Sunday Business Post - Agenda Magazine - Dec 16 2007
Read the story on the SBP website by clicking here.
As concerns mount about how many products are made, Dermot Corrigan sources the best fairtraded gifts.
In the words of one famous Christmas lover, the festive season is a time for giving, a time for getting, a time for forgiving and a time for forgetting.
But many typical Christmas presents, from mobile phones to dolls, to designer clothing, come wrapped in a variety of ethical issues that impact negatively on the lives of many less fortunate people around the world. Ethically-sourced and fairly-traded goods can save Christmas and assuage some lingering guilt, allowing giver and receiver to tuck into their turkey and sprouts, knowing that they have done some good this Christmas.
Oxfam
A goat might seem like a particularly cruel practical joke Christmas present, but if you buy the goat from Oxfam’s ‘‘unwrapped’’ Christmas gift catalogue the animal will be a useful gift for a family in the developing world.
Peter Anderson, head of fundraising for Oxfam Ireland, has recently seen first-hand the positive results of the different ‘‘unwrapped’’ gifts.
‘‘The people of northern Uganda have suffered 20 years of civil war. Everybody we met wanted to get back to their small farm and earn their own living,” Anderson says. ‘‘We can replace lost livestock and provide seeds and tools to replant fields. We saw people who received the vegetable garden gift last year and they are now harvesting. It was fantastic to see the impact.”
Less wacky ideas for gifts in the Oxfam Unwrapped campaign include micro-credit loans, cooking stoves, condoms, bicycles, clean drinking water, schoolbooks and musical instruments for children.
‘In the communities, there is a child-to-child project,” says Anderson.
‘‘Young children use music, drama and dance to teach other children about good hygiene and sanitation.”
It is not only the children in the developing world who benefit from an ‘‘unwrapped’’ gift. ‘‘I have given some unwrapped presents to my nephews and nieces along with something else,” Anderson says. ‘‘It raises their awareness of the disparity between the first world and the developing world.”
Goats are €38 each from www.oxfamirelandunwrapped.com.
Organic goods at Ecoshop
Ecoshop is a fairly traded and organic goods retailer located near the Glen of the Downs site at Kilmacanogue, Co Wicklow. It sells a range of eco-friendly and fairly traded cleaning, beauty, baby, clothing and gardening products as well as organic, fine and local foods.
Ecoshop owner Jane Hall says ethically sound products are typically of higher quality than those from mass-producing competitors.
‘‘Our products are made carefully, and the materials and design are far better,” she says. ‘‘The old image of the hairshirt is totally contrary to what we have.”
Hall says Leela-branded wooden toys, such as Bibbo (€19.95), were popular Christmas gift ideas this year. ‘‘Leela toys for younger children are made by a women’s cooperative in India. They are made from sustainable rubber wood and covered in a natural resin, so children can chew them without any harmful effects.”
Other gift ideas include soft toys, alphabet blocks, puzzles, recycled playpens and musical instruments. All of them meet EU and US toy safety standards.
Hall knows wooden toys may not fit all of Santa’s gift requirements this Christmas, so the Ecoshop also stocks a cutting-edge media player.
The wind-up Baylis Eco Media Player has a 2GB memory capable of holding over 500 songs to listen to on the move, and a 1.8-inch colour LCD screen to view photos and films. It also works as a torch, phone charger, voice recorder and FM radio. Designed by legendary British inventor Trevor Baylis, it costs €249.
Visit www.ecoshop.ie.
People Tree
Irish consumers can now buy fairtrade pretty much anything, from coffee in the local store to designer fashions online. People Tree is a fairtrade organisation based in Britain and Japan. It deals with ethically-sound suppliers around the world and offers a range of stylish clothing and jewellery.
‘‘We work with around 70 groups in 18 different countries in the developing world, using fashion as a tool for development,” says company founder Safia Minney.
‘‘Wherever possible, we use labour-intensive, hand-production, for example, hand-weaving, hand-embroidery and hand-knitting. These methods are more environmentally friendly than conventional ones, and also allow us to create more employment.”
Minney says that People Tree’s range of stripey knit accessories (£14 or €19) are popular gifts this Christmas. They are made at the Kumbeshwar Technical School (KTS) in Kathmandu, Nepal, by members of the discriminated against Pode caste.
‘‘KTS provides education, vocational training, and then paid employment to these most underprivileged of people. People use the money they earn to educate their children at the KTS primary school, which is something that they could never have dreamed of previously.”
Minney also recommends a 100 per cent organic cotton poplin tunic, (£48 €66), which is made by Assisi Garments in India. Assisi is run by Franciscan nuns and provides employment for deaf, mute and poor women considered unfit for marriage by their families.
‘‘Assisi provides a haven for these women to live in, and a safe and supportive working environment,” she says. ‘‘They are paid a fair wage and a lump sum after five years of employment to start a home.”
As well as clothing, People Tree offers a range of jewellery, including the Bronze inlay necklace (£18, €25) from the Tara project in Delhi.
‘‘There is a dark side to the jewellery industry,” says Minney.
‘‘The cheap, spangled jewellery that is all over the high street is often made by children forced to work 12-hour days, working, eating and sleeping in the same cramped, poorly-lit and ill-ventilated workshop, because it’s cheaper and children’s small hands are more suited to creating intricate jewellery.”
Visit www.peopletree.co.uk or call 0044-845-4504595.
Monday 17 December 2007
An Ethical Christmas
Monday 10 December 2007
Click on to your car's history before you buy
Sunday Business Post - Motoring Supplement - Dec 9 2007
A quick internet check on a used car revealing how it has been treated by previous owners may make you think twice, writes Dermot Corrigan
An estimated one in three second-hand cars offered for sale in Ireland has a past that should make consumers think twice about buying. To learn more about the history of a used car before the sale is completed, consumers can now utilise a number of websites that offer a wide range of information on the vehicle.
These websites include motorcheck.ie, cartell.ie and carsireland.ie, which all charge consumers for reports on the history of a used car, as well as carhistorycheck.ie, which is an industry service run for the Society of the Irish Motor Industry (Simi).
Problems uncovered by these services include outstanding finance on a car, incorrect mileage and the car having been previously stolen, used as a taxi or leased. Other important factors that are commonly uncovered include incorrect NCT information, the vehicle having been involved in an accident, numerous past owners, replacement engine or other important parts, service history, or the car having been imported from Britain or further afield.
Alan Nolan, Simi's deputy chief executive, said the organisation introduced its car history check service, which provides motor dealers with a Car History Check certificate, to allow its members to provide a better service to the public.
"We believe it is vital for dealers to be able to check on the integrity of vehicle information supplied so that they can reassure the future buyer that they have undertaken all required checks and can verify the vehicle's history," said Nolan. "A car history check is designed to allow dealers to confirm a cars history so they can pass this information on to the next owner as a reassurance."
Nolan said incorrect mileage, due to the illegal practice of ‘clocking’, or altering the mileage shown on a car’s odometer, was an increasingly prevalent problem in Ireland.
"There has been a noticeable increase in the incidence of clocked cars appearing for trade-in at garages," he said. "Irish people place a huge value on low mileage, often with little confirmation that the low mileage is accurate. A three-year-old car with 15,000 miles on the clock will be more sought after and will achieve a higher price of as much as €2,500 than one with 40,000 miles.”
Mick Dillon, director of carsireland.ie, said outstanding finance on used cars was a major problem in Ireland.
"One in every three cars we see would have a finance contract on it still," said Dillon. "If you purchase a car with finance on it, you will not be able to secure title on it, as the bank effectively still own the car, so you could get into quite a mess as a result."
Dillon said the carsireland.ie history check often turned up fake national car test (NCT) certificates.
"Fraudulent NCT certificates are becoming more and more common," he said. "People are trying to move cars along that have recently failed their NCT test."
"Most people would prefer not to buy a car that has been used as a taxi, or has been leased," added Dillon. "Obviously if a car has numerous owners, that is never a good thing either. Engine replacement is also never a good sign.”
Other less common problems, which can be highlighted by a history check, include the car having been cloned, written-off or scrapped, the colour being changed or a contradiction between the recorded and actual chassis and engine number.
Dillon said it was not only potential purchasers who used car history check services.
"We often find people who have already purchased a car and have noticed things going wrong over a few months," he said. "They would then come to us to check the car and at that time find out there is something in the car's history that tells them why this is happening."
All the businesses carrying out car history checks find information from a wide variety of sources, including the Irish Credit Bureau, the Vehicle Registry Office and the National Vehicle and Driver File. All this information is in the public domain, but it can be very time consuming for individuals to track it down.
