The first time I encountered teachers and designers building serious gaming scenarios to help learners learn was in the late 1990s. “Gamification” according to its wiki, http://gamification.org, has been in the bloodstream since 2004. If it has taken Farmville and AngryBirds and X Box to awaken some people to the pervasive presence of game theory within all of our thinking about the way we learn, then they stand convicted of not living in the twenty first century. Gaming is now tightly wrapped around the way we learn: the problem is that we still do not do it consistently, in large enough contexts, to create ultimate learning value. People who call themselves publishers, information service solution providers, content developers etc still have the notion that the game is something you add to the mix to lighten the load, provide some variety, change the pace or overcome a tricky and boring learning essential. But what if gaming was the core to our learning, the methodological base for instruction and measurement. What if it was the package that replaced the training manual and accomplished its assessment as well as handled its updating? What if, as much biological evidence demonstrates, games are the way we learn and we are just now returning to a full recognition of what that means?

Sitting in an armchair in the City Lights bookstore in San Francisco one foggy day in June 2007 I opened a copy of Mackenzie Wark’s Gamer Theory, published that year as Version 2.0 of his blog GAM3Y 7H3ORY, a networked book hosted online by Bob Stein’s Institute for the Future of the Book. Here is a sample: “Here is the guiding principle of a future utopia, now long past: “To each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities”. In gamespace, what do we have? An atopia, a senseless, placeless realm where quite a different maxim rules: “From each according to his abilities – to each a rank and score? Needs no longer enter into it. Not even desire matters. Uncritical gamers do not win what they desire: they desire what they win. The score is the thing. The rest is agony.” (para 021).  Is this different to what you thought? Is it closer to passing that test, completing that continuous development assignment, getting those SATs, or satisfying all of those humiliating hurdles placed in the way of forward progress by those who have already progressed far enough forward not to be troubled by them any more. If you say “yes” to any of these questions then you are in danger of joining me on a dangerous road – towards a future for learning dominated by gaming.

But we are in good company. That hugely serious player, SAP, employs Mario Herger as its  Global Head of Gamification  (www.enterprize-gamification.com). MIT’s Learning Lab spawned Scratch (http://scratch.mit.edu/) to create and test learning games for younger people and Microsoft created Kodu (http://www.kodugamelab.com/), a programming environment designed to allow users to build their own games on the XBox. And in most countries there is now a serious gaming industry, often with 10 to 15 years of experience behind them, mostly making serious games for user organizations, and unvisited and unblest by the publishers who should be their natural collaborators. Centres of excellence here in the UK include inventive survivors like Desq (www.desq.co.uk), the Sheffield -based developer with almost 15 years of intensive work around immersive experiences like DoomEd or the SimScience environment built for the Institute of Physics. Or look at Pixelearning (www.pixelearning.com) in Birmingham and its training environments, or the company created by its founder, Kevin Corti (SoshiGames – http://www.soshigames.com/, exploiting customer retention through social gaming). Then, around London’s Old Street Silicon Roundabout, see how many of the 800 start-ups are games related, like Michael Acton Smith’s hugely successful MoshiMonsters (http://www.moshimonsters.com/). As a director of CreatureLabs many years ago I recognize the DNA! The games thing is on the march, but the content businesses old-style are not yet aligned with it.

So lets drop “gamification” if we are going to get into some social backlash. Really, games for learning are not like that lesson on Friday afternoon when the teacher showed a filmstrip (younger readers can insert film-loop, film, TV programme, slides, video etc according to age or taste) and we all slept or gazed out of the window. They are the very stuff of learning and the keywords which we shall associate with them are engagement, immersion, collaboration. They will have their problems, but as well as the future of learning they are also the future of assessment.

FOOTNOTE  While continuing to use this blog to record a view of information marketplaces and the players within them, I would also like to devote a regular item to looking at what I am increasingly calling the Post Digital Information World. This does not mean that I think that we shall renege at all on the digitalization of all forms of communication – just that once infrastructures are in place, and the majority of human society is connected to a networked society, it is conceivable that the next stages of development, while they are faster and even less supportive of current business models, will be different in type and style. The current debate about the future of email highlights this. More from me here later.

