SERVICES

Cura can provide directly or through its associated consultants a range of services and skills as noted below.

For further information on any of these please contact curacon@o2.co.uk

Consultancy

• Balanced Scorecard: Maximising business performance and maintaining results using certified consultants.
  
  
• IS/ IT strategic planning: Development of corporate or localised strategies is necessary to ensure technology and systems really do support business requirements.
  
  
• Knowledge management: Ensuring that real benefits can be delivered to business as regards tacit knowledge (held in an individual's brain in the form of know-how and experience) and explicit knowledge (recorded independently of humans).
  
  
• Document management: Managing the life cycle of information in recorded form, whether legacy paper or electronic media helps ensure that the maximum benefit is obtained from recorded knowledge.
  
  
• Records management: Managing information that records business activities demands attention be given to such matters as safeguarding and retention of information to support operational, legal and historical requirements. Records management standards both in government and from international bodies (ISO) offer means for bench-marking an organisation's performance.
  
  
• Content management/ document publishing: Delivering up-to-date coherent sets of information, readily accessible on-line (e.g. internet/ intranet) or off-line (e.g. CD-ROM or printed) is a key requirement of content management. Equally important is the management of this activity, involving IT skills, editorial input and records management professionals.
  
  
• Museum, archive and library management: The special needs of the cultural sector are exemplified by collection management and by the long, hierarchical catalogue records for archives. These requirements demand knowledge of the specialised intellectual standards and the often niche suppliers in these fields.
  
  
• Taxonomy, search and information retrieval tools: Natural language free text search and retrieval is rarely sufficient to ensure you find what you seek. The use of some means of classifying objects or concepts (or ontology as it is frequently termed) to suit the particular business is key to improved retrieval
  

Skills Applied

• Auditing/ quality/ health checks: The rigours of auditing practice and procedures can be applied to ensure conformance to internal company policies or to national or international standards, for example in the fields of information security, legal admissibility of information stored in electronic form, and quality management. Alternatively less formal health checks can be conducted using such techniques as gap-analysis.
  

• Soft Systems Methodology: Many business problems cannot simply be solved by mechanistic approaches relying on objective and quantitative analysis. The Soft Systems approach is suited to problematical situation where human-related subjective and qualitative issues and concerns arise, for example around aspects of structure, policies, processes, people and technology. Rich pictures are a powerful way of capturing the essence of a problematical situation, and examples are to be found elsewhere on the Cura web site.
  

• Project Management: Project management covers conception, feasibility, implementation to operation and post-project review. PRINCE, the UK government's preferred project management methodology, has been applied in a variety of business environments to help ensure that project's deliver what is required, on time and within budget
  

• Business Case development: A business case needs to address the questions "What is recommended? Why should we do it? How much will it cost? When will it be delivered? How will it be achieved?". It also needs to take into account the variation in cultures and approaches to justifying investment across different organisations.
  

• Risk management: Identification and analysis of risks and the planning, monitoring and controlling of their management are key factors in ensuring that the success of a project is not jeopardised.
  

• Data and process modelling: Information is dynamic, and whether considered as knowledge, documents or records, it needs to flow efficiently and effectively to support business activities. While much recent emphasis has been on process improvement, this cannot be fully effective without knowledge of the business data and its inter-relationships. Processes and related data need to be documented and modelled and uml-based skills and tools are available to assist this.
  

• Knowledge capture: Business activities can be viewed as a hierarchy of objectives from the more strategic ones at the top to the sharp-end tasks at the bottom. Questions of how objectives are achieved and why they are set need to be clarified if the knowledge within an organisation is to be successfully captured. Cura has a range of modelling tools to assist with recording business data, process flows and corporate or personal knowledge.
  

• Requirements specification and product evaluation: User and technical requirements need to be documented in a way that the business can understand and validate. At the same time the requirements need to be in a form that facilitate response from suppliers and the subsequent analysis of the responses by the customer. Cura has developed a flexible approach to satisfying these needs.
  

• Product Acceptance Sampling: Processes such as scanning and data transcription will generate products (images and transcribed data respectively) whose quality may need to be assessed. This will typically be undertaken by measuring attribute values of the products and comparing these with previously agreed acceptable values for these attributes. Cura can provide fixed sampling or sequential sampling plans to meet acceptance sampling requirements and as necessary implement them for use by the customer with computer-based support, for example in MS Excel.

• Authorship: It is important to be able to present complex or alien concepts in ways that are readily comprehended by the intended audience. Cura consultants and associates have experience of addressing this need in a range of private and public contexts including devising and conducting training courses, and commercial publishing - see below for further details.

  Publications and Training Courses

• Publications "Effective Document Management - unlocking Corporate Knowledge": written by Bob Wiggins and now in its 2nd edition, includes chapters on information strategy, approaches for improving business performance, records management, information and knowledge retrieval, technology, project management and the supplier marketplace. The book has been well received:
  
  'Wiggins has produced a very good work, highly practical with a good deal of common sense, and, not least of all, readable.' Information Management, March 2000
  
  'a useful overview of relevant information technology, and helps demystify
  much of the jargon.' Library Association Record, June 2000
  
  'Wiggins manages to provide topicality with practicality in one very useful
  volume. It is well laid out, easy to read, and contains many useful
  references.' Electronic Library, Volume 18, No 6 (2000)
  
  For further information visit Gower Publishing's web site

• Training Courses: Knowledge transfer is an important part of Cura's work for clients. In this context we deliver courses in areas of our expertise and can tailor these for use within organisations - either presented by Cura trainers, or supplied in packs for use by in-house trainers.
  
  
  Should you wish to discuss these courses or you have other topics you would like covered, please contact curacon@o2.co.uk
   

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This page was last updated on 12th February 2010

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