Each of the services also source information from Britain on the history of cars that have been imported into Ireland.
The history check services tend not to be the primary business of the organisations providing them. Carsireland.ie is also a car sales web portal where garages and individuals can offer their used cars for sale. Motorcheck is provided by Benchmark Fleet Services who are a fleet provider and also offer consultancy and vehicle related services to Irish businesses, as well as operating asset financing, fuel-related and a business trip recording IT system. Cartell.ie’s core business is providing car history checks.
The different car history-check businesses all provide a slightly different range of products, with a corresponding range of prices. A basic history check costs from approximately €25 to €40.
Nolan said garages paid the cost of the SIMI’s check.
"There is no charge to the consumer as it is part of the professional and ethical dealer's reassurance to the consumer," he said.
Dillon advised consumers to get a third-party opinion on a used car before making a purchase.
"The Simi service could not really be regarded as independent, as they look after their own members," he said.
The Simi’s car history check service is provided in association with global information services company Experian.
"Experian, who are world leaders in this field, develop and operate the system, they provide and support the software for the checks, retain the records and ensure the integrity of the system," said Nolan.
Nolan said motorists and dealers should work together to keep detailed service histories of all cars, which does not always happen at present.
“Simi strongly believes that we should place a much higher value on a well kept vehicle service history which will not only confirm that the recorded mileage is accurate but will confirm that the car has been well looked after,” he said.
Carsireland.ie also offer an inspection service to consumers, which they can use prior to deciding to buy.
"Inspections cost €99 and take about an hour in total,” said Dillon. ”We look at engine, gearbox, suspensions, undercarriage and exhaust systems, as well as the general condition of the car."
Sellers are generally happy to allow the car to be looked at, according to Dillon.
"The seller brings in the car," he said. "We do the inspection and afterwards we phone up the potential buyer and advise them on the condition of the car and give them a heads of up of what might happen three or six months down the road. They would often proceed with the buy, but can use the information to negotiate with the seller on the price. We ask what the price is and might say that seems reasonable, but we do not value cars or get involved in negotiation directly. The customer gets a report in the mail a couple of days later."
The AA’s technical department also provides a comprehensive vehicle inspection service, which is commonly used by garages and can also be used by consumers. It costs from €225.
Monday 3 December 2007
How to best manage your databases
Sunday Business Post - Computers in Business magazine - Dec 2 2007
The latest storage products excel in keeping the data much closer to the end user, writes Dermot Corrigan.
Most large organisations now generate staggering amounts of data. This includes reams and reams of externally facing information on customers, suppliers and partners, as well as masses and masses of internally-facing information on products, processes and people.
This information has to be stored in a usable form so it can be exploited to grow the business, keep track of products or meet regulatory requirements.
This means that databases are continuing to grow in size at a phenomenal rate, according to Bill O'Brien, platform strategy manager with Microsoft Ireland.
“If you think back two years ago a one terabyte database was considered enormous, but now in the UK they would have four or five databases bigger than 16 terabytes and Ireland would have lots of organisations with greater than one terabyte databases,” he said.
One terabyte (TB) contains 1,000,000,000,000 bytes, which is a lot of zeroes and a lot of information. O'Brien said large organisations were using advances in digital storage technology to electronically store information that would previously have been kept in different formats such as images, sound and video.
“Enterprises are creating and storing much more digital information than they did in the past,” said O'Brien. “They used to just store text and numbers, the traditional stuff such as customer information, transactions et cetera, but they are now digitising pictures, invoices, sound, geo-spatial map information. There is a huge amount of additional material being stored and database technology has had to deal with this.”
Christian Blumhoff, NetWeaver business consultant with SAP, said many legacy database systems stored information too far away from the end user, so that it is not available quickly enough to use effectively.
“Over the last two years the database has become a bit of a bottleneck, in that it does not fulfil the requirements of a modern enterprise,” said Blumhoff. “It does not react fast enough to aggregative requests for information.”
Blumhoff said the latest storage products keep the data much closer to the end user, where it can be quickly accessed on demand to support business processes.
“A modern organisation wants to retain its information in a memory state that it can get at very quickly,” he said. “If you look at knowledge management, document imaging, enterprise search, all of these business process critical toolsets are not operating at a database level, although they might store data there for persistence sake. All the realtime processing and execution is actually done in memory.”
O'Brien said the latest database products included business intelligence tools that provide information directly to different people within the organisation, enabling them to do their jobs better and smarter.
“It is about working smarter with the data that you have,” he said.
“At executive level there are dashboards, a single place where executives can view a number of different metrics from a number of different sources. There is drilling into the data beneath that, maybe to highlight an area of the business that is not performing, perhaps sales in a particular region. A few years ago that would have meant asking your finance department to go and do some research. Now managers expect to be able to instantly drill down into the data and analyse it live themselves.”
O'Brien said reports were provided in the way that best al lows decision makers to act cleverly and quickly.
“That is not necessarily just screens with numbers, it can be visualisation in meaningful ways as well,” said O'Brien. “It can be simple things like traffic lights with green, amber and red to show the state of the business at any time, and whether objectives are being met.”
Quality
It is all well and good having lots of data stored, and being able to get quick access to it, but businesses must also ensure the information they are keeping is correct, according to Alys Woodward, business intelligence and analytics program manager, with global technology research firm IDC.
“Data quality can be a massive problem for organisations,” said Woodward.
“It is also one of those problems people do not know they have until they have investigated it. We say to people that if you do not know you have a data quality problem, then you do have.”
Woodward said organisations should look carefully at the information they have stored to determine its data quality.
“You start off with an investigation process and there are a number of tools that can help you do that,” she said. “They actually go into a database and tell you what tables you have, what values you have in the tables, and how those tables match together.”
Organisations from different sectors will have different data quality priorities, according to Woodward.
“Then you would look at which parts of your data are the highest priority for you to fix, maybe making sure your customer data, names and addresses, is correct if you are a marketing company. Or if you are a manufacturing company you may decide that sorting your product information out is more important,” she said.
“You would also set levels of data quality that are acceptable, as getting 100 per cent data quality is much more difficult than getting 97 per cent.”
Woodward said once organisations have cleaned up their data, they could then put in place mechanisms to ensure a high level of data quality going forward.
“For example if you have cal l centre operators inputting data about customers, you might put rules in place to make sure they do things correctly,” she said.
“Or if you have a lot of web forms where customers are filling in their own information, you cannot necessarily trust them to spell everything correctly. The classic example is you do not just ask the customer for their post code and type it in, you have address-matching capability in there, so you make sure the post code is valid for the road.”
Costs
Ian Devine, director of data services and business intelligence solutions with IBM, said that as databases get bigger and bigger, organisations were looking for efficient storage technologies, to keep their costs manageable.
“Storage is growing and growing, it is an increasing component of operational managers' budgets and they are expecting us to provide a far lower cost of ownership,” he said.
Devine said compression is important if you want to efficiently store your data.
“We compress data to table level,” he said. “So you create a data dictionary which provides you with the compression. We are seeing compression ratios of better than 70 per cent for regular applications, whether transactional or warehouse. That provides a real saving for people whose storage is growing 10 or 20 per cent per annum.”
Human management costs can also add to the cost of storing huge amounts of information, according to Devine.
“We have put a lot of effort into autonomics, where you are able to run databases with little or no intervention from the main cost of running things, which is humans,” he said.
Open source
One way to keep database costs low is to choose an open-source solution, which can be downloaded free of charge.
“Open source is generally slimmer and does not have the richness of what the big guys do,” said Woodward. “But it still meets quite a lot of people's needs. If you are just looking at storing data and doing some queries then the open source vendors might be perfectly good.
“The big guys say they are very simple and can not do this or that, but the end users may have very simple requirements.”
MySQL is probably the best-known open source database, and now has 11 million installations globally, according to Joe Morrissey, managing director for Britain and Ireland of MySQL AB.
“At MySQL we keep it simple,” he said. “We have a 15-minute rule - you should be able to download and install it in that time. Reliability and ease of use are priorities for our software.”
Morrissey said open source database products were often used in different ways than traditional enterprise databases. For example internet and telecommunications companies formed a large chunk of its customers.
“Google does not use any traditional enterprise databases for its adwords business,” he said.
“Also we are increasingly the choice for software companies that wish to embed a database and provide a batteries included solution for their customers.”
Morrissey said open source databases al lowed organisations to store data that it would have been too expensive to retain in the past.