So when I heard his voice on the phone last week my first emotion was relief – that he had not simply given up and retired to Florida – and then agreement. Yes, we were 15 years too early. And many of the people we thought were primary customers, like the Yellow Page companies and the phone books and the industrial directories – are now either dead or dying, or in the trauma of complete technological makeover. Ross’s company, WAND Inc (www.wandinc.com) is now very widely acknowledged as a market leading player in horizontal and multi-lingual taxonomy and classification development. They are the player you go to if you have to classify content, if you are in a cross-over area between disciplines (he has a great case study around taxonomies for medical image libraries), and if you have real language problems (“make this search work just as effectively in Japanese and Spanish”). What they do is really simple.

Your taxonomy requirement is going to start with broad terms that define your content and its area of activity. These can then be narrowed and specified to give additional granularity in any specific field. These classifications can be incorporated into the WAND Preferred Term Code, given a number, and used in a programmatic, automated way to classify and mark up your content (www.datafacet.com). Preferred terms can be matched to synonyms, and the codes can be used to extend the process to very many different languages. So someone whose company, for example, was created in Spanish can be found in the same list as someone who has a Japanese outfit, as the result of a search made by a Chinese user working in Chinese.

And from synonyms we can extend the process  to extended terms themselves, and then map the WAND system to third party maps – think of UNSPSC, Harmonized Codes or NAICS, as well as those superficial and now dwindling Yellow Page classifications. WAND can isolate and list attributes for a term, and can then add brand information. All of these activities add value to commoditized data, and one would think that the newspaper industry at least would have been deep into this for 15 years. Yet few examples – Factiva is an honourable example – exist which demonstrate this.

Not the least interesting part of Ross’s account of the past few years was the interest now shown by major enterprize software and systems players in this field of activity. Reports from a variety of sources (IDC, Gartner) have high-lighted the time being wasted in  internal corporate search. Both Oracle and Microsoft have metadata initiatives relevant to this, and it still seems to me more likely that Big Software will see the point before the content industry itself. With major players like Thomson Reuters (Open Calais) deeply concerned about mark-up, there are signs that an awareness of the role of taxonomy is almost in place, but as the major enterprize systems players bump and grunt competitively with the major, but much smaller, information services and solutions players, I think this is going to be one of the competitive areas.

And there is a danger here. As we talk more and more about Big Data and analytics, we tend to forget that we cannot discard all sense of the component added value of our own information. We know that our content is becoming commoditized, but that is not improved by ignoring now conventional ways of adding value to it. We also know that the lower and more generalized species of metadata are becoming commoditized; look for instance at the recent Thomson Reuters agreement with the European Commission to widen the ability of its competitors to utilize its RICs equity listings codes. This type of thing means that, as with content, we shall be forced to increase the value we add through metadata in order to maintain our hold on the metadata – and content – which we own.

And, one day, the only thing worth owning – because it is the only thing people search and it produces most of the answers that people want – will be the metadata itself. When that sort of sophisticated metadata becomes plugged into commercial workflow and most discovery is machine to machine and not person to machine we shall have entered a new information age. Just let us not forget what people like Ross Leher did to get us there.

Now, lets pull back a step further and see how information services change networked industry and society at large. I only have space for two examples. The first was driven home to me on Monday at a dinner given by the Real Time Club. The speaker, Dr Siavash Mahdavi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siavash_Haroun_Mahdavi), spoke on 3D printing, and by the time he had finished, and we had examined printed hip joints and shoe inserts amongst other examples the penny was beginning to drop for me. We are moving in the network from manufacturing by extrusion processes through moulds, the industrial revolution pre-digital world, to additive manufacturing, creating products in software and instructing printing devices to build them in extremely thin 2D layers one on top of the other until the desired shapes and structures are created. Medical implants have had the publicity here, but gold jewellery was mentioned as an application. This is a design – intensive, network efficient manufacturing world in which design and the actual printer can be in totally different places. Printing can take place using any materials which can be chemically – adapted to the process. Customization (the running shoe insert designed for the imprint and weight distribution of your own foot) and personalisation are at the centre of this. Every product can be made for you. However, it remains a requirement that everything we know about the performance, qualities and expectations of an artificial hip are brought to bear in the network upon the design process, as the information services world creates the bullets for manufacturing workflow to fire. And all this is going strong now: the lead engineering player in 3D printing in the UK is Renishaw (http://www.renishaw.com/en/additive-manufacturing-news–15505) (and with eery coincidence  it announced today a strong trading year, with sales up 11%).

