Major landfill tax changes

Posted on May 30, 2012 by Bob

Waste King, the specialist collections, clearance and recycling company, has assured its customers that its charges are, at present, unaffected by Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC)’s recently announced changes to the rules which govern Landfill Tax. Industry commentators expect these changes, which have sent shockwaves throughout the waste management industry, to have a significant and immediate impact on the cost of waste disposal throughout the UK.

Landfill Tax contributes to the Government’s general and ‘green’ taxation objectives, including the Government’s commitment to work towards a ‘zero waste’ economy. It is the key component of the drive to divert waste from landfill to ensure that EU targets are met in 2013 and 2020.

In May this year, HMRC said that landfill tax should now be paid on material used to protect the overlying layers at the top of a landfill cell. Known as the ‘top fluff layer’, this equates to a metre of material underneath the clay cap in each cell – and, in the past, this has been regarded as engineering material and, as such, was not taxable. In addition, fines from recycling processes, grit and screenings will no longer be eligible for the lower rate of landfill tax applied to inert material – of £2.50 – and must be charged at the full taxable rate of £64 a tonne.

Waste King’s managing director, Glenn Currie, commented: “With these fines rising by more than 2,000%, operators look set to face some steep increases in their costs. Prices within the M25 have more than doubled and, in other parts of the country, there have been increases of between 30 and 40%. Waste King is carefully monitoring the situation but it’s now more important than ever that our customers look at multiple options with regard to segregation of their waste because of the major cost implications that are now involved.”

Other waste operators are rumoured to be considering introducing cost rises to customers of up to 400 per cent where skip hire is involved. Moreover, there are warnings that the recycling rate, reported by civic amenity sites and waste transfer stations, could fall dramatically as the material which no longer attracts the lower tax rate would not be counted as ‘recycled’ when used as the foundation for a landfill cap.

Comment: This is an industry-wide issue and, sooner or later, everyone will be affected in one way or another by these increases. They are ushering in the most challenging period the waste industry has encountered since the introduction of the landfill tax in 1996.

More information on the Landfill Tax changes can be found at:

http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/briefs/excise-duty/brief1512.htm

http://www.letsrecycle.com/news/latest-news/legislation/landfill-tax-changes-send-2018waves2019-through-industry

Cunning linguists

Posted on May 24, 2012 by Bob

According to the European wide project Language Rich Europe, sponsored by language teaching specialists, Rosetta Stone, all European countries have foreign language provision in primary education. Denmark and Greece make two foreign languages compulsory, while 18 countries have one compulsory foreign language. Only in England, Northern Ireland and Scotland, are foreign languages optional.
Also, according to Rosetta Stone, there are more than a million children between five and 18 years old in UK schools who speak some 360 languages between them, and more than 60 of these languages are taught in community language classes.

According to EU policies, all young European children should learn two languages in addition to the national language(s) of the country in which they reside. In primary education, apart from Italy and the Ukraine, all countries offer extra support for newcomers in learning the national language. In secondary education, the only countries to make two foreign languages compulsory at both lower and upper secondary level are Austria, Estonia, France, Poland, Portugal and Romania.

The most commonly offered foreign languages in secondary education are English, German and French. However, other European languages such as Spanish and Italian are also available. Some immigrant languages such as Arabic, Croatian, Polish, Russian and Turkish are often optional foreign languages.

Comment: These findings provide some interesting insights. One is the large number of languages being spoken in Europe – at least some 360 – compared with the common view that English, with Spanish and German, are the key languages of modern business.

Another is the implication that children are, somehow, missing out if they can’t speak at least one language other than their mother tongue – while the traditional British view has been that, if you shout loudly and slowly enough in English, the rest of the world will decide to learn your language (this seems to have worked pretty well up to now, of course). Moreover, with a million children in the UK speaking 360 languages between them, maybe times are changing in terms of the ‘shouting loudly and slowly in English’ strategy – but I doubt it, since it’s worked so well in the past.

Finally, it’s interesting to note that ‘only in England, Northern Ireland and Scotland, are foreign languages optional (in schools)’. Could Rosetta Stone be thinking of the fact that two languages – English and Welsh -are now taught in many Welsh schools? In that case, the only question is which language is the ‘foreign’ one?

: The Welsh language translation on the road sign reads: ‘I am out of the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated.’ Unaware of the real meaning of the message, officials had it printed on the sign under the English.