“80 per cent of the world's data is not in a database and it should be,” said Morrissey. “It has been either too costly or too complex to store all data in a database. Our mission is to make databases available and affordable to all.”
Features
Increasing regulatory requirements mean many organisations have a legal obligation to keep accurate records. Devine said the latest database products can help companies do this.
“Being an American company we are painfully aware of things like Sarbanes Oxley and Basel and how important regulation is,” he said. “All the regulatory stuff is worked into the product.”
The ability to access information from the database at all times is also a priority for many organisations.
“Databases now run on phones, PDAs and embedded devices,” said O'Brien. “They are not just things that are running in the server room.”
Many enterprise level organisations now leave parts of the database open so that partners, such as customer, suppliers or consultants, can have access to the information they need to best interact with the business.
“The whole idea of self-service processes, enterprise services, web services and application services that are opened up to self-service style processes are critical,” said Blumhoff.
Privacy is also a big concern for organisations that have stored sensitive data.
“A lot of people want to encrypt their information, and they do not want that to have any impact on their applications,” said O'Brien.
“They want the database to go off and do that itself.” O'Brien said one way for the larger database vendors to add innovation to their products was to buy up smaller players who introduce interesting tools or services into the market.
“There are a lot of acquisitions in this space,” he said. “Microsoft purchased Proclarity, Oracle purchased Hyperion and Siebel and SAP purchased Business Objects. They are all business intelligence providers at one level or another. We can all compete about the merits of our database technology, but the coming battleground is around how people access and use that data.”
Devine said IBM was also active in acquiring new ideas to improve its database products.
“We are always looking at companies that can accelerate our time to market,” he said. “If we think there is something there that can fill a gap or solve that problem for us then we do that.”
Modification
Many large organisations develop their storage systems to best suit their individual requirements, according to Blumhoff.
“Most applications will have an extended database space, where people can add custom code,” he said.
“So most databases will look significantly different from one organisation to another.”
O'Brien said, however, the core database product remained as standard, with modifications varying from organisation to organisation in how they best implemented the solution.
“They typically buy the product as it is and all of the features are in there,” he said. “People do not really customise the core capability, most of the work with data is in what information people get access to, how it is presented and who gets access to what data.”
Woodward said many enterprises were running a number of different databases in different areas of their organisation, which was not the most efficient practice.
“It just does not happen that companies know exactly what they want to do and go in on a green field site,” she said. “You get one department that puts in a system, and then another department does something else. It would have made sense for them to discuss it first and put the same thing in, but it is just not how it tends to work.
“Part of IT's job is then to say we now have five Oracle databases, why do we not consolidate them and make things more efficient and streamlined,” she added.
Organisations can buy specific tools from smaller vendors, which they can then use to improve their access to or use of the information stored in their databases, according to Woodward.
“Even reporting tools from small companies will integrate with all the major databases,” she said. “As a software vendor you need to be able to say your reporting tool can be used everywhere.”
Woodward said the amounts of data being collected by enterprises would continue to grow and grow.
“For example once RFID (radio frequency identification) takes a foothold, very high volumes of data will come in,” she said. “Take something like dairy goods that have to be chilled at all times, from storage to the shop-floor, they are looking at including temperature sensors to check at intervals to make sure the temperature of the goods remains the same.”
“If you have volumes of data like that it is an order of magnitude greater than what we now have. The more data you have the greater the challenge is to get something out of it, and present it in a way that a human being can use it to make a decision.”
At present the majority of information in databases is structured, i.e. it fits within clearly designed parameters or fields. In the future the data stored might not be so simply organised, said Woodward.
“One interesting innovation will be the introduction of unstructured data, that is not held in rows and columns,” she said. “Increasingly customers are looking at the way you would search using Google and looking to bring that into the database. That is where some interesting stuff will happen, but whether it will happen over the next 12months I am not sure.”
Blumhoff said the model of large storage units in dusty basements within the enterprise, would be slowly phased out.
“We are moving towards service-based relationships, where I do not need to retain the information locally all the time, I have a trusted partner that actually manages the infrastructure for me,” said Blumhoff.
“From a database perspective that means actually moving into a shared-service environment and offering repository and memory based services for the retrieval of information.”
In the longer term Blumhoff said the database as we know it would fade away.
“What has made a step forward is the virtualisation of data into memory,” said Blumhoff. “There will continue to be an emotional need for a database, so we can go and find the data on the disc in a format we can understand, but from a technology perspective, things like virtual computing, grid computing and service based architecture will require different things from databases and I think that is where we will see the transformations. Overall we will see the database slowly but surely disappear.”
Wednesday 28 November 2007
Working in the new Ireland
Sunday Business Post - Recruitment Pages - Nov 25 2007
Foreign workers are an essential part of the workforce in Ireland and are often vital to business success, writes Dermot Corrigan
Research published by Chambers Ireland has revealed that foreign workers now account for 17 per cent of the workforce in Ireland. John Forde, chair of Chambers Ireland’s human resource policy council, said that the number of overseas workers employed in Ireland had increased substantially in the last 12 months.
"We are well up on last year’s figure of 11 per cent," said Forde.
The findings showed that the number of foreigners working in the tourism sector jumped from 31 per cent last year to 36 per cent this year. In construction, the corresponding rise over the same period was from 11 per cent to 17 per cent.
The number of foreign nationals employed in the public sector has risen from 5 per cent to 15 per cent. In manufacturing, numbers have risen from 14 per cent to 24 per cent.
The research, published last month in Chambers Ireland's 2007 Labour Force Survey, and conducted by Amarach Consulting, found that foreign workers were not equally distributed across all sectors in Ireland. 36 per cent of employees in the hospitality sector are overseas workers, compared to 10 per cent in the finance sector.
Larger organisations are more likely to have foreign workers on their staff. Among businesses employing more than 50 staff, 24 per cent are foreign nationals. 57 per cent of organisations questioned in the survey employ at least one worker from Poland. 23 per cent have at least one staff member from Britain. 16 per cent employ Lithuanian staff.
Forde said migrant workers were filling new positions in the booming Irish economy, rather than taking jobs from Irish workers.
"We have had a full employment situation for a number of years," he said. "In the main, foreign workers are filling roles that cannot be filled from the Irish workforce.”
Forde said that while some firms employ agencies to find staff abroad, most do not need to.
"If I advertise on one of the Irish job websites it is triggered worldwide," he said. "If I advertise using the local print media, I will get a lot of applications from abroad. There is a network that is sending word home."
Specialist skills
Gina Quin, chief executive, Dublin Chamber of Commerce, said people coming to Ireland to work often have specialist skills that organisations need.
"Employers are looking for very specific skills within IT and software development,” said Quin. “There are also the native speakers of different languages, whether Czech or Cantonese, sought for the localisation of products, or in providing services and support to other countries by phone. Generally employers must go outside the country to find those people."
Quin called on the government to use the tax system to attract highly skilled workers into Ireland. She pointed to a Dutch programme that offers international employees, with skills in short supply in the local job market, a tax-free allowance equivalent to 30 per cent of salary.
"We believe there should be some sort of tax-break, maybe on a temporary arrangement, for somebody coming into the country,” she said.
Work permits
Workers from 25 of the 27 EU countries can work freely in Ireland. Workers from the other two, Romania and Bulgaria, which joined the EU last January, still require a work permit to take up employment in Ireland, as do citizens of all other countries.
Citizens from European Economic Area member states Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein, as well as Swiss nationals, do not require a work permit.
Changes to the work permit system, introduced by the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment last February, were welcomed by Chambers Ireland.
"We argued that the work permit should be held by the employee, as opposed to the employer," said Forde. "We were also looking for a simplification in the whole process. These changes have made a difference."
The work permit system still contains some important restrictions, however. Permits are usually only available for occupations with an annual salary of €30,000 or more. An application must be accompanied by documentary evidence of a completed labour market needs test. Clerical staff, manual labourers, retail sales workers, crèche workers and many jobs in tourism are explicitly ineligible for work permits.
Quin said the current work permit system was not responsive enough to the needs of employers in Ireland.
"Despite putting additional resources in, we are still too slow to make decisions and process applications,” she said. “We should be speeding the process up and making it clearer for both employers and individuals."
"I would particularly hold up a flag for the SME company, where one person might be 25 per cent of the their workforce. If one member cannot be cleared quickly, that is a big skills loss.”
Discrimination
Employers sourcing labour from abroad should not take into account an applicant’s nationality when choosing new staff, said Deirdre Lynch of Matheson Ormsby Prentice’s employment group.