If this is not bizarre enough, I stumbled upon a Google story this week about automated motoring. Apparently Google’s own patented technology had racked up 200,000 autonomous driverless miles by the end of last year. This may just be another Google enthusiasm which runs out of steam, but it does have a history (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car), and a great deal of real research, and my bet is that it will happen in this over-crowded isle a lot quicker than the UK estimate of 2056. Extending the network to our over-populated motorways may be the only way to squeeze more capacity from infrastructure we do not have the space to rebuild, and to control scarce parking resource. Driving my car to the motorway and then surrendering control to a system that governs inter-car distance and speed until I leave is a likely first stage. And as the car becomes part of the network, then its ability to intelligently appraise where it is, where it is going and how it is feeling becomes a natural extension of a world of autos which are already computers on wheels. Information service solutions will be vital to feed this activity: important players like ITOWorld (www.itoworld.com) already assemble critical geospatial data, matched at the vital micro level by services like Elgin (http://www.elgin.gov.uk/) who can tell you about every road repair in Britain. At the moment this is part of the world of local government and planning: tomorrow it will have to be part of the knowledge base of your motor car.

When I think about examples like these I become more and more convinced that the new world of information service knowledge and intelligence will be more important than the old one, patrolled by intermediaries like librarians, and governed by quite irrelevant business models like advertising. And here is a world where the use shapes the content, and where suppliers are involved in developing solutions for sectors or even individual companies. Here the information services and solutions players have forgotten whether they are “content” or “software” players, because it has no bearing on the end result, and they had to have both elements to play in any case.

So who will do this stuff well? Undoubtedly the Indians and the Chinese and the Brazilians amongst others. But in many ways this future vision levels out a lot of the inequalities of the old and new worlds. You do not need a great deal of cheap labour to compete here. Capital too will have a different importance if you can custom manufacture close to the point of use, and avoid shipping and warehousing. I quite fancy the chances of this old island: good with design, strong start-up culture, great software development skills, good financial services investment culture, strong presence in information and education markets globally. Or at least I would, if our politicians did not think that modernity was returning to the railway investment mode of Britain in the 1840s, or aping the French and the Japanese high speed trains of the 1960s and 1970s. The infrastructure requirement here would be to create the most intensive high bandwidth broadband coverage in Europe. Fat chance of that while politicians think there are more votes to be got by shaving 34 minutes off the journey time from London to Birmingham!

Some of my friends call this type of article ”futuristic madness” (and that was the polite one!). But, to me, the real madness lies in taking the formats of the Gutenberg age (books, newspapers etc), carefully wrapping them in software and delivering them in facsimile form across the network – and then calling these eFormats Innovation!

So when I read the words “This is important not only for the supplementary data accompanying one’s experiment, but even negative results” I came alive immediately and read consciously what I had hitherto skipped. You see, in all the years that I have spoken with and interviewed researchers, when we get off the formal ground of OA or conventionally published articles, or the iniquities of publishers and the inadequacy of librarians, we get back to some stubborn issues that cling to the bottom of the bucket. One is what do you do with the remaining content derived from the research process which did not get into the article, where it was summarized and where conclusions were drawn from it. I mean the statistical findings, the raw computations. the observations and logs, the audio and video diaries, the discarded hypotheses etc. Vital stuff, if anyone is going to walk that way again. Even more vital is the detritus of failure: the experiment which never made a paper since it demonstrated what we already know, or where the model proved inadequate to demonstrate what we sought to show. Researchers going back to find why a generation of research went astray from a finding that proved fallible often need this content: in terms of detective fiction it is the cold case evidence. Yet more often than not it is not available.

So here is what I found in the nearly discarded press release. Nature Publishing’s Digital Science company (yes, them again!) have refinanced figshare (http://figshare.com) and yesterday they relaunched it. What does it do? It archives all the stuff I have been talking about, providing a Cloud environment with unlimited public public storage. They call it “a community-based open data platform for scientific research”. I call it a wonderful way of embedding research workflow into a researchable storage environment that eventually becomes a search magnet for researchers wanting to check the past for surprising correlations. At the moment it is just a utility, a safe place to put things. But if I just add a copy of the article itself then it becomes a record of a research process. Put hundreds of thousands of those together and then you have a Big Data playground. Use intelligent analytics and new insights can be derived, and science moves forward on the tessellate of previous experimentation – only quicker, with less effort and more productivity for the researcher. And much less is lost, including the evidence from the wrