AlacraBlog

The Alacra Road Map, Part One – New Content

Over the next couple of weeks there will be several posts outlining what Alacra is working on for release prior to SLA in June and over the summer. First up is new content:

Marketresearch.com will be added to Alacra in May. Over 50,000 market research reports from hundreds of publishers around the world. Marketresearch.com will complement Alacra’s current lineup of market research and industry research publishers: Freedonia, Snapshots International, IBISWorld, S&P Industry Surveys, Mintel, Thomson Financial Market Research and Global Insight.

Mergermarket.com will also be added to Alacra in May. Established in London, Mergermarket has recently expanded to the United States. Alacra plans on carrying the full Mergermarket database which will complement our M&A coverage from Thomson Financial, Mergerstat, M&A Monitor, Zephus, and TheDeal.com. Alacra has the most comprehensive set of M&A databases available.

Finally, Hemscott will be also added to Alacra prior to SLA. We plan on carrying Hemscott’s Company Insight Reports, Company Facts Reports and Directors Report. Information on UK company directors will be added to Alacra Corporate Connections. Hemscott is a leading provider of high quality business and financial information and the number one provider of corporate relations websites in the UK.

Social Networking & Knowledge Management

It’s great when you see someone ahead of the curve. Out of curiosity I typed “social networking knowledge management” into Google. The first hit was a blog posting by Dave Pollard dated May 23, 2003 titled Social Networking, Social Software and the Future of Knowledge Management. There are two terrific things in this post. First Dave outlines all the different definitions of Knowledge Management held by different groups of people and concludes that with so many definitions, Knowledge Management means nothing at all.

· Academics: KM is anything that allows us to do something better in business than we can do without it
· Consultants: KM is an aspect of business process improvement
· IT People: KM is any software that concerns itself at least vaguely with databases or content management systems
· Librarians: KM is the new name for what special librarians have always done
· HR People: KM is the process surrounding non-classroom learning curricula

This may or may not have been an original thought but then Dave goes on to reinvent Knowledge Management as Social Network Enablement which was brilliant then and is still ahead of the curve.

Content Aggregation

The opening session of EBIC last Tuesday night was a panel discussion on the Future Role Of Information Aggregators chaired by Andrew Hughes of OneSource. Panelists were Dermot Corrigan from Lexis-Nexis, Jonathan Feroze of Business Monitor International, Simon Lande of Magus Research and Alan Scott from Factiva. This could have been interesting, but it seemed as if the participants were given a chance to talk about new products (the future) but declined. Simon didn’t mention Magus’s recently launched LawSuite nor did Alan mention Factiva’s new Reputation Management service, which is powered by IBM’s WebFountain. It sounds simplistic but the major issue facing content aggregators is that it is practically impossible to make money selling other people’s content. How the aggregator innovates and adds value (without stepping on the toes of the content providers) is the critical issue.

Just Back From EBIC

I went to my fifth European Business Information Conference last week, hosted by TFPL. This year the venue was The Ritz/Four Seasons in Lisbon. Spectacular as usual. The networking was terrific; an excellent mixture of new faces and regular attendees. If you know anyone who went, ask them about the “bad” bus. (I was on it.) The sessions this year were a bit disappointing, as it seemed as though, with the exception of the breakout on Outsourcing, most of the talks would have been fresh a few years ago. Charles Leadbeater gave an interesting talk about innovation. The highlight was the final session given by Richard Reeves, author of Happy Mondays. Briefly, Richard’s talk was about work being a great thing, and that people who like their work want to work more and are generally happier people. I plan to pick up the book soon.

Why An AlacraBlog?

Welcome. There are plenty of ways companies can communicate with their customers. Alacra has traditionally used email, phone, in-person visits and surveys to maintain a dialogue with customers. I think adding a blog to the mix will add value because, as an intermediary, we get to see what’s happening both on the customer side and on the publisher side. We’re always seeing new content products and we’re always hearing what customers want that’s different from what publishers (and packagers) are offering now. So the goal of the AlacraBlog is to inform and hopefully generate some back and forth so that business information consumers can ultimately get what they want, and publishers can make some money producing it.