"The Employment Equality Acts 1998 and 2004 prohibit an employer from discriminating against prospective employees on the grounds of race, which is defined as nationality or ethnic or national origins,” said Lynch. “Candidates who believe they may have been discriminated against can bring a claim to the Equality Tribunal, where the maximum compensation is €12,697."
Lynch advised employers to take care throughout the recruitment process to avoid any kind of behaviour that might appear discriminatory.
"Employers should ensure no potentially discriminatory language is used in an advertisement," she said. "Details of nationality or race should not be requested on the application form. It is very important that personnel conducting the interview process are trained in regards to what questions they should and should not ask, and how questions should be phrased.”
"Experience is an objective requirement for a position, but if you are only asking questions about the Irish market of non-national employees, then potentially you might have a claim on your hands."
Lynch pointed to a recent case where the Equality Tribunal found that an employer had discriminated against an applicant by requesting two references, which the tribunal said made applying considerably more difficult for non-Irish candidates.
"According to the legislation, discrimination can be either direct or indirect," she said. "It is irrelevant whether the employer intends to discriminate."
Lynch advised employers to liaise with industry experts to ensure that all recruitment processes employed comply with 'best practice' standards.
"It is important that regular reviews are carried out, where you sit down and look at your application form, job description, marking schemes for the interview and equal opportunities policies,” she said.
Lynch said non-Irish workers, who are increasingly aware of their rights, were willing to take legal action against their employer.
"The Equality Tribunal, is its latest annual report, remarked on a dramatic increase in claims on race grounds,” she said.
Integrating staff
Dell was recognised at Chambers Ireland’s recent awards for Corporate and Social Responsibility for its commitment to promoting and celebrating diversity in the workplace.
"We have employees from 34 countries," said Ingrid Devin, diversity manager with Dell. “It is important that staff and employers understand each other's culture. It is not just the differences that can be seen, the colour of my skin, or the language that I speak, it is also invisible things like work-styles and learning-styles of people."
"We have social events for our staff's familes, because the family is also extremely important. We celebrate national days such as Bastille Day and Thanksgiving, and the canteen might serve different food. During the World Cup we had television screens showing different countries play. For some nationalities, religion is very important, so we have a prayer-room on site."
Devin said there was a business motive to these integration projects.
"A diverse workforce is not just a nice thing to have, it is essential to our business success," she said. "This is an Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) hub here in Dublin, and we have people from all over Europe, the Middle East and Africa. We need all the different languages and skills. We have to be diverse otherwise we will not know what our customers need, and we will not be able to give them the right services and products.”
Devin said that Ireland is now an attractive place for Dell to base its EMEA operations.
"There is such an international workforce in Ireland that it is great for us," she said. "A lot of different languages and skills we can recruit in Ireland, but sometimes we have to go outside."
Sunday 18 November 2007
Print your photos from home
Sunday Business Post - Printing and Output Supplement - Nov 18 2007
Advances in affordable digital photo printer technology mean growing numbers of consumers can now print their own digital photos at home, according to Phillip Brady, country manager with Canon Consumer Imaging, Ireland.
"Inkjet technology has developed radically over the last ten years," said Brady. "We are increasingly seeing printers with faster printing capabilities, producing higher quality images, with an increased colour range."
"Seventeen years ago, a four colour inkjet printer would set you back around €5,000 – a machine now with similar printing capability will now retail around €350. Inkjet technology has been refined to the point that even entry level printers are capable of producing excellent photo results."
Sean Healy, consumer business manager with HP Ireland's Imaging Product Group, said he expected considerable growth in the photo printing market for consumers in the run-up to Christmas.
"There will be a pretty significant market this Christmas for photo printers,” said Healy. “Last year, the market was quite big for digital photo frames, but the new devices have a seven inch LCD (liquid crystal display) screen so you can put in your memory card or your USB drive and you can view your photographs. Then, if you want to print, you can do that quite easily. There are a whole lot of editing features there as well."
Entry-level options
Entry-level photo printers usually produce prints measuring 10cm x 15cm. Users can either connect their digital camera to the printer using a USB (universal series bus) cable or by inserting the camera’s memory card into a slot in the printer.
"Flexibility is important to consumers and many photo printers allow you to print photos directly from a camera, or from a memory card or a USB key, so there is no need to connect to a computer," said Mark Robinson, senior product manager, Epson UK.
Basic single function home-user photo printers start at under €100 and are available from high-street and online retailers.
Healy said prices for entry-level products had stabilised this year. He added, however, that manufacturers are now adding more features to basic products.
"At the entry level, you are looking at a similar price point to where it was last year, but features would have improved,” said Healy. “You would be getting a slightly faster printer - you now have an LCD display."
Other features that are now standard with most digital photo printers include basic editing software, battery packs and one-touch printing functionality. More expensive models can have wireless and Bluetooth connectivity, higher dpi (dots per inch) resolution and print larger images (13cm x 18cm up to A4).
Larger photo printers can also be attached to a PC or laptop and used as a conventional printer - or as a scanner, fax and photocopier. Smaller portable models are designed to be used on the move.
Digital photo printers require glossy paper and ink designed specifically for photographs. A range of different paper types is available.
"Costs for consumables vary greatly, depending on paper and ink type,” said Brady. “What you need then depends on the type of photograph that you are looking to produce. You can produce great photographs on our printers from as little as 30 cents."
Entry-level printers may not produce images of as high quality as those printed in retail photo-labs. Robinson said, however, that vendors continue to improve on the quality of the consumables available.
"Epson have developed an advanced pigment-based ink technology that encapsulates each pigment particle in a protective resin coating," he said. "This makes the ink resistant to water, smudging and fading and provides laser-like text and glossy photos, which last up to 200 years when stored in a photo album.
Higher end models produce professional quality images, said Robinson.
"We also have professional devices, which are very much aimed at the higher-end professional user,” he said. “There is a vast difference in terms of features and overall quality. You have single ink technology on the entry-level photo clients, whereas the professional devices have six ink print technology. You also have age resistance up to 200 years.”
photo editing
The majority of the photo printers available on the market now allow users to perform basic editing tasks prior to printing, according to Healy.
"There would be editing features that would allow you to manipulate the image and remove red eye and things like that,” he said. “Also there is a touch-screen pen with it so, if it is a birthday, you can write happy birthday on the photo."
More expensive models can have more extensive editing features. Brady said users could access built-in editing software via the LCD panel on the front of the printer to manipulate their images prior to printing.
“Images featuring skin tones, landscapes and skylines are detected automatically and reproduced with enhanced colour settings to improve the overall tones and contrasts,” he said. “It is particularly useful when the subject in the photo is darkened by shadow. There is also a new night scene mode in the preset list to improve the sharpness of night time shots."
Users of image manipulation software - such as Adobe Photoshop, iPhoto or Picasa - can load images from their digital camera to their PC or laptop, work on it there, and then print the edited image directly.
"You would have a bit more flexibility in terms of manipulation of photographs if you are using a software package on your PC,” said Healy. “You can also use the printer to print other photos from your PC. But you get the best quality, when you print direct from your memory card or from the camera."
Future trends
Robinson said he did not see home printing ever taking over completely from retail printing in high-street photo laboratories.
"The expansion of digital photography into the consumer market has resulted in a massive increase in the number of photos taken and total print volumes have increased as a result," he said. "Retail and home printing have both benefited from this increase in print volumes."
Healy said that the larger players in the digital imaging sector are also exploring other image printing avenues.
"We are developing retail kiosks, this is a big area for us,” he said. “People can also put their photographs up on the web, whereby you can upload your photographs onto the web and get them delivered to you."
Monday 12 November 2007
Skypephone hits the market
Sunday Business Post - Technology pages - Nov 11 2007
Read this story on the Sunday Business Post website by clicking here.
Mobile phone operator 3’s new Skypephone marks a turning point for mobile phone users, as prices continue to be driven downwards by an increased level of competition. Dermot Corrigan reports.
Mobile phone operator 3 has launched a new handset that comes pre-enabled for the Skype VoIP (voice over internet protocol) service.
The new ‘‘Skypephone’’ handset, which will enable users to make free voice calls and send free texts to other Skype users, goes on sale tomorrow and will cost €99.
This is the first time that an operator has offered a consumer product designed for free mobile telephone calling using the internet. The managing director of 3 Ireland, Robert Finnegan, said the new Skype-enabled 3 handsets will be a popular Christmas present this year.
