tfpl blog

TFPL Recruitment is on the market

Message from the Chairman

“The new trading year has started positively both in terms of orders and revenues.

There are further opportunities in all three divisions at IDOX; Software, Information Solutions and Recruitment  for growth and improvement in trading performance. The markets for all three divisions will show long term growth. The improvements made in all three divisions is expected to show through during the new trading year.

In 2007 management will concentrate further on strengthening operations, product delivery and profitability while looking for opportunities in the software and related government market place allowing for both organic growth and acquisition.

The Recruitment division and related assets, while excellent in their respective markets and capable of further organic growth, will be better supported within another organisation which has these activities as its primary focus. We have therefore instructed our advisors to pursue strategic options in order to optimise the value of these assets to our shareholders.

We have recognised the need for a clearly focused strategy emphasising and building upon our local authority relationships. Consistent with this we are actively pursuing consolidation opportunities in this core business activity.”

aspire

A good file tells the story of a piece of work:  making a narrative out of disparate documents/e-mails.

The ultimate aim of implementing a business classification is to tell the story of the whole organisation, making a narrative out of the disparate files that are classified against it.

The business classification needs to tell a story itself, on its own:  it needs to concisely capture the organisation's raisons d'etre: the purposes powerful enough to have brought that organisation into existence.

There are lots of ways you could concisely write that story, even in the restrictive and repetive format that is a classification.  The key thing is that it doesn't read like it was written by any one section of the organisation, or by an external consultant with no stake in the organisation.  You are looking to generate an acceptable and accepted shared statement.

I've been working with an organisation in the City of London to help them generate a business classification.

The project is at an interesting stage: they are looking at the classification and thinking seriously about whether they could live with it, whether it would last them for two to three years- a long time in organisational terms.

The way back from their office to our office took me down Lombard street.  Named after the Italian merchants that based themselves there in the middle ages, trading wool and money.  Famous now for its financial instutions but still narrow, bendy, and with a church to remind you of the time when the City had people living it, a compact, walled City.  I leaned against one of the financial instutions for twenty minutes and drew the church tower and the base of the spire of St Edmund Lombard Street.

Interesting meetings

Along with many others, I was a victim of transport chaos yesterday.  I left King's Cross at 13.00 on my way to Glasgow where I am supposed to be participating in a workshop today.  About 15 minutes out the train in front of us was struck by a tree.  With the power turned off, and no water in the loos, we sat on the track for several hours before eventually being shunted backwards into London.

However, as is often the case, fellow passengers kept me amused.  Sitting in a group of four seats were three young women who obviously work for a food company.  They took about 100 phone calls between them from colleagues.  'No please tell him that the skins on vegetarian sausages ARE baggier than on non-vegetarian ones'.

Later one of them arranged a meeting with a colleague.  A chocolate pudding meeting.  A meeting to discuss chocolate pudding...

Why can't I get an invite to a chocolate pudding meeting?!

TFPL abroad

Are you looking for work in Europe? Want to put your excellent language skills to work or just think its time to work outside of the UK? Maybe you have friends abroad looking for work? We regularly recruit in Europe (and sometimes further afield), here are a few of our current vacancies, for a full list please go to our website.

Sales Executive – Germany
A leading international financial news and information publisher is looking for a sales person to sell for their German publication based in London or Germany.  The role will involve new business development as well as strategic account management of existing relationships within the corporate sector in Germany.  Working within a sales team you will have complete autonomy to manage your own business.  You will travel to meet clients where necessary in order to demonstrate the products strengths.  You will be used to working in a busy sales environment, target driven with a successful track record in media sales.  Experience of working in an international environment and fluency in German is an advantage.

Sales Executive – Vienna
A leading provider of news, real time data and financial information is seeking a sales person in Vienna.  The role will be selling the client's high value financial information products and services to the investment banking sector (European banks, Private Equity firms and other corporate financial companies).  You will be networking within existing clients sourcing new opportunities as well as developing new business.  You will do this through regular client meetings and following up on leads from a qualified database.

New Business Development Manager – France
Our client, a leader of business and company intelligence, is looking for an experienced new business development person to focus on the German marketplace.  The aim of the role will be to develop new business strategically across the Professional services and Corporate marketplaces.  The role will concentrate on not only selling their main products but also bespoke solutions inline with client requirements.

Email your CV to iprecruitment@tfpl.com or call +44 (0)20 7332 6000 for more information.

Thinking about a spring clean?

A client, embarking on the roll out of a new Content Management System in 2007, asked me for an opinion on the potentially thorny problem of classifying a large set of existing content.

The answer is, “well, there are a many ways to attack it.”  So I thought I’d share my points of view on it:

Manual classification

• requesting the author classifies their content gives you a high degree of accuracy, but often it is a subjective set of tags (the author knows what they were thinking when they wrote the document, but might not consider wider tags which are equally applicable to the content).
• employing Information Scientists (directly or outsourcing to a group like TFPL’s Information Service) to read appraise and tag the document – This could be a useful approach if you want other metadata to be created, for example a summary, abstract or headline where there is some skill in creating those new meta items.
• employing a team of classifiers to train on a specific taxonomy and to apply this to content. If the volumes are not huge and this is a one off task, providing some temporary contactors to plough through a document might be low tech, but could be the best option.