LogiXML helps ‘evolution’ provide key information

Posted on May 22, 2012 by Bob

It’s been revealed that ‘evolution’ (http://evolutiondistribution.com/) – a global distribution system (GDS) and internet distribution system (IDS) hotel reservation platform created by Great Hotels of the World (GHOTW) (http://www.ghotw.com), one of the world’s largest hotel representation companies – is using Logi Info, from web-based business intelligence (BI) specialist, LogiXML, to maintain its market-leading position. Although the evolution system has proved a popular and productive product, those responsible for continuing to develop it were aware that it could be improved – and so Logi Info is now helping to produce key business indicator reports for evolution users.

Philippe Dewulf, GHOTW’s commercial operations director explained: “evolution provides its clients with standard reports, grouped in department areas – general management, sales director reporting, revenue manager reporting, front desk reporting, and so on. With Logi Info, we can now do much more – and we have plans to use LogiXML to do even more over the next eight months or so.”

“In our application, the system employed to produce reports was quite basic,” explained Joakim Persson, chief technical officer (CTO) for evolution. “However, since our business is selling software-as-a-service, we realised that we needed to improve the service we offered our customers – including making the reports more ‘in depth’. We looked again at Logi Info and found that it can provide extremely useful analysis. It filled the gaps in the reporting system that we needed to fill. It has an attractive and intuitive interface – and LogiXML was happy to provide it to us to use under a ‘white label’.

“From a development point of view, we’ve found that LogiXML makes it easy for us to compile and deploy the reports that our customers need,” said Persson. “With the LogiXML-powered evolution system, it’s a simple process for inexperienced users – without going through time-consuming training – to drill down through several layers of reports to get the system to tell them what they need to know. Moreover, advanced users can download the data in, for example, Excel, for further analysis.”

Earlier this year, LogiXML was positioned for the second time in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms, where its products ranked among the highest for ease of use, overall product functionality, support, product quality, performance, and customer experience.

Comment: Not many organisations are happy to confess that their product is enhanced by another product, made available under a ‘white label’ or original equipment manufacturer (OEM) agreement. GHOTW deserves some praise for its openness in revealing this – but it also deserves praise for its decision to continuing to invest in, and improve, an already market-leading product in order to provide a higher quality and quantity of information to those using the evolution system.

Waste King raises tons for charity

Posted on May 18, 2012 by Bob

In the last two months, Waste King, the specialist collections, clearance and recycling company, has donated over five tons of recycled books, DVDs and music CDs to the British Heart Foundation (BHF). In addition, Waste King has donated and recycled over a ton of clothes in aid of the Salvation Army.

Last year, Waste King installed recycling points at its premises in the Frogmore Industrial Estate in Hemel Hempstead – to help raise funds for its chosen charities of the BHF and the Salvation Army. While many members of the public have contributed to these collections, they have received a major boost from Waste King’s house clearance service – which has recently been called upon to clear the contents of some large houses.

Waste King’s managing director, Glenn Currie, commented: “Waste King’s operating ethos is to recycle as much as possible of the waste materials it collects. We guarantee to recycle at least 85 per cent of all the waste that Waste King collects but, in reality, the figure is now well over 90 per cent. As part of our corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategy, we want to promote the benefits of recycling not just in environmental terms – helpful though that is – but also in terms of directly benefiting people, through the work of the BHF and the Salvation Army. These collection points at our premises are enabling other people’s waste materials to benefit those in need.”

Most clothes still have at least 70% of their useful life left when their owner disposes of them, believes the Salvation Army. The income that the Salvation Army receives from its recycling activities – including those of Waste King – helps to fund beds for the homeless, cups of tea for the thirsty and food for the hungry.

Currie said: “Surprisingly, our policy of linking with charities in this way appears to be unusual for a waste management company. We’re now networked with a number of other, well established organisations across the UK that re-use and recycle. It’s a strategy that benefits everyone – and the environment.”

Comment: The benefits of Waste King’s policy of recycling as much as possible – and enlisting the help of the public in that crusade too – should be self-evident. The environment benefits and so do people – especially those who need help in these challenging economic times.

What is most surprising is Glenn Currie’s comment that other waste management companies appear not to be following similar policies. Maybe they can’t see the ‘wood’ for the profits of not giving to charities. Thankfully, Waste King appears to take a different view.

Tribal choses eXact learning solutions’ LCMS platform

Posted on May 16, 2012 by Bob

Carin Martell, of eXact learning solutions.

Tribal, the UK-headquartered worldwide education technology and services provider, has chosen eXact learning solutions (www.exact-learning.com) to produce online and mobile content for its training publications as well as customised learning content for its clients – which include large organisations in the healthcare, food and beverage as well as education sectors.