‘‘We expect to sell loads,” he said. ‘‘The fact that people can now make calls for free means there has been a huge amount of interest in it. We believe it will be very big.”
Skype is an internet service that allows users to talk to each other over their broadband internet connections. It also allows users to make cheaper local and international phone and video calls and is usually accessed via a PC or notebook computer. Skype currently has 246 million registered users worldwide.
The Skypephone handset can also be used to make conventional mobile phone calls and send conventional text messages in the same way as any other mobile phone. Users access Skype via a separate call button.
‘‘You just press the Skype button in the centre of the phone, key in your username and password and off you go,” said Finnegan.
3 users who signed up to its X-Series schemes have been able to access Skype from their handsets since September, but the Skypephone is the first model to include the functionality as an integral element of the handset. The 3 Skypephone handset was developed by Skype and 3 in partnership with US technology giant Qualcomm.
As well as Skype functionality, the 3G handset features a 220mm x 176mm colour screen, two-mega-pixel camera,MP3 player,16MB internal memory and Bluetooth, Java games, mobile TV and internet capability as standard.
The 86-gram handset comes in black or white, with blue or pink trim. It measures 100mm x 44mm x 13.6mm. Battery standby time is 320 hours, talk time is 270 minutes and video talk time is 170 minutes.
‘‘The whole idea behind the 3G network is to allow people to do what they do at home, chained to a desk or their laptop, on the go on their mobile,” said Finnegan.
‘‘We started off with voice and text as a core, but with internet access, watching TV, downloading music, and playing games now on your mobile, an extension of that is the Skype function.”
Ireland is one of the first countries to get the Skypephone. It will also be available before Christmas in Britain, Australia, Austria, Denmark, Hong Kong, Italy, Macau and Sweden.
Price plans
Finnegan said the Skypephone would be available from 3 stores, www.three.ie and selected retail outlets across Ireland.
He said the new handset has been introduced first into the prepaid market. Skype-to-Skype calls and text messages are free once the user tops up their credit monthly. It will then be released to bill-pay customers in 2008.
‘‘We want it to go into the mass market,” said Finnegan. ‘‘It will be a sub-€150 handset.”
First-timeSkype-users can create an account by going to www.skype.com and downloading the free software onto their computer. Alternatively, they can create a Skype account directly from their 3 Skypephone.
Other operators
Finnegan said he expected the existence of free calls in the Irish mobile market to provoke a reaction from competing operators.
‘‘I have no doubt the other operators will follow us in due course,” he said. ‘‘We have an exclusivity with Skype, so they cannot follow us in that way for quite awhile.”
Chris Handley, head of mobile internet and content development for Vodafone in Ireland, said Vodafone had no plans to follow 3 in this direction.
‘‘There is a common misconception that Skype or VoIP on mobile phones equates to free calls,” he said. ‘‘What people really want is a good value, quality voice service that is reliable and is supported by effective customer care - this is not currently on offer via VoIP on mobile.”
Amanda Carroll, media and public relations manager with Meteor, said many of its customers could already benefit from free mobile calls, due to its Phone a Friend for Free and Free Calls to any Network all Weekend For Life promotions.
Quality concerns
Vodafone’s Handley said VoIP calls were of a lower standard than those made using competing mobile technologies such as GSM (global system for mobile communication), 2.5G, 3G and HSDPA (high-speed downlink packet access).
‘‘At this point in time, in terms of quality and service level, VoIP is not comparable to our full service package, which is far superior and include s a range of network technologies,’’ Handley said.
Gerry McQuaid, commercial director of O2 Ireland, said customers would not accept lower quality voice calls, even if they were cheaper.
‘‘The cost of delivering VoIP calls could increase, as operators build in the improved quality of service that consumers now expect as a minimum,” he said.
‘‘Until the experience of mobile VoIP calls improves, there is little reason for customers to seek such potential alternatives to familiar switched mobile services.”
Finnegan does not agree that VoIP automatically means a lower quality of service. ‘‘We are very pleased with the quality,” he said.
‘‘We have had people here testing them over the last three or four weeks, and there has been no difference in quality that we can see.”
Business model
Regardless of whether O2, Vodafone and Meteor introduce a Skype-type service, Finnegan said there was an inexorable slide towards an end to per-minute call charges in the Irish mobile market.
‘‘The industry is certainly changing,” he said. ‘‘We are getting away from the per-click, per-second, per kilobyte charge, towards just free access. We can see call costs from the other operators dropping already, but that is because they are coming off such a high plane, and they have had it so good for so long without any really sharp competition.”
Finnegan said 3 did not view profitable voice calls as central to its business model.
‘‘In terms of the future revenue models, we would see Skype as a great opportunity for us to acquire customers to start with, but also customers would then avail of the other services that we offer, accessing the internet, watching RTE news on-the-go, and downloading music,” he said. ‘‘Also, we see advertising revenues playing a role in our revenue model in the future.”
Meteor’s Carroll agreed that generating revenue from other services besides voice was now important to mobile operators.
‘‘While better value offerings from voice will be one of the key drivers in the mobile market, we can expect to see a broader array of services coming from data, entertainment and music downloading, as technology evolves,” she said.
That went well
FC Nürnberg 0 Everton 2 - toffeeweb.com - Nov 11 2007
Read this story on the toffeeweb website by clicking here.
There were a few Everton jerseys on the 7AM flight from Dublin to Frankfurt and the train from Frankfurt to Nürnberg was full of them. The on-board bar ran out of bottles of beer, but they had draught, and "it's a grand old team to play for, it's a grand old team to support" rang out down the aisles.
When I got to Nürnberg the whole city centre was jammers with Evertonians, a couple of balconies overlooking medieval cobbled squares were covered in blue flags and some very raucous chanting echoed around the pretty old coloured buildings and stone gothic cathedrals. Lots of police sitting around watching, but no trouble at all.
A friend of mine who lives in Nürnberg had bought tickets for me and her, but I was still a bit worried after the debacle with the tickets bought in the UK being cancelled. There was absolutely no hassle though, I just kept my mouth shut, scanned the barcode and climbed the stairs to my seat. We were sitting at the opposite end to most of the Everton fans, in a section next to the noisiest Nürnbergers. They were giving it socks, chanting in German and bouncing up and down. I couldn't see any other Everton fans sitting near us, but maybe they were also keeping their heads down.
Any pretence at neutrality lasted about 30 seconds. Arteta gets free in the box, but the keeper saves. It's straight to Cahill whose shot hits the post. So close. I was up out of my seat and Karen was laughing at my attempt to keep a low profile. I thought we started very impressively, Arteta and Osman linking cleverly down the right soon after and Cahill inches away from knocking home the cross.
We looked comfortable enough in the first half, without making too many chances. Yakubu miskicked in the box, and there was an almighty scramble from a corner when the ball just wouldn't bobble our way, but generally it was even-stephen. Their only chances seemed to come from our mistakes, both Lescott and Pienaar sloppily handing them shooting chances, which Howard did well to save.
Second half was more of the same. They put on a bit of pressure, but it was mostly huffing and puffing in front of us. Carsley and Cahill were putting themselves about effectively in midfield, nicking plenty of ball in front of their players. Nürnberg looked like a team struggling in their league, a bit short of confidence.
The Spanish ref was getting dogs' abuse from home fans around us for giving us frees and them nothing. I thought he had a very good game, and didn't let them get to him. Yakubu was showing a few nice touches. Arteta was getting on the ball a lot, but his delivery, especially from set pieces, was poor. Valente looked a bit rusty, and was booked for a late tackle, which pleased the home fans.
We were on top, without making any decent chances and then Arteta turns in the middle of their half and slides ball in to Victor, who was just on for Yak. He is through around the penalty spot, and the centre-half obviously hauls him back. Definite penalty. It seemed to take ages for Arteta to place the ball, and all around us there was whistling and shouting, but Mikel calmly sends their keeper the wrong way. Brilliant.
The home fans are not impressed with their players, and the Everton fans down the far end, who had been quiet enough up to tnow, are going mental. Looking around I could see a good few pockets of Evertonians, it definitely looked like more than the announced official allocation. The locals started up with "you only sing when you're winning", which made me smile.
Then a few minutes later I am laughing. A big lump down the pitch from Howard and Victor does his European thing, out-muscling and out-pacing their centre-half down the wing and calmly slotting home under the keeper from a tight angle. A pretty special goal. It really is fantastic the way he keeps doing it. And that was that. Nürnberg 0 Everton 2. A great night's work.
