From complete library management to specialized services such as document delivery, taxonomy or GMP compliance, Infotrieve can deliver the expert staff to help manage a corporate library. Whether the need is short or long term, on-site or off, Infotrieve can provide the solution. Infotrieve’s expertise includes a wide range of industries, including pharmaceutical, biotechnology, medical and health sciences, medical devices, consumer products, chemicals, electronics, transportation, energy, education, professional services, technology, engineering and more. With Infotrieve’s global resources, the company can customize a library staffing solution for virtually any set of corporate requirements.

For example, the Infotrieve in-sourcing staffing model is flexible enough to allow a company to contract for one or more corporate librarians to work on site, or the entire corporate library function can even be managed by Infotrieve remotely using a combination of Infotrieve’s highly experienced librarians, in-house library facilities and Mobile Library technology.

Hiring managers can select both the level of expertise and the specific industry and technical skills required for their staffing needs. Infotrieve is the employer of choice for highly experienced corporate librarians from a wide range of industries.

For more information about Infotrieve’s in-sourcing staffing services, please use this link.

However, this September 2012 news item written by Benjamin Fox of the E.U. Observer shows a renewed commitment and interest in making cloud computing more mainstream in the E.U. “In January, Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes launched a European Cloud Partnership to bring together cloud projects already launched by member states and develop a common cloud procurement strategy. The E.U. also launched its first cloud software in June with its Optimis project backed by €10.5m from the E.U. budget.

According to the E.U. executive a public sector cloud could generate an additional €250bn by 2020 and an extra 2.5 million jobs.

Meanwhile, late last year a paper by the International Data Corporation estimated that total revenue from public IT cloud services exceeded €17bn ($21.5 billion) in 2010 and will reach €58bn ($72.9 billion) in 2015.

The Commission regards cloud computing as a key element of its plans to establish a digital single market and acknowledged that the first step would be to task telecommunications experts to lay out E.U.-wide standards on security and data portability, as well as protecting personal information.

The IT industry is concerned that delay at European level could see them fall behind U.S. rivals, a fear borne out by a report published in June by U.S. technology research firm Gartner claiming that E.U. cloud computing would lag two years behind the U.S. due to European privacy rules and the effects of the eurozone crisis.

The full news story can be accessed here.

Aside from Apple’s marketing success, from the perspective of a global IT or information centre leader, the iPad is an ideal platform for accessing, consuming and sharing of rich e-content. According to Apple, 80% of Fortune Global 100 companies are piloting or researching the use of iPads for corporate use.

As we note in the briefing, “Mobile access and collaboration through the iPad facilitates the emerging “anywhere, anytime” global workforce model, allowing organisations to access and leverage internal expertise and knowledge across the enterprise.”

Mobile Library not only runs on the iPad but also incorporates secure social media tools to facilitate high value business collaboration. Collaboration across a global workforce is a well documented driver of business innovation and market leadership. Consumer-style secure, social media tools increase adoption and usage which has traditionally been a problem for general purpose collaboration systems.

For those interested in our recent E.U. thought leadership briefing, the key points we explore in the paper are summarized as follows:

• The emergence of social media and how information centres can leverage secure social sharing tools for enhanced collaboration and competitive advantage.

• The trend towards cloud computing and the efficiencies it creates in the acquisition, management and dissemination of scientific, technical and medical e-content.

• The portable mainframe: How mobile devices are re-shaping the traditional notions of the corporate workplace.

This complimentary thought leadership briefing can be downloaded by clicking here.

The one minor difference we note in our research is that the regulatory environment in the E.U. is somewhat more complex and that complexity has slowed the wide spread adoption of cloud computing. Interestingly, while adoption has been slower, the level of interest in cloud computing from E.U. based IT leaders is virtually identical with that of U.S. corporate IT leaders. Approximately 44% of IT leaders plan to invest in cloud computing solutions within the next three years.

Although we found increased usage of mobile devices in the workplace to be about the same across Europe as in the E.U., one area we did not explore was the European wireless infrastructure. As all U.S. visitors to Europe know, the wireless technology in the E.U. has always been superior to that of the U.S. This is due to the fact that the U.S. built its wireless systems on an older, less scalable technology called CDMA, whereas Europe started with the more advanced and highly scalable GSM technology.

What our briefing did confirm was the business value inherent in collaboration driven by secure social media. We note that an entire software industry grew up around building collaboration software. Yet for all the effort major companies put into developing smarter, easy to use corporate collaboration software, nothing has the appeal and natural adoption rate of social media. Infotrieve is the only document delivery platform for corporate information centers and corporate libraries to build a secure social media set of tools into their software platform. To learn more about how Mobile Library uses secure social media to enhance business value, click here.