“Tribal manages large content production projects with different requirements. We need a highly flexible and powerful solution, which adapts to different content production projects,” said Krysti Hamilton, Production Manager at Tribal. “We chose eXact LCMS, because it’s an open system, which enables us to extend the technology to meet our clients’ specific content production needs.”

“Being able to deliver content seamlessly to iPads and other tablets, as well as mobile devices, is extremely important in today’s world,” explained Carin Martell, Alliance Manager at exact learning solutions. “It needs authoring tools which the creation of content which can then be used for different output formats – which is a key feature of eXact LCMS.”
Tribal (www.tribalgroup.com), which has more than 1m learners currently using its e-learning solutions around the world, builds software, supports adult learning and careers development and also provides school inspections and improvement services. It works collaboratively with its clients to help deliver high quality education services – which is why it wants to use the best learning technologies available to produce and deliver them.

Comment: In recent months there have been relatively few large contracts signed in the learning technologies world – certainly compared with the boom days of the mid-2000s. So it’s encouraging for the whole sector to see a global organisation opt for an LCMS platform; be prepared to talk about doing so, and praise the technology as meeting both the buying organisation’s and the learners’ needs.

Implementing mobile learning

Posted on May 15, 2012 by Bob

Christophe Ferrandou, of goFLUENT.

‘How to Implement Mobile Learning in Global Organisations’ is the title of a whitepaper recently published by goFLUENT, the provider of Business English training. Christophe Ferrandou, CEO of goFLUENT, believes that: “Growth rates for mobile products, including the iPad, iPhone, Android’s smartphones and tablets, have increased so quickly that they’re surpassing desktop computers in some countries. So, it is not a question of ‘if’ but ‘when’ an organisation should deploy mobile learning – and how it delivers that mobile learning.”

“Selecting an e-learning solution that offers mobile delivery in addition to a computer delivered application puts the choice of accessing the training in the hands of the learner,” he said. “Learners are then empowered to decide how they will learn, which delivery model best fits their learning style and, perhaps, overcome any learning constraints – geographical, technological and so on – with which they are dealing.”

goFLUENT reports that, in its experience of the distance learning market, as organisations look to expand their global footprint and reduce costs, they seek a common business language – which, in almost every case, is English. It believes that teaching non-native speakers to speak business English unites them, boosts their confidence and enables them to be more productive, thus improving their organisation’s results.

After discussing the needs of workforces in global organisations and assessing how they are using mobile learning, the whitepaper also explains how organisations can determine the return on investment (ROI) from mobile learning materials. When using mobile learning, goFLUENT recommends that you should:

Identify business challenges and define strategy. Common business challenges that mobile learning addresses can include:

• Enabling access to business English training content and services across a global workforce.
• Offering learning to a workforce that is already mobile.
• Delivering ‘just-in-time’ and ‘just-enough’ learning.

Define the solution. Think particularly in terms of technology/ infrastructure; culture; content.
Pilot the mobile learning solution. Limit risk and cost by using new learning materials on a sample group first.
Measure, analyse and refine. Measure effectiveness – such as performance improvement, course completion and skill mastery results – to gauge success.

The whitepaper also discusses evaluating the hardware used to deliver mobile learning – including the challenge presented by Apple products not supporting Flash. The whitepaper is available on goFLUENT’s website: http://www.gofluent.com/web/us/download-white-paper-mobile-learning.

Comment: It’s said that many workers rarely find themselves in front of a traditional desktop computer – and their work patterns prevent them from adhering to ‘traditional’ working hours. Workers at all levels in an organisation are increasingly comfortable with technology and so they are looking to that technology to help them – wherever they are – whenever they need support, or have some spare time to develop their professional skills.

Initially mobile learning was a minor but complementary technology to other forms of online learning. Increasingly – prompted by the rapid growth in mobile devices – it’s becoming a major delivery mechanism for learning and performance support materials. No self-respecting training/ learning professional can afford to ignore mobile learning these days – so, with that in mind, the goFLUENT whitepaper is probably worth a read.

Corporate learning world urged to co-operate and collaborate creatively

Posted on May 11, 2012 by Bob

The western learning and publishing industries are being urged to experience their own ‘Sputnik effect’ – 50 years after President Kennedy committed the US to win the Space Race after being surprised by the initial success of the USSR’s ‘Sputniks’.

This call comes in a whitepaper published by the online and mobile learning solutions provider, eXact learning solutions. The whitepaper – available from http://gnstx.gr/fDI – argues that western corporate learning industry leaders need similar vision and commitment if they are to help their organisations continue to survive global competition effectively from the emerging world’s labour and educational markets. It draws parallels between the world’s historic industry challenges – such as the one faced by the US aerospace industry during the Cold War – and the peculiar challenges and opportunities currently facing the West’s publishers and learning technologies developers as they try to help the West survive increasing competition, both for appropriately skilled workers and for business in global markets.

