionals, Thomson Reuters, is progressing in its acquisition of Discovery Logic, a provider of customisable analytics and decision support solutions for scientific research.

In the first week of the new year, the company announced that Discovery Logic had become part of its healthcare and science business, with immediate effect. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Discovery Logic provides systems, data and analytics for real-time portfolio management, decision support, outcomes tracking and information visualisation.

Both information providers specialise in transforming information into knowledge. Together they can create a resource to help global professionals make crucial decisions on projects, people and research collaboration opportunities.

According to Thomson Reuters, the acquisition will enhance existing research analytics offerings and boost decision support and workflow solutions to academic, government, non-profit and commercial professionals.

To its healthcare and science’s scientific and scholarly research group, Discovery Logic brings assets such as ScienceWire – its highly customisable and proprietary software and database platform; plus complementary capabilities in analytics, data management and value-added services; and scientific-oriented skilled professionals.

“Combining Discovery Logic software, analytics and data mining capabilities with our global resources will result in extraordinary workflow solutions and services to help our customers improve their outcomes,” said Mike Boswood, president and chief executive of the healthcare and science business, Thomson Reuters.

“There is an increasing global need for analytics on grants, experts and research outcomes,” added Keith MacGregor, its executive vice president. “Combining content, tools and services from Thomson Reuters with data analytics from Discovery Logic will enable our business to deliver a one-of-a-kind solution for evaluation and outcomes measurement.”

Changing plans

The information segment players’ confidence in consolidation through acquisitions increased after it saw how plans by Anglo-Dutch publishing group Reed Elsevier to raise funds and reduce debts led its shares to close down 13% in a single day.

Last year, Reed Elsevier intended to sell RBI for £1.3bn, but recession forced it to drop the price to £650m. It then scrapped the sale altogether and began a rights issue. However, last month [January] it was reported that the publisher is in talks to sell of its controlled circulation magazines and re-organise its RBI division in the US.

The trend for acquisitions is continuing in 2010 with ProQuest, the provider of specialist information resources, announcing in January that it had acquired International Bibliography of the Social Sciences (IBSS) from the London School of Economics, to “secure the future of the world’s premier social science database”.

At the same time, Pearsons, the publishing and education group that owns the Financial Times, is considering selling IDC (Interactive Data Corporation), its financial data arm. It is still reviewing the future of its $1.5bn (£920m) stake in the financial information group.

Many expect M&A generally to revive in 2010 and players in the information sector may well play their part because M&As provide them with the much needed consolidation and larger market share – vital in uncertain economic times.

Fewer deals in 2009

Last month, global information services company Experian’s report on mergers and acquisitions and equity capital market (ECM - flotation, rights issue and placement) showed a 24.5% decrease in UK M&A and ECM transactions announced in 2009. Covering Q4 and year-end 2009 in the UK market, it recorded 4,269 deals compared to 5,656 in 2008. Overall, the deal volumes in the UK and Europe continued to decline with some encouraging signs in the last quarter of 2009, according to the report.

Strike gold with Google

Stephen Arnold — 2010-02-05T10:33:00.000Z

Stephen Arnold, Information World Review, Friday 5 February 2010 at 10:33:00

Stephen Arnold kicks off the first of three articles on how to make money from Google with a look at the disruptive nature of its business methods

Google is no spring chicken. It is 11 years old, commands more than two-thirds of the web’s search traffic, and has left powerhouses like Microsoft struggling to find a competitive response. The company is difficult to describe because its dominance of web search and advertising is so ubiquitous. Excepting China and South Korea, Google’s search and advertising services capture the attention of users and advertisers everywhere.

Most of the media attention focuses on its steady stream of new products, its competitive thrusts against Microsoft, its high-profile management methods and its legal battles. What the media tends not to cover is the opportunity Google presents other businesses to generate revenue from its continued growth.

The company has a varied product and service line. But as financial analysts delight in pointing out, 98% of its income derives from advertising revenue. With a potential $25bn slated for the 2010 calendar year, the 2% from other services seems insignificant.

Good opportunities

However, Google offers opportunities similar to those Microsoft generated when it rolled out its first operating system for PCs in the 1980s.

First, Google’s advertising system is do-it-yourself, but most potential advertisers to its hundreds of millions of users need some assistance in determining how much to spend, how to craft their online advertisements, and how to manage and assess a Google AdWords campaign. Google’s reluctance to hold the hand of the average prospective advertiser is a potential pot of gold for the technically savvy marketer.

Secondly, Google’s expanding enterprise products and services can confuse even experienced system administrators. Consulting engagements await those who can explain what the firm offers and what its services can deliver to an organisation. An even greater opportunity awaits the person who can use a Google application programming interface (API) to connect a Google service with an organisation’s own data. For example, Google Maps could be used to help a business track its delivery trucks, or get a low-cost way to mash up sales data with geographic data such as customer locations.