“In the long history of humankind those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed” – Charles Darwin

The above quote is directly relevant to the response of commercial enterprises to the rise of social media. In large part this is due to the fact that social media has led to a fundamental re-evaluation of the way in which companies can, and should interact with consumers for maximum effect. Market leaders such as Facebook, which reached 1 billion active users as of September 2012, are responsible for a nascence of new marketing practices centred on interacting with the public within this new online environment. This ongoing trend is equally shaping the transformation of information management and information sharing within the corporate world. Few information management software platforms exemplify a more creative adaptation of the power of social media than Infotrieve’s Mobile Library.

Of note is that although the majority of commercial enterprises have been keen to adopt one or more social channels to better engage with relevant stakeholders, social media has been used almost exclusively for external communication. Generally speaking, the official social media channels of commercial organisations are run by their marketing departments and individual employees. This tightly controlled approach to social media is driven by the necessity to avoid valuable corporate information or corporate intellectual property from reaching the public domain. Nevertheless, the business value of leveraging STM e-content across the enterprise, facilitated by easy to use, familiar tools is undeniable. Corporate leaders have long understood the immense value of technology enabled collaboration and information sharing.

Therefore, a secure social media platform presents the perfect opportunity to facilitate effective collaboration by building upon people’s natural desire to share information using tools that they are instinctively comfortable and familiar with. Such a platform would especially appeal to information centre managers and IT leaders keen to offer clients easy to use, secure social media tools. Infotrieve’s innovative Mobile Library utilizes secure social media features precisely for this purpose.

Infotrieve’s one of a kind Mobile Library is specifically designed for users of corporate libraries and information centres and comes with a built-in secure social media feature. These secure social media tools are designed to replicate the user experience of the tools that people use in their personal lives. That familiarity dramatically increases the adoption rate and most importantly, the usage of the secure social media tools for collaboration.

For global enterprises, research and development is inherently collaborative in nature. The social media interactions that take place within a project team are centred on merging their collective research. Mobile Library’s secure social media tools enable R&D and other project teams to achieve effective collaboration in all areas associated with their specific tasks. This all takes place within a highly secure environment. Security is of course of utmost importance considering the highly sensitive corporate information and valuable intellectual property at hand.

Collaboration across a global workforce is a well documented driver of business innovation and market leadership. Infotrieve’s Mobile Library facilitates high value business collaboration in a way that has simply never been done before in a corporate library platform or a document delivery service.

To read Infotrieve’s E.U. Leadership Briefing on Mobile Library and Secure Social Media, click here.

“In 2001 Gartner analyst Doug Laney defined the three major problems created by the explosion of information in the Big Data era – Volume, Velocity, and Variety (Three V’s).

• Volume – the sheer amount of data being created doubles the amount of available storage, and 95% of this data is complex or unstructured in nature.
• Velocity – data has become a strategic asset being used as a basis for competitive advantage; the faster a company can access, manipulate, and gain insights on its data, the better.
• Variety – there are countless sources and types of data today; moving outside of the corporate firewall with sensors, social media, photos, and video to name a few.”

Mobile Library™ as an information management tool addresses primarily, although not exclusively, the issue of Velocity. The International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers (STM – www.stm-assoc.org) published a study in 2009 by Mark Ware Consulting which reported that the number of scientific articles published each year has grown at a slow but steady pace of about 3% per year for over 100 years.

That said, Mobile Library has the largest collections of STM content in the industry and most requests for journal articles and other content can be delivered in 5 minutes or less. As a cloud-based system, Mobile Library is able to offer some insights into the data by providing the end user with valuable information on additional content related to their specific request. The business value of a cloud-based document delivery service that incorporates secure social media has been well documented in a recently published thought leadership briefing. We invite you to download your complimentary copy by clicking here.

In the course of writing that post we came across some fascinating information on the history of Apple Computer, specifically the success of the iPad, iPod and iPhone. Apple doesn’t merely dominate these markets, they own them. It’s also likely that they will continue to own these markets for a very long time. While some have said that iPod sales are declining, it’s worth noting that an iPhone is an iPod, it just has higher profit margins!

The reason we find the iPad so interesting is that, knowingly or unknowingly, Apple created an almost perfect hardware platform for our customers. One of the main activities of scientists, researchers, physicians and many other professionals who rely on high quality, published research are reading, visualizing and disseminating that research. With the iPad’s eye-popping screen resolution, wireless connectivity and intuitive touch screen, the iPad makes those activities easier than ever before.

So it comes as no surprise that the life science industry, the medical community and a whole host of other professionals have adopted the iPad in record numbers. With Mobile Library on the iPad, the whole experience of document delivery, from accessing STM content to reading, sharing and collaborating is not only easier, but Apple enthusiasts might even say, more enjoyable. Here are just a few of the reasons that Apple Computer has become so successful in the last 10 years.

Apple has created the one of the most cost efficient global supply chain ever devised. Apple can buy electronic components in previously unheard of volumes. Apple can literally buy up the entire world supply of any component it needs.