The USSR launching the Sputnik in 1957 – becoming the first nation into space – gave the American aerospace industry a wake-up call. According to the whitepaper, the West’s corporate learning and publishing industries today face a similar challenge since countries with emerging economies – including India and China – are doing ‘learning-related things’ faster than they are.

It argues that the West must reduce its corporate learning ‘missile gap’ – and this means understanding the nature of creativity and genius; then using this knowledge to detect and encourage excellence in performance. The corporate learning industry needs to re-engage in lateral thinking – still competing but taking risks together.

When it comes to being successful at surviving the increasingly challenging issues surrounding global competition, Charles Darwin’s writings teach us that it’s not the smartest, the ‘best’ or the wisest who’ll survive the current economic challenges. Nor will it be the best trained trainee or the best taught student. Rather, those who survive are the most adaptive – in other words, the digital content that will survive will be designed to adapt to new learning delivery technologies and devices.
For further discussions on this topic, visit: http://gnstx.gr/fyv

Searching for an Executive Director

Posted on May 10, 2012 by Bob

Workplace Matters (WM), a charity which has over 50 years’ experience of taking Christian values into the workplace, including providing chaplaincy to a wide range of organisations within the private, not-for-profit and public sectors, has begun searching for its next Executive Director. The post became vacant a few weeks ago, following the resignation of the previous Director, on health grounds.

According to Alan Harpham, WM’s Chairman, the St Albans-based ecumenical charity is looking for someone with a background in, and understanding of, business and the role that faith and spirituality plays in working life. He added: “In particular, we’re looking for someone who’ll not only provide strategic vision and direction but who will also seek and implement new and innovative ways of engaging faith and church with the business and work community.The role is a unique opportunity for a lay or ordained individual of any mainstream denomination with a background in, understanding of, or interest in business and the role faith and spirituality plays in working life.”

Among its various activities and initiatives, WM provides chaplaincy services anywhere – within Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire – where people work. These chaplains operate within the emergency services – in police stations, among fire and ambulance teams and so on – in the manufacturing industry; especially at Vauxhall Motors in Luton; in the ‘town centre retail’ environment; with those living and working along the Grand Union Canal, and at London Luton Airport.

In addition, WM has launched EPICC, its consultancy arm, which aims to bring greater recognition and status to spirituality in the workplace. EPICC’s emphasis is on human care within organisational strategy and culture, and it focuses on growing and developing an organisation and its people together, as well as creating an environment that draws out underlying wisdom and releases energy.

For further details of WM and the Executive Director’s role, contact workplacematters@stalbans.anglican.org or visit the organisation’s website: http://www.workplacematters.org.uk/

Comment: This is both an exciting and challenging, time for WM. The current economic situation means that there’s a growing need to provide spiritual support and guidance to people in the workplace – but this wealth of opportunities brings its own challenges, not least building effectively on existing networks to enable the right people to use the most appropriate ways to meet these needs.

Moreover, while bringing spiritual support (‘church’, if you like) to the workplace, WM also needs to represent the voice of the workplace (notably its spiritual needs) to churches which, by nature, tend to focus on communities other than those purely to do with work.

Signs of the season and the time

Posted on May 8, 2012 by Bob

Was Robbie or Gary the best singer?

For many years, trade magazines have devoted their August (or July/ August) editions to features on ‘training’ or ‘learning and development’ (L&D). The traditional rationale is that ‘real’ advertisers don’t advertise in that edition of the magazine because readers are on holiday. So that’s the edition of the magazine that doesn’t get read. Consequently, to salve the magazine’s conscience about not considering L&D at any other time of the year – and to make the industry that the magazine serves appear to have a soft, human side – it cynically devotes a few pages to L&D issues in August.

True to tradition, HR Director magazine has recently published its forward features for the August 2012 edition – and ‘learning through technology’ is, again, on the list. Interestingly, the published synopsis, inviting relevant feature proposals, says:

‘We are still in a mess, and any “people spend” has to be physical, visible, impactful and above all popular – like the new yukka plants in the canteen! The problem with IT stuff is, it’s kind of expensive, takes ages to set up, takes even longer for people to take on board and use properly – if at all – and isn’t very tactile or pretty. And so it is that learning through technology splits opinion like, who’s the best singer in Take That, Robbie or Gary? On the face of it, it all makes perfect sense to pipe learning through modern means of communication, it should be cheaper, convenient and empowering, and so right up there with the most obvious and natural IT applications. But learning through technology, well into the 21st century, epitomises the proverbial little girl with the proverbial little curl – when it’s good, it’s hugely enabling and when its bad, it stinks. There’s certainly no lack of options and partnerships out there, but how do HR directors avoid a potentially devastating blind-taste, guessing game?’