Finally, Google’s Android mobile phone technology continues to make inroads in telecoms. Its handsets create a demand for mobile applications for business and recreation. Even more important may be the inclusion of Google voice technology in Gmail and Google Calendar. These building blocks can be assembled into software solutions that have the potential to generate both consulting and software licensing revenue.

In the present economic climate, my research suggests that Google is well placed for the next three to five years. Betting on the company makes good sense for four reasons.

First, Google is a next-generation technology company that operates on a global scale. The word “scale” pinpoints its competitive advantage in 2010. It can operate on huge datasets without plunging into red ink, while competitors need time and money to catch up. So far that has not worked for Microsoft, although Facebook has had some success and could become a thorn in Google’s side.

Second, Google’s advertising-based business model is misunderstood. It generates revenues from ads, but the method is that a third party pays Google for access to its web traffic. What is overlooked is that Google uses other business models now. These range from subscription fees for upgrades of its Apps to fees from developers and partners. When it comes to making money, Google has more options than a Barcelona midfielder.

Third, Google has a global impact similar to global warming. Its Android mobile technology, products and services are poised to challenge Research in Motion’s BlackBerry and Apple’s iPhone. Firms like Nokia may not survive the Android. Motorola is betting the company on Google and its Android technology. Google’s mobile services continue to expand, changing the business climate in the telecoms sector.

Finally, Google continues to push the technical boundaries. What is interesting is that in 2009, Google was more productive in generating patent applications and patents than at any previous time in its history. The company continues to invest in applied and blue-sky research. Its technical leadership is likely to continue working for the foreseeable future.

Implications

What this means is that Google is disrupting business – big time. Whether it’s the push into educational services or its introduction of new advertising methods for YouTube videos, the firm’s shaking up established business sectors. Incumbents may not be aware of the Google tsunami that is racing toward their customers.

We know what Google has done to telephony in the US and to handset manufacturers in Finland and Taiwan. The company is now making an impact in film and video, online payment, enterprise applications, government systems and publishing.

But while disruption may be bad for incumbents, it creates opportunities too. Google responds to user behaviour. An entrepreneur or a firm looking for a new revenue stream can look at it as a creator of opportunity. Possibilities range from coding products to run on the Google platform to becoming an expert in a particular phase of Google to using the Google platform as a digital Gutenberg.

Since 2003 my motto has been “surf on Google”. Don’t just search using Google – earn money using Google. We’ll get started in the next instalment.

Stephen Arnold is an IT consultant

Next month investigates the money-making potential of creating products and services running on Google infrastructure, including the Android platform. The final article will consider the major business sectors in which Google’s products and services are forcing incumbents into a “ground and pound” face-off.

More information about how to profit from Google is in Stephen Arnold’s free video series,

How to Make Money on Google, on YouTube via the link at www.arnoldit.com/video.

How to find out more

Android development:

http://developer.android.com/index.html

Developer information:

http://code.google.com

Enterprise partner programme:

www.google.com/enterprise/gep

Google Apps:

www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/resellers/index.html

Google jobs:

www.google.com/intl/en/jobs/

Search engine:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com

YouTube partner programme:

www.youtube.com/partners

Government's good start

Peter Williams — 2010-02-05T10:33:00.000Z

Peter Williams, Information World Review, Friday 5 February 2010 at 10:33:00

The launch of data.gov is a huge advance for information

The launch of the government website data.gov.uk is one of the most significant steps for the advancement of information since the advent of the accessible search engine. It’s hard to argue against the government’s assertion that the website gives unprecedented and free access to government data in one place. As important as the 2,500 data sets is the open licence which allows government-owned data to be freely used. It’s an impressive start and there is an explicit promise of more to come. Last June the government could barely conceal its delight in announcing it had secured Sir Tim Berners-Lee as expert adviser on public information delivery to assist the project. His presence seems to have done the trick: barely six months after his arrival the website was revealed and we can all check the performance of local schools or look at crime patterns in our area. Or… well that’s up to the individual.

Anyone who has had a wander around the site would agree this one stop shop for data is impressive. The big question is what next? There are several answers. Government minister Stephen Timms claims this liberating of government data creates opportunities for business and should aid wealth creation. Berners Lee took a slightly different stance. His believes the point of making public data available for re-use is that it increases accountability and transparency so people can use information more innovatively. And that has to sound like good news to information professionals.

Problems in academia

While the government may be throwing its information out for free to a presumably grateful public, life is not quite so rosy in the academic world. At the end of 2009 a Research Information Network (RIN) report found that researchers are encountering difficulties in getting access to the content they need and that this is affecting the quality and efficiency of their research. While researchers claim to have no problems finding content in this age of e lectronic information, gaining access is another matter due to the complexity of licensing arrangements, restrictions placed on researchers accessing content outside their own institution and laws protecting public and private sector information.