Apple has the largest eco-system of software developers, distributors and marketing partners in the world.

Hey, it’s Apple. They are number one in customer service, product quality, online experience and Apple has built a reputation of being the “coolest” technology company on the planet. We could go on (and on) but you get the idea.

However, we also want to focus on how important the “secure” is in secure social media. When researchers are collaborating on a project the intellectual property they create is the lifeblood of the company and must remain within the enterprise. In fact, cyber-security is so important to virtually every organization that they have created a role called the CSO, or Chief Security Officer. The sole focus of that job is network security across the entire organization.

While social media is employed by the marketing department in most companies, some have banned the use of any personal social media by employees. A quick Google search reveals why CSO’s are so concerned about employees using their personal social media accounts in the workplace. CSO’s are not only concerned about the technical security breaches in the headlines below, they are also concerned about the inappropriate use of social media by employees potentially inadvertently revealing critical corporate IP, unannounced new products or even financial information.

The social media features of Mobile Library allow corporate CSO’s to sleep at night knowing that information shared on the fully-secure platform will trigger headlines like these. For more information about Mobile Library’s secure social media features and how it allows employees to share and collaborate, please click here.

Mobile Library is the industry leading cloud-based software platform for anywhere, anytime access to enterprise information assets and secure collaboration. In fact, many of the Fortune Global 500 are Infotrieve customers.  Mobile Library has also long been recognized by IT leaders, corporate librarians, scientists and other R&D professionals as the technology leader in what is traditionally referred to as “document delivery services.” In the past four years, Infotrieve’s Mobile Library has largely redefined the vertical market of document delivery.

Since 2009, Infotrieve has undertaken a series of major software development initiatives that extend the capabilities of Mobile Library far beyond merely delivering scientific, technical and medical (STM) documents.  For example, Mobile Library is now a fully secure, cloud-based platform for sharing and collaboration across the enterprise.  The consumer-style social media capabilities are coupled with enterprise-grade security to protect a company’s intellectual property.  Mobile Library also supports full mobile synchronization between iPads, PC’s and Macs allowing users to access content compliantly no matter where they are located.  It’s also worth noting that Infotrieve has one of the largest cloud-based collections of STM content in the world with over 50 million citations and distribution relationships with more than140 major publishers.

The extension of Mobile Library for pharmaceutical sales and marketing professionals allows organizations to create a pre-authorized “personal library” of medical eprints easily accessible to sales reps when out in the field via a native app on the iPad or any device that supports a web browser.  As physicians allow less and less time for pharmaceutical detailing or want information through multiple channels, the ability to instantly provide highly relevant medical journal eprints with a tap of the screen becomes increasingly important.

Sales and marketing professionals are always hungry for data.  Mobile Library provides reports and analytics on which pieces of content the physician read, when they read it and who they shared it with. If you’re a sales rep, you already know how valuable a pharmaceutical sales tool this will be. These analytics can be used for a range of strategic sales and marketing planning.

Our CTO, Fred Pandolfi once said “Traditionally many companies thought of themselves as simply as document delivery companies. People ordered documents and they delivered them.  Based on the extensive discussions our executive team had with existing customers one of the concepts that emerged was that we needed a set of supply chain management tools for articles and documents.  So that’s the direction we started to take.  We are not just an STM document delivery service company.  We are really about managing the supply chain of this information from front to back.”

Fred’s description of Mobile Library as a supply chain management tool seems somewhat more accurate than “document delivery”, as the system is designed to facilitate the access, management and control of a large inventory of STM content.  Specifically, Mobile Library is a cloud-based system that provides end users access to all enterprise information assets including e-journals, e-books and internal repositories, their complete collection of personal files, and a database of 50 million citations.  In one of our thought leadership briefings Fred described the system this way, “We have a large catalog of scientific, technical and medical content that customers can license in a copyright compliant manner.  With Mobile Library customers are buying much of the same licensed content from our huge STM library in the cloud.”

The Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals (CSCMP) defines one element of supply chain management as follows: “Importantly, it also includes coordination and collaboration with channel partners, which can be suppliers, intermediaries, third-party service providers, and customers.”  Another analogy to a supply chain management tool would be the secure social media tools within Mobile Library, which enables collaboration among customers. In the same briefing, Fred describes the collaboration features as follows: “The ability to conduct creative discussions about collective research, follow colleagues through notes and activity feeds, to query subject matter experts for input, create internal documentation, action plans and reports seemed to make a great deal of sense. So having collaborative and social extension to Mobile Library seemed natural to us.”

For the time being, we will resign ourselves to accept the industry terminology of “document delivery.” However, there are more information supply chain analogies we could make.  If you have not read the thought leadership briefing from which we quoted Fred Pandolfi, just click here to download your complimentary copy.