No hassle after the game either, straight down to packed train and back into the city centre. Few quiet beers and off to bed. Considering this was my first time ever seeing Everton in Europe, I reckon it went pretty well. Any ideas on how to wangle a ticket for Alkmaar game would be much appreciated.
Monday 5 November 2007
CIPD's vital role in promoting HR
Sunday Business Post - Recruitment Pages - Nov 4 2007
The Institute of Personnel and Development's recent award to the Taoiseach has highlighted its important work, writes Dermot Corrigan
This year marks the 70th anniversary of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD). The organisation celebrated with a gala dinner in University College Dublin’s O'Reilly Hall last month, where it presented Taoiseach Bertie Ahern with a gold medal to mark his contribution to personnel management in Ireland during the last 20 years.
The institute's celebrations coincide with the 20th anniversary of the establishment of social partnership in Ireland. CIPD Ireland director Michael McDonnell said the coincidence led the CIPD to consider Ahern a worthy first recipient of the Charles E Jacob medal, which is named after the Irish co-founder of the institute.
“The signing of the Programme for National Recovery (PNR) between the government, employer bodies and the Irish congress of trades unions in 1987 heralded a new era in industrial relations in Ireland,” McDonnell said.
"Bertie Ahern, as Minister for Labour in the late 1980s, played a lead role in getting the PNR off the ground. In the 1990s, as minister for finance, he saw another two agreements through, and as Taoiseach he has overseen a further seven partnership agreements. Huge economic growth and transformation has taken place during this time.”
McDonnell said the award also recognised Ahern’s work in Northern Ireland and the European Union.
“The peace process helped the image of Ireland and the Taoiseach was very closely involved in that,” he said. “The role he played as president of the European Union in the accession of the ten new states was also very important for the international image of the country.”
The award ceremony took place on October 4.
CIPD origins
McDonnell said CIPD Ireland decided to establish the Charles E Jacob medal to ensure the lasting memory of one of Ireland’s great industrial relations pioneers. Jacob was the owner of Jacob’s biscuits, which employed over 3,000 people in Dublin.
Together with English industrialist Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree, Jacob established the CIPD’s forerunner – the Central Association of Welfare Workers (Industrial) – in York in 1913.
"They were very both Quakers and they were incredibly enlightened and advanced for that age,” said McDonnell. “They saw a very definite business link between the way you treated employees and the bottom line. If you bear in mind that 1913 saw the 'lockout' in Dublin with Jim Larkin, it would not have been a view shared by many industrialists of the day."
The first Irish branch of what was to become the CIPD was set up in Dublin in 1937.
“The first meeting took place in the Jacobs biscuit factory on Aungier Street, which is now one the sites occupied by DIT (Dublin Institute of Technology). It now has several courses, including masters coursers leading to membership of the CIPD, so it has come the full circle."
McDonnell said that, historically, the CIPD had set itself three broad objectives.
"One was to be the professional body for those specialising in advancing the management and development of people. The second was to be recognised as the leading authority and influence in the field of people managment and development and the third was to continuously advance the management of people to the benefit of employers and the community at large.”
The CIPD in Ireland today has a membership of over 6,000 human resources professionals, drawn from all areas of the country and sectors of the economy. CIPD Ireland is affiliated with the CIPD in Britain, which has 130,000 members.
Steady progression
McDonnell said the history of human resources and personnel management in Ireland has gone through three phases. Initially, labour relations primarily concerned paternal employers concerned for the welfare of their workers.
“It was the more benevolent employers, mainly Quakers like Jacob's, Bewley's and Wills, and also Guinness,” said McDonnell.
The 1950s and 1960s brought more rights and regulation for workers, but also lifted labour relations into a more adversarial phase, said McDonnell.
"Throughout the 1970s and 1980s a lot of HR workers would have been involved in strikes and industrial disputes," he said.
The stark economic climate of the 1980s led all stakeholders in the personnel management area to realise the advantages to working together, McDonnell said.
"There was a recognition by the government, employers and trade unions that the adversarial industrial relations climate could not continue. Since then, we have seen twenty years of social partnership. One of the real benefits was it created a benign industrial relations climate that made the country attractive to foreign direct investment."
Current developments
McDonnell said the arrival in Ireland of multinationals, particularly US companies, resulted in the re-imagining of the relationship between employer and employee.
“The earlier period was a time of personnel managers dealing with trade unions as the spokespeople of the workers. The American multinational model saw the world in a different light. It said the relationship should be between the individual and the employer. That gave a great boost to a professional body like ours."
"A lot of these companies invested heavily in human resource management techniques in terms of learning and development, communications, employee dispute resolution and other areas. You had very large and sophisticated human resource models emerging. Our growth to over 6,000 members can be accounted for by these developments."
McDonnell said companies now realised that human resources management was vital to their business.
"There is a philosophy to how you manage people,” he said. “If you apply that properly the individual benefits - and also the organisation benefits - in terms of continued productivity, receptiveness and openness to change.”
McDonnell said the CIPD in Ireland has set out the parameters of the new human resources function.
"CIPD has played the lead role by defining the requirements of the profession,” he said. “It is rare nowadays to see a job ad for HR that does not mention membership of the CIPD."
The 1990s saw an explosion in the number of human resource and personnel management courses offered by educational institutions in Ireland.
"We sit down with the colleges, and discuss the needs of professionals in the field. We then work very closely with them in the design of their programmes.”
The CIPD also invests substantial resources in research.
"CIPD now ranks as one of the top five European investors in quality research into human resource management."
However, McDonnell said the CIPD did not get involved directly in social partnership negotiations.
“We are not a lobby group in the sense of representing a sectional interest. We are interested in promoting the effective management of people and demonstrating how that can be done. That applies equally to trade union thinking as it does to employer thinking. We talk to government frequently and make submissions on a wide range of areas. For example we will soon be releasing a green paper on pensions."
McDonnell said networking and communication between CIPD members was a key function of the organisation.
"The opportunity to network with professional colleagues and peers is critically important, probably more important in HR than a lot of other areas. It is something the CIPD does a lot of."
CIPD Ireland is divided into five regional groups, each running local events and courses to enable member development. There is also an annual CIPD Ireland conference. The theme of this year’s conference, held in May in Kilkenny, was the New World of Work.
"Joe MacAree from Microsoft spoke about the need to build productivity. It is an issue that HR needs to come up with some strategies for. An awful lot of the current workforce need to acquire higher added value skills if we are to remain competitive."
The CIPD employs 260 staff in Britain. However, CIPD Ireland employs only three permanent staff at its new office at Clanwilliam Court, Dublin 2.
"The UK resources, systems and research are available to Irish members. We tap in to a lot of the resources that are available through the CIPD in the UK."
CIPD Ireland also retains a number of professional advisors in key areas.
Future Plans
McDonnell said plans were in place to ramp up the CIPD’s operations in Ireland.
"We plan to develop in two areas,” he said. “One is to beef up our professional development area, and the offering of services to members. The second is adding very significantly to our public policy and research activities. That will require additional resources and will mean employing more staff."
International links are vital to CIPD Ireland, said McDonnell, who is currently on the board of the World Federation of Personnel Management Associations (WFPMA) and also works closely with the European Association of Personnel Managers (EAPM).
New high-end golf scheme in the Algarve
Sunday Business Post - Property Pages - Nov 4 2007
Read this story on the Sunday Business Post website by clicking here.
The Residences at Victoria Clube de Golfe is a new high-end scheme from renowned Algarve developer André Jordan's firm Golf Estates Portugal.
The development is situated in Vilamoura, the golfing capital of the Algarve, and comprises 145 properties spread out over ten buildings directly adjacent to the Arnold Palmer designed Victoria course.
On offer are 130 square-metre two-bedroom apartments ranging from €510,000 to over €700,000. Three–bedroom apartments, ranging in size from 151 to 155 square-metres, are available from €565,000 to over €800,000. Furniture packages cost an extra €25,000 for two-beds and €30,000 for three-beds.
Private facilities for residents including a central piazza area with pool bar, lounge bar and snack bar, large outdoor and indoor heated swimming pools, a fully equipped gymnasium and a children's play area.
However, golf is the main draw. The Victoria clubhouse is a 75 metre stroll from the scheme and many of the apartments have views of the course. The Laguna and Millenium first tees are also within 500 metres of the development, while the Pinhal and Vilamoura Old Course are a short drive away.
All Residences owners and guests are guaranteed dedicated tee times and owners get half-price green fees across the five Vilamoura courses.