This means research into important information resources can be missing. Researchers are frustrated by this lack of immediate access and this slows their progress, hinders collaborative work and may well affect the quality and integrity of the work produced. Librarians and researchers fear that unless licensing and technical issues are resolved, moves towards a digital environment may impose new barriers, as researchers face restrictions on access to resources which would have formerly been available in print. Looming cutbacks won’t help either.

How to avoid death by a thousand edits

Bruce Sharpe — 2010-02-05T10:29:00.000Z

Bruce Sharpe, Information World Review, Friday 5 February 2010 at 10:29:00

Structured content beats the nightmare of collating multiple inputs to a document any day

The most significant trend in structured content for 2010 will be the integration of authoring and reviewing. Now, people in technical publications departments are probably thinking, “It’s about time!” Elsewhere, however, the reaction may be more along the lines of “Huh?”

Understandably, the advantages of integrated authoring and reviewing will be lost on people who have trouble grasping the whole concept of structured content – documents that have been broken into meaningful component parts and tagged systematically. To them, structured content is an abstraction that makes little sense to their day-to-day work. So, let me put it in context.

Let’s say you’re working on a sales proposal or a product manual or some other document that requires the input and review of other members of your department, or maybe even another department, say legal or human resources. Or maybe it’s a simple, internal memo to team members that needs your manager’s approval. How do you create that document and solicit the input and review of other people?

Outside the tech pubs department, the document is usually created with standard word processing software and then emailed to a list of domain experts and other people who review it and email their edits back to the document author. By now the author has multiple versions of the document, each containing unique edits proposed or mandated for the revised document. The revision process, in turn, typically includes a lot of cutting and pasting, a lot of side-by-side comparisons (either on screen or in print), and a lot of judgment calls when edits from one reviewer conflict with edits from another, among other things.

In that context, integrated authoring and reviewing of structured content means “Stop emailing word processing documents to people for review”. It’s that simple. Integrated authoring and reviewing replaces a chaotic, error-prone process with a streamlined, organised approach to creating content and incor porating changes proposed by people reviewing it.

Instead of emailing a document to multiple reviewers – and creating the headache of juggling multiple versions of it – integrated authoring and reviewing gives domain experts, editors, reviewers and casual contributors a simple, convenient web-based environment to provide feedback in real time and in context.

By capturing and preserving comments across drafts, integrated authoring and reviewing eliminates miscommunication, backtracking, multiple versioning and other delays.

Some people still scratch their head when they hear “structured content.” But almost everybody pulls their hair out when they have to endure the document avalanche and related content co-ordination nightmare that comes after emailing a Word document out for review and approval. Integrated authoring and reviewing may well be the trend that brings the salvation of structured content to the organisation at large. n

Bruce Sharpe is a founding technologist at JustSystems: www.justsystems.com

bruce.sharpe@justsystems.com.bit.ly/7G9OK8

Advantages of integrated authoring and reviewing

Faster approval cycles, faster release of content deliverables
Parallel workflows, simultaneous collaboration
Prevent duplicate efforts
Simplified comment integration
Auditable content production history
Competitive advantage

A decade for mobiles, social media and research

Archana Venkatraman — 2010-02-05T10:28:00.000Z

Archana Venkatraman, Information World Review, Friday 5 February 2010 at 10:28:00

Dr Hazel Hall, director of the Centre for Social Informatics, Edinburgh Napier University, and the executive secretary, Library and Information Science Research Coalition, speaks to Archana Venkatraman about the Coalition, social computing and winning the IWR Information Professional of the Year award

IWR: Tell us about the Library and Information Science (LIS) Research Coalition. What are its objectives and what is your role in the programme?

HH: Its broad mission is to facilitate a co-ordinated and strategic approach to LIS research across the UK. The Coalition will provide a formal structure to improve access to LIS research, and to maximise its relevance and impact in the UK. It aims to bring together information about LIS research opportunities; encourage dialogue between research funders; promote LIS practitioner research and the translation of research outcomes into practice; articulate a strategic approach to LIS research; and promote the development of research capacity in LIS.

The Coalition was established in March 2009, I was appointed in August 2009. My role is to lead the implementation. I am seconded part-time to this role, two days a week.

The Coalition’s first one-day conference will take place in London on Monday 28 June at the British Library conference centre. It will focus on LIS research and we aim to attract practitioners, researchers, academics and funders from the UK and beyond will meet to discuss the UK LIS research landscape.

What attracted you to this role?

There were three things in particular: extension of my involvement in library and information science research strategy to a national level; growth opportunities through networking with other information professionals and practitioners; and the chance to put into practice my organisational skills.

What do you think of the role of knowledge and information management and the trends in these segments?