For all of the above elements the size of the taxonomy can be a limiting factor.  Any structure over 200 nodes and the lower level nodes are unlikely to be used.

Automatic classification

For large content sets or for multiple and or large taxonomy structures, an automatic classification system might be the best approach. However, the trade off is typically the effort required “up front” to develop the tagging rules.

There are a number of software applications which in one form or another build up rule sets to apply to the language of a document and return one or more tags (dependant on the setting of a threshold value).  This process can include:

• Training sets: compare a positive set (documents you know are about the subject), to negative set (a random control set) and generate the linguistic rules.  The effort involved in creating the initial documents sets is non-trivial. 
• Manual rule’s bases – requires expertise in the rule language and application
• Machine learning systems – needs monitoring and tailoring over time to improve accuracy.
• Thesaurus driven systems – using keyword relationships to preferred terms with an algorithm to create a rule base. Can be set up reasonably easy, but will need tailoring for complex and ambiguous language  (which English  seems to be littered with wen you get into this topic!)

However, for some of the known taxonomies, like the UK government sponsored Integrated Public Sector Vocabulary (IPSV)  there are off-the-shelf classification systems that can be employed directly.

The type and format of the content is also a major factor:

• If your reports follow a standard template then you have a much improved chance getting a successful outcome with rule based classifications (knowing the first section is always an Executive Summary means that more weighting can be applied to the content there than the content in the Appendices, for example).
• Large complex documents can have many subjects and while a classifier could apply many tags it might be better to create distinct sections that have a more focussed set of tags, depending on the desired application of the content.

It's certainly a challenge, but there are options out there and the improvement in search and retrieval with well classified content set is a worthwhile benefit.

Using powerpoint

Russell Davies has posted 5 things about powerpoint to You Tube.  Its a short talk on how to get the most out of powerpoint for your presentation

I was delighted to find it, especially as I only stumbled on it because I read his blog on traditional London cafes. 

Russell urges you to:

• think about what images you need to illustrate your story before you write down any words
• print out your slides and blu-tack them to the wall so that you can see and evaluate your presentation as a whole
• ruthlessly eradicate anything that doesn't absolutely have to be shown.

His post gives me hope that there are ways of using powerpoint to assist learning and to tell a story.   I gave up using powerpoint last year because I felt it was doing me as a presenter, and the audience as learners, more harm than good. 

There are five reasons why you might want to use powerpoint for your presentation:

1. to provide visual aids for the audience to illustrate some of the points you want to make
2. to provide a structure for your talk
3. to reduce your fear as a presenter that you will go off track, or forget what you wanted to say next
4. to enable you to clear your talk with significant colleagues before you deliver it
5. to enable you to provide attendees with a handout to take-away with them

Of these five points only the first two are of any advantage to the people in the audience on the day of your presentation. 

Powerpoint as visual aid

Some learning points benefit from a visual aid to illustrate them. If I am talking to a group about classifications I need at some point to show a classification to illustrate what I am talking about.  But most powerpoint slides simply have the learning points themselves written out. They aren't illustrating the points, they aren't providing a visual dimension to enhance the learning. They are no better than the presenter simply making the point verbally.

Powerpoint as structure

A presentation needs to tell a story, it needs to be coherent, it needs to take people on a journey that can be easily navigated from their existing knowledge/perspective.  If you have a clear story to tell then you can certainly use powerpoint to give tangible expression to that structure.  But if you itemise every point you make on powerpoint then your structure becomes imprisoning for you as a presenter. It gives you no room to maneouvre.    I spent a lot of time preparing a talk for the Online conference in 2005. I generated too many slides and ended up rushing through the last few slides with no benefit to the audience.  In 2006 at the same event I gave a showfloor talk where I had also prepared too much material.  But this time I wasn't using powerpoint, and when my time was up I simply stopped and asked the audience if they had any questions. 

Powerpoint as prompt

It is true that powerpoint gives you plenty of prompts as a presenter.  But these prompts are also a distraction, if you end up responding to the words on your slides rather than engaging with the audience.  If you know what you want to say and the order in which it will go in then you won't need powerpoint as an insurance.

Powerpoint to cover your back

Sometimes your work colleagues want to see your talk before you give it.  If you use powerpoint then you can re-assure them that your presentation is congruent with the key messages that they want to be put out.  Nothing wrong with that, but it is of no benefit to your audience.  And it is a factor that leads to very bland, sanitised conference presentations.  I am a co-ordinator of the Records Management Society's London Group and we found that the presentations became far more frank and useful after we told presenters that powerpoint would not be required

Powerpoint as handout

If you do your presentation on powerpoint then you can give people a handout with no extra effort at all. The downside is that printouts of powerpoint slides aren't terribly informative when you look at them a few weeks after the conference.  Not that this is too much of a problem: most people will have thrown away their copies of your slides long before that.

Why not try one of the alternatives!

If you haven't already done so, why not try making the odd presentation without powerpoint.  You might enjoy it (I have!).  The biggest advantages for me of not using powerpoint are that:

• I can spend my preparation thinking of what I could usefully say to and/or show the audience, and in what order, instead of spending the time on generating a set of slides and making sure that they look good.
• On the day of the conference I can integrate any new ideas, or jettison unwanted ideas, without major powerpoint surgery
• I am forced to give all my attention to the presentation because I haven't got powerpoint as a safety net