This October the Victoria course hosted the inaugural Portugal Masters golf tournament, which featured Darren Clarke, Rory McIlroy, Retief Goosen and Justin Rose. The course also hosted the 2005 World Cup of Golf. The five Vilamoura courses were bought by Irish developers Oceanico in March 2007 for €125 million.
The Residences properties feature full air conditioning throughout, underfloor heating in bathrooms, silent alarm systems, wiring for sound and broadband, secure card entry system, three metre high ceilings, Grohe taps and Siemens applicances.
A 24-hour concierge will help with tee-times, taxis, restaurants, laundry or babysitting services. Owners and guests can also access the facilities of the five-star Tivoli Victoria Hotel, which will be adjacent to the Residences site.
Two underground parking spaces and a secure underground storage area are included in the price of each property. Completion of the development is slated for 2009 and local finance can be arranged for non-Portuguese residents.
Owners wishing to rent must sign up to a fixed shared rental package. The developers predict an annual return after expenses of approximately €20,000 for the two-bed properties and €25,000 for the three-beds.
The planned town of Vilamoura was designed 35 years ago with the needs of the foreign visitor in mind. Its marina is the biggest in Portugal and its seafood restaurants, pavement cafes and nightlife attract holidaymakers and retirees all year around.
André Jordan is best known as the creator of Quinta do Lago, the nearby luxury development, where Denis O’Brien is one of many Irish owners.
Vilamoura is a thirty minute drive from Faro airport, which is linked to Dublin, Belfast and Cork by Aer Lingus and to Dublin and Shannon by Ryanair. Lisbon is a two and a half hour motorway drive away.
For more information, visit www.residencesvictoria.com.
Monday 29 October 2007
Pigsback.com enters Canadian market
Sunday Business Post - Done Deal - Oct 28 2007
Online marketing website Pigsback.com has entered the Canadian market in a franchise deal with local operator Bell New Ventures (BNV). Under the terms of the contract, agreed in June, BNV, a division of Bell, the large Canadian telecoms company, will operate the Pigsback.com brand in Canada.
"You could call it an IP (intellectual property) licencing or franchising deal,” said Michael Dwyer, founder and chief executive of Pigsback.com. “BNV own the Pigsback Canada company. We are going to support them in all aspects of the business, including the technology bits, communicating with the members and producing content for the site, but primarily we are training and empowering them to do it for themselves."
As part of the deal, BNV has undertaken to invest CAN$10 million (€7.2m) in the new Pigsback.ca operation to finance set-up costs, staff and marketing.
“It is a very, very big opportunity for Pigsback. Canada is a very mature internet advertising market, and a company like Bell would be looking to take a very big share of that," O'Dwyer said.
“We will get a share of revenue and some support services fees as well. It would be premature to start quoting big numbers, but if it is successful this will be a very lucrative deal for us, as in multi-million lucrative annually.”
Dwyer said BNV approached Pigsback.com after the Canadian company had researched various online marketing options across the world. Initial contact was made early this year and the final deal was agreed in June.
The new Pigsback.ca site went live on October 16. The initial launch is centred on the city of Calgary, home to one million people, and the site will be rolled out across Canada during 2008. The total investment includes a CAN$1 million marketing spend.
"For the Canadians who are experiencing it, it may as well be a Canadian website,” said Dwyer. “You have the Pigsback system populated by local brands speaking to local consumers in a local accent. Early sign-ups of well-known national brands in Canada are well ahead of schedule.”
Pigsback.com was founded by Dwyer in 2000. It is headquartered at Citywest in Dublin and now employs 75 people.
This is Pigsback.com’s second overseas venture - its British operation, based in Soho, London, was launched in 2005.
Dwyer said the licencing arrangement was an effective method for growing the Pigsback brand.
"It is a realistic way of moving into new markets,” he said. “Our business is very investment heavy in the first few years as you have to try and build a brand and build a membership. This gives us access to a partner's capital to extend the brand much more quickly."
Pigsback.com’s turnover in 2006 was €4.5 million.
"We would expect to grow turnover to €6 million this year,” said Dwyer. “The Irish business is benefiting from very strong growth in internet advertising spend.”
Gareth Lambe, who was managing director of Pigsback.com in Ireland, has moved to Canada to oversee the set up the Canadian business, which is headquartered in Toronto and employs 15 staff.
Monday 22 October 2007
New investment management certificate is to be introduced
Sunday Business Post - Recruitment Pages - Oct 21 2007
The Institute of Bankers in Ireland and the Securities and Investment Institute (Ireland) have joined forces to launch a new certification programme to facilitate career progression in the investment management sector.
Diarmuid Bradley, director of education at the Institute of Bankers, said the Certificate in Investment Management would equip holders with the professional knowledge and skills necessary to successfully develop careers in the investment management space.
“Fund management has became a big growth area in Ireland,” said Bradley. “The sense we had was that there needed to be some education element to tie in with that and educate industry professionals. This would benefit the individuals in terms of their careers and also the customers who would use their service."
The qualification is aimed at professionals engaged in managing investments, including areas such as private client asset management, advisory and discretionary portfolio management and fund management.
Bradley said employers would welcome the introduction of this qualification.
"To work effectively in the industry you need specialist knowledge and skills because of the complexity and the level of change,” he said.
Bradley said interest in the certification was expected to come from a broad spectrum of candidates employed in the financial services sector.
"We are expecting people who are working in both front and back office of investment organisations to apply,” he said.
He said that candidates interested in moving into a career in financial services might also consider the qualification.
"Because of the growth of the investment, funds and asset management sectors you get people coming from other degrees,” he said. “It is certainly not confined to people with a business degree.”
The course runs from October to September. It includes Saturday seminars at the School of Professional Finance in Dublin’s docklands (an externally recognised school of University College Dublin) and distance learning elements, which allows participants to continue to work full-time while studying.
“They are combining what they are learning on the job, with practical knowledge of the particular subject area," said Bradley.
He said that the majority of candidates would already have third level degrees, although the minimum requirements for applicants are five passes in the Leaving Certificate including English and Maths. Applicants over 21 years can apply on mature grounds.
The course content includes a thorough overview of the Irish investment and funds management industry, said Bradley.
"One focus will be familiarity with the products in the investment and funds management industry,” he said. “There is a significant level of growth in the range of products and the complexity of products at present. They will understand the products and how they can be appropriate to different clients and people with different investment needs."
The syllabus is divided into two modules: regulation and investment management. Tuition covers subjects including rules and regulation specific to firms trading on the Irish Stock Exchange, macro and micro economics, securities and derivatives, and investment appraisal and performance management.
There is a registration fee for students of €490 per module. This includes examination entry, study manual and seminars.
Monday 8 October 2007
FMCG's loss is financial services gain
Sunday Business Post - Recruitment Pages - October 7 2007
Competitive salaries and the guarantee of an invigorating challenge are driving many marketing executives away from the FMCG sector and towards financial services, writes Dermot Corrigan
A growing number of high-level marketing executives in the fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) sector are moving into new industries, including financial services and telecommunications, according to Marketing People director Rory Brennan.
"A brain drain is hitting most Irish FMCG companies," Brennan said. "An example is Damien Devaney, who is now marketing director of O2 Ireland. He came from Coca Cola, and prior to that he was in Diageo. He had worked for the biggest brewery and soft drinks companies in the world. That is an asset that FMCG had developed up to a very high level, and now he is gone.”
Brennan said Vodafone, Bank of Ireland and Perlico had also recently taken senior marketing executives from employers in the FMCG sector.
Chris Small, director of interim, consulting and training with Alternatives, said increased competition within markets such as financial services was driving the demand for skillful and experienced marketing candidates.
"There is now a lot of competition between banks for customers, so they want to have the best marketing people out there," said Small. "Consequently there is not as much available talent of the calibre that they - and we - would like."
Key attractions
Brennan said the salaries on offer to marketing candidates in the financial services sector were generally higher than in FMCG.
"Financial services as a home would pay, broadly speaking, about ten per cent more to marketeers in basic salaries,” he said. “On top of that, you have packages which are slightly more lucrative."
Brennan added, however, that many of the candidates who opted to leave FMCG for other sectors were not just attracted by the promise of a higher salary, but also the challenge within a new market.
"Marketeers are generally not, by their nature, money grabbers," he said. "Their salaries are pretty healthy, but they are not generally as cut-throat as sales people. When I move people, particularly at the middle to senior end of the marketplace, they are not moving for money; they are moving for a more rounded experience which will add value to their CV and help them up the marketing ladder."
Brennan said that the skills marketing departments developed in FMCG were easily transferable to both financial services and telecoms.