Comment: There speaks a ‘real’ businessperson: peddling the sort of opinion about learning technology that’s been prevalent anywhere other than among learning technology professionals for at least the last 20 years.

Anyone who has a soft spot in her/ his heart for learning technology should be more than a little concerned about this. Maybe s/he should also feel hurt and even betrayed that a magazine representing views of those as close to the learning technology profession as the HR world should be so dismissive of, and disparaging about, it.

In the cold hard light of day, though, these jaundiced journalistic comments illustrate that, despite its earnestness, the learning technology sector has failed to make its case for being taken seriously by the wider business world. If it couldn’t make that case during the so-called ‘boom’ years, it’s got a much tougher job to do so during these years of budget cutting austerity.

It’s too easy to be wise after the event and say that, in the good times, those in the learning technology industry were too concerned for themselves – and for their own success compared with their competitors – to collectively invest in promoting their industry as a whole (for example, as making a tangible, measurable contribution to business performance via knowledge and skills development). Now that budgets for L&D are not so ample or easy to tap – and learning technology has to compete strenuously with every other form of L&D for these meagre budgets – few learning technology vendors/ distributors are in a position to do anything to counter the swelling tide of ambivalence and indifference they’re experiencing from the wider business community.

DITA XML content standard update

Posted on May 4, 2012 by Bob

For those who’re not too sure of their acronyms, ‘DITA’ stands for the Darwin Information Typing Architecture, Learning & Training specialization. It’s a relatively new structured content XML format for producing online and instructor-led training and documentation materials.

The standard is issued by OASIS, the US-headquartered global consortium for open standards in the Information Society. OASIS aims to encourage the convergence of technical and training documentation within engineering and process orientated industries, such as the machine plants, semiconductor, automotive, financial, pharmaceutical, translation and defence industries.

Today’s instructional authors, designing technical training sessions within large engineering, manufacturing and process based industries, need to cope with some 90% of their input materials coming from disparate sources within their organisations. Typically, these include the product and plant engineering, design and marketing departments – all of which use different content packaging and exchange standards (for example, DocBook, ePub, IETM and/or S1000D).

All of these differ from those standards commonly used within learning/ training tools and platforms – such as SCORM, IMS and AICC content packaging and tracking interchange formats. Up to now, the lack of a common interoperability format across the technical documentation, training platforms and tools has limited the type of documents that training departments could receive as input from their technical counterparts to Word, PDF and HTML, for example.

Yet – to compete successfully in contemporary markets, reaching their workforce where and when they need field training and performance support – there is a need to create compelling training materials able to deal with the increasing complexity and blending of technical training formats, from instructor-led sessions to web-based training, mobile learning and so on.

The ‘cut and paste’ approach has been the most commonly used approach to producing technical documentation for online training delivery. This has resulted in high levels of content replication, low levels of content re-use and extremely high costs in engaging subject matter experts (SMEs) within never-ending proof-reading cycles.

All those engaged in designing training for new products and processes around the world have experienced high levels of inefficiency in online training design. So they’ve been looking for an improved interoperability format to allow them to exchange contents among the diverse and dispersed knowledge hubs within their organisations more easily.

The DITA Learning & Training specialization addresses this gap and brings new life to content interoperability across and within large organisations dealing with massive and rapid technical documentation and training materials production flows.

To help to draw attention to the DITA standard, exact learning solutions is running a series of webinars, workshops and closed DITA seminars for content strategists within large organisations. The next workshop is scheduled to be held in Utrecht, in The Netherlands, on 7^th June, and is connected with the DITA Information Energy 2012 conference.

The most recent webinar – scheduled for 23^rd May at 11am US Eastern Time, 10am US Central Time, 8am Pacific Time, 4pm BST and 5pm Central European Time – will explain the need for new generation structured content management standards and the benefit of adopting DITA. Delegates will also learn how DITA compares, and can be integrated with, other existing learning content formats such as SCORM Content Packaging and IMS Common Cartridge.

Places at the webinar are free but limited and granted on a ‘first come first served’ basis. To request a seat at the webinar, visit: http://gnstx.gr/eEX

For further details of eXact learning solutions’ DITA-related events,, send an email to m.leikas@exactls.com

Further details of DITA can be obtained from www.oasis-open.org/committees/dita/

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Monthly Archives: May 2012