This is a big topic! The full impact of social media on IM and KM practice is yet to be understood. For example, with respect to particular technologies such as microblogging I am reminded of first reactions to the widespread introduction of e-mail in the workplace in the early to mid-1990s. In the coming months we will still be debating the risks and opportunities of social computing with relation to the specifics of IM and KM work. One thing that is now absolutely clear, however, is that for those in external customer-facing roles social media adoption is not optional: any organisation that hopes to maintain its competitive advantage must engage in these tools.

The semantic web is another theme that is becoming more prominent, as evidenced at Online 2009, where there was a real buzz about the topic.

So what would be your message to information professionals?

I have two. The first is: ignore social computing at your peril – engagement is not optional. The second relates to hard economic times, when there is a pressing need to be able to demonstrate worth. The strongest way to do so is to argue value on the basis of solid evidence, which in turn derives from research. Information professionals, particularly those working in the public sector where cuts are inevitable, should make efforts to contribute to the building of the evidence base. I’d like to see a growth in the body of practitioner researchers who not only conduct research (and we know that this is happening) but also disseminate their findings beyond their home institutions.

What should they look for in 2010?

Semantic web developments; the mobile phone as the preferred platform for information delivery; and Google Wave – though this has not yet taken off.

What changes would you like to see in the information profession?

Greater engagement in practitioner research. We have become experts in supporting the research efforts of others while neglecting the evidence base of our own subject domain.

Does this mean information professionals need multiple skills because information-related roles are evolving and overlapping?

Indeed. We have to accept that change is inevitable and must continually develop new skills. For example, if conversation and information is moving to a different environment, information professionals must also make that move or risk exclusion.

How does it feel to be named IWR Information Professional of the Year (2009)?

Winning the Information Professional of the Year award comes at the end of an extraordinary 12 months. I am delighted that my work in my two roles as director of the Centre for Social Informatics at Edinburgh Napier University, and in implementing the Library and Information Science Research Coalition, has been recognised in such a way. All those with whom I have collaborated throughout the year are due a share of this recognition, particularly my international colleagues in Scandinavia, Canada and the US, and the information and knowledge management practitioner community in the UK, whose work inspires my research and teaching.

And what do you think of the social web?

I’m a big fan, but I think it’s very important that people use the right tool for the right job. Digital identity is a big issue here. Over time individuals are realising that they need to think carefully about how they manage their identity (or identities) online. This is an issue that will hit more people this year as they venture further into the social web.

For example, I manage three Twitter accounts: @hazelh for personal professional updates; @LISResearch for the Coalition; and @CentSocInfo for the Centre for Social Informatics. I use my Facebook account purely for social purposes, and so decline invitations from people I do not know, as well as from students. Dedicated accounts for particular purposes means that followers and friends can selectively choose the type of updates they want to hear from me.

As an academic information professional, what differences do you see in academics, librarians, readers and researchers in today’s times?

Something we all have in common is the flexibility in the boundaries of our jobs. By this I mean first that the boundaries of information professional roles are not as obvious as they were – our work opportunities extend far wider than straightforward information services provision; and secondly the different roles have greater overlap than before – for example academics engage in contracted short-term consulting work projects that previously would have been the domain of commercial consultants, academic librarians are spending more time in the classroom (normally the home of the lecturer) etc. Something that ties us together is research.

What do you do in your free time?

I love eating, cooking and running (in that order). I run a lot so I can eat the food I enjoy cooking!

How to build a winning team

Computing staff — 2010-02-03T15:54:00.000Z

Computing staff, Computing, Wednesday 3 February 2010 at 15:54:00

Mix in a poached IT star with your own company culture and that person may perform very differently

Manchester United footballer Wayne Rooney recently received a rumoured pay rise bringing him earnings of £150,000 a week to discourage him from leaving the team and playing overseas. The news follows the staggering four goals he scored in his team’s 4-0 victory over a punch-drunk Hull.

Rooney spends hours most days practising so that he has the perfect right foot. His talent is natural and the training simply serves to hone and develop his skills. And for that talent and hard work he is paid handsomely.

What does Wayne Rooney’s salary have to do with IT? Well, it raises the question of whether there is such a thing as natural talent in IT technology and management. Are some people born to be excellent at understanding technology and using that knowledge to manage others? Or can anyone become excellent by learning on the job, attending training courses and putting in the hard work?

It’s an important issue because managers need to decide whether to buy in expensive talent or hire more junior staff and train them to become effective leaders.

If you see a rising star at a rival company, should you attempt to poach that person and their skills for any price? Or should you focus on nurturing whatever talent you already have in-house?

Buying in talent is always a risky exercise. While Rooney may well score the goals in a winning match, if he was alone on the pitch against another team he’d likely score none at all. Mix in your poached IT star with your own company culture and that person may perform very differently.

The mundane truth is that in most cases, developing and training staff is a far more cost-effective way to build a winning IT team than buying in expensive stars from other companies.