“If you build a good career in food and drink and get original advertising and really good branding experience with big budgets, you can quite easily apply that to a banking or communications environment," said Brennan. "For example if I am marketing a beer, or marketing a mortgage, the market for those products is actually quite similar."
Brennan said marketing candidates tended to prefer original ‘above the line’ advertising experience working for Irish-based brands, over ‘distributor’ experience localising international campaigns.
"The goal for most marketeers is to get original advertising, where they are really being creative," said Brennan. "Most good marketeers will seek out experience that will get them that type of exposure so they know they can develop and will be attractive for most companies going forward."
Marketing Salaries
Marketing People's latest salary survey, released last month, profiled marketing salaries across the FMCG marketing sector in Ireland.
The data compiled in the survey was taken from a comprehensive range of industry sources, including a large selection of multinational and indigenous companies, key industry contacts and the company’s own internal data.
Brennan said salaries were relatively stable, with incremental rises the norm over the last year.
"Basic salary increases are at an average of 4.5 per cent," he said. "The rate of increase is down from the previous 12, when the average was eight per cent. Salaries were growing at a serious speed, but they have definitely slowed down. I think it will even tighten again in the next twelve months."
Brennan said salaries in certain senior roles were growing faster than the average, but at middle and lower levels, growth was generally negligible.
"The whole piece has slowed down, which ultimately is good for clients," said Brennan. "People are staying longer and building their skills. A year ago, some people were coming in to us and saying they wanted €40,000 and, in my opinion, they were only worth about €32,000. There is a little more sense out there now."
Tight market
Brian Sweeney, sales and marketing director with HRM Recruitment Group, said economic factors were driving recruitment trends in marketing.
"Some of the larger companies have reorganised their marketing departments and there has been a certain streamlining of roles," he said. " The markets are now saturated in areas such as telecoms and financial services, so they are looking for creative marketeers and trying to put in a different marketing structure."
Sweeney said the trend meant some candidates were now less inclined to consider a career move.
"Senior candidates are being more particular about what they want," he said. "There are a lot of senior people in the marketplace who maybe have less options than they may have had. They may be looking, but there might not be an awful lot there for them to choose from at the moment."
Sweeney said an economic slowdown would mean both increased competition within particular sectors of the economy and greater demand for marketing expertise.
"There are a number of saturated markets in Ireland," he said. "A lot of larger clients have slightly downsized their marketing departments, but companies need people with a very strong capacity for delivery."
"Companies are looking to their marketeers for opportunities to get into new segments or broaden the distribution channels they are already in. They are looking to the marketing group to add that additional insight to their business."
Sweeney said he did not expect a slowdown in marketing recruitment. He said HRM had recently added a new member to their marketing team, with plans to expand the team further in the near future.
Companies looking to manage scarcer resources often turn to interim marketeers to work on individual projects, rather than take on extra full time staff, said Small.
"Over the last two years the interim area has grown particularly well and we are certainly expecting it to continue to grow," he said. "As general business conditions tighten, interim is a really good solution. It is 'turn on, turn off' so you can take what you need, when you need it."
Skill-sets
Despite the general tightening of the market, Sweeney said certain specialised skill-sets were still in demand.
"On the services side, there is a strong emphasis on strong customer relationship management people who can put direct marketing and relevance marketing campaigns together," he said.
"On the brand and product management side, we are seeing demand for managers who have had commercial responsibility for affecting change in their market and who really understand how to drive the triggers in their market."
Small said Interim’s clients were looking for new staff with particular niche skill-sets.
"We are finding a strong demand for customer insight specialists who have a strong knowledge of how people think and act," said Small. "It is a pretty refined skill and the sort of thing you only really find in the most senior candidates.
"Data analysis is an area where there are not as many people as there were in the past. There is also more demand for brand managers, particularly in the financial services sector.
"Technology is a growth area, but it is still a niche. A familiarity with online marketing is quite important in telecoms and financial services, but maybe a little less so in FMCG."
In the current market Sweeney said clients were willing to wait for the right candidate to come along at the right price.
"Some clients are being very particular about the skills they are looking for," he said. "They are saying we want somebody who can bring a more defined consumer orientation to what we are doing, or we would be looking for someone with a broad range of above the line or TV campaign experience. They will wait to find the right candidate and that can sometimes take some time."
Monday 1 October 2007
Hospital IT benefiting all patients
Sunday Business Post - Better Business: Healthcare - September 30 2007
New systems enable levels of care to be continually improved, writes Dermot Corrigan
Ireland’s healthcare providers in both public and rapidly growing private sectors are continually investing in IT solutions and infrastructure to help them deliver an improved level of service to patients. The last year has seen a number of landmark projects reaching completion in some of Dublin’s larger hospitals.
"Over the last 12 months or so, our main focus has been on the electronic patient records,” said Martin Buckley, ICT manager at St James’s Hospital in Dublin. “One of our main projects is the addition of the PACS (picture archiving communications system).”
James’s chose a PACS from leading US vendor Cerner Corporation.
“It distributes digital X-rays and imaging for diagnostic results throughout the hospital,” said Buckley. “This has been a major success. Now at every point of care the X-ray image and report from the radiologist are immediately available.”
Across the river, the Mater Misericordiae Hospital has also been investing heavily in new ICT systems, according to its information management services manager Gerard Hurl.
"We are currently rolling out an integrated information system. It has been working quite successfully in a number of specialised areas over the last couple of years and this year we have been given funding to start rolling it out to all the other departments. It is effectively a multimedia system which allows doctors to order tests online and look at results and images on screen."
Buckley said St. James’s had recently partnered with Cisco Systems to install a new 3,000 user voice over internet protocol (VoIP) network to handle their ever increasing ICT requirements.
"The VoIP system is in since June,” he said. “Our old analogue DBX router was 20 years old and in decline. We were faced with an urgent requirement to replace it, so instead of a phased approach, we were obliged to do a full scale changeover.”
"The big benefit is the convergence of voice and data on a single network,” said Buckley. “The investment is future proofed and easily expanded, and it also has less maintenance overheads.”
The Mater IT department also worked with Cisco to improve its communications network recently.
"It was really critical that our network was up to speed, resilient and all the rest,” said Hurl.
In the Mater, approximately 3,000 staff use the ICT system.
"In a hospital like the Mater, as in any of the other large hospitals in the state, every person uses the hospital system, from the financial department to consultants to porters," said Hurl. "We have about 3,000 intelligent devices connected to the network including about 1,500 PCs."
Hurl said the Mater’s ICT department has developed a unique solution to deal with the hospital’s requirements.
"We have the rights to develop this system and have been working on it with the users over the last couple of years," he said. "It is based on one commercial system, and there are other similar systems available, but we have chosen to develop this one."
Hurl said it was important to include the users in the development process.
“The user has to start looking at these systems the way they look at pen and paper, it has to become second nature to them as part of the process of care giving," he said.
Martin Buckley said St. James’s preferred to use different solutions from a variety of different vendors.
"We do very little internal development,” he said. “We would have an information systems team with both medical and IT expertise. Their task is to take the best proven IT systems and fit them to St James's own practices.”
James's EPRS (electronic patient records system) holds information on current and past patients of the hospital, including test results, diagnoses and outcomes.
"The electronic patient record can be comprised of anything up to fifty or sixty components,” said Buckley. “Some of these would be speciality based, for example you have cancer and intensive care modules.”
Buckley said modules were chosen from competing suppliers, meaning that integrating different solutions was a real challenge.
“At the moment we might have 12 to 15 different suppliers,” he said. “From our point of view once the integration works well we can take advantage of competition between different suppliers."
Buckley said further improvement of the hospital’s IT systems was vital to keep improving the level of care it provides.
“The next major piece of information that we are looking to computerise is medication management through electronic prescribing and distribution systems,” he said. “We have this implemented already in the intensive care unit and would like the same facilities across the 900 beds in the hospital.”
Most users currently access the James’s systems internally using stationary PCs. Buckley said this would soon change.
"We are now moving into mobile technology such as mobile laptops and tablets," he said.
Hurl said the Mater was also looking at introducing electronic prescribing systems, as well as developing further its diagnostic imaging systems, physician support systems, teleworking capabilities and wireless patient monitoring.
"We want to make sure we are up to speed and can take advantage of all these technologies, but all of these, of course, are subject to funding,” he said. “With the introduction of the HSE (Health Services Executive) we work within a system and within that context we will be looking to develop. There is no point putting in the investment unless we have organised the processes so we can implement them properly and improve care."
