Linex Blog

I used Apple products all my life until a 4 year break a short while back. Long enough to be dissappointed with Panasonic, Hewlett Packard and Microsoft. Returning to the MacBook was like a homecoming. Yes: I'm one of those annoying Apple-products-are-the-best people. And of the three below the iPad wins the cake. It's all the beauty of the iPhone - which I find a great machine - but on a large clear screen. 

By the way: I left my (two) iPods out of this photo - they seem so old fashioned now. 

I recently attended an LMA luncheon event, with guest speaker Judi Friedman of Fizz Marketing. Her presentation was about - you guessed it - word of mouth marketing, and she ended with a case study which I want to share.

She asked how mnay in the room are regular gym-goers, and how many of those drank chocolate milk when they work out. One woman mentioned that she does not, but all of her friends at her gym will only drink chocolate milk before and after.

Read the story about how the ReFuel With Chocolate Milk worked to urge pre-teens and others to start drinking their milk. 

Another app requires my singing of its praises. I have just booked several flights and hotels for 3 weeks of travel in May and June, and am reminiscing about the "old" way of managing all my booking information (and when I say "old", I mean so 2011). 

A confirmation email arrives, I copy the relevant information, go to my Google Calendar, drop in an event and add the details to the location and description areas. To retrieve the details I go to my Google Calendar app, hope there is wifi if required, open up my calendar app, scroll to the relevant day and scroll to the relevant time, open up the event. Substitute Google Calendar with SpringPad or Evernote, and remember when that was the height of efficiency? 

I am probably late to this game but just recently started using TripIt. It's good enough having apps for underground and transport maps for all major cities in a single folder on my iPhone, now add to it all my travel information. The set up is absurdly simple: just forward your email travel confirmations to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , or you can have TripIt scan your inbox and automatically import any new travel info to your account. And then, voilá: all your details in one place, in an easy-to-read-no-scrolling-required page. 

Each "trip" is listed in the app, and when I enter a chosen trip, it shows me a summary of flight times and numbers, hotels with check in/out times and maps and any additional information I added. I can add of course car rental details, ground transportation, meetings, restaurant reservations. And, of course, I can share required information with other users. 

This is the free version, but pay for the upgrade (whcih I just might do) and you can check in to your flights straight through your app, as well as receive flight delay alerts. 

I recently came across the following, apparently anonymous, quote:

A person who graduated yesterday and stops studying today is uneducated tomorrow

If ever a few words made me think of good management. And the good knowledge management. 

I have written before about the importance of learning, and how that is the ultimate goal of KM (and, in that context, the value of failing too). There are still people who are protective of what they see as "their" knowledge. And perhaps the language we use has something to do with that: hearing that somebody wants to "capture" your knowledge can seem a little invasive. But of course when you are too protective if your own experiences and ideas you are diminishing the opportunities for others to share theirs. Thus, in fact, diminishing what it is you know. 

It's not about recording everything you know and sharing that with everybody else involved. In fact this is where the hard work comes in: it's about identifying those bits of intormation that are of value in multiple contexts; extracting those and making them first easy to understand, and then easily accessible to others. There is great skill in understanding what those elements are, and the best ways to share them. An understanding of human nature is also required to get the balance just right, and I admire those who do this successfully. 

And as I started with a quote, I shall end with another, this oneattributable to Jack Welch, of General Electric Fame:

“An organization’s ability to learn and translate that learning into action is the ultimate competitive business advantage”

I am beyond delighted to be welcoming Fiona Fogden to Linex. She has been a long-time customer and friend to us all; I now get daily access to her enthusiasm and knowledge. The possibilities here are endless! But enough from me, here's her first day in her own words:  

The sunshine is streaming through my window as I sit in the Linex offices on my first day as Customer Relationship Manager for Linex.  I have had a very warm welcome from Markus the Content Manager and Matthew Dickinson the Director. I have had a call with Rebecca in the States and have been getting to grips with all sorts of new systems, some more familiar than others. I am replete with a pasta from the deli in nearby Spitalfields market and ready to face the afternoon.

What strikes me the most is that I am finally here, it seems like an age ago that I first met Matthew in the London offices of Baker Tilly in 2008. That meeting didn’t result in anything much more than an exchange of contact details and the knowledge that Linex were a flexible company that at the time didn’t quite have the product that Baker Tilly were looking for. A few budget cuts later and a review of current awareness provision and I couldn’t see how I could solve both the budget and the current awareness problems together but by switching our main news provider and subscribing to Linex we made budgetary savings and were able to deliver a broader and more uniform alerting service to 28 offices around the country. Linex by that time had got about 80% of the functionality that we needed and their responsiveness and agility meant that by the time we needed to go live it was giving us 100%.  I became a fan of Linex. I wrote about Linex in Legal Information Management. I spoke about Linex at the BIALL conference. People who know me would have thought I had shares in the company, but I didn’t then and I don’t now, I was just a very happy customer.

I have been a customer of software and content solutions for as long as I have been a Librarian which is more than 15 years. I have always been the buyer and the negotiator and never dreamed that one day I would be on the other side of the fence. But here I am, feeling like the guy in the Remington shaver advert who said ‘I liked the product so much I bought the company’. Well I can’t afford to buy Linex so the next best thing is to be working with them. I like to think that I will be bringing my experience of what Librarians need and what end users expect into the company. I am looking forward to working with many ex-colleagues again but in a different type of support capacity. What are your expectations of what I might bring to Linex? Can I meet those expectations? I hope to see as many of you as possible in the coming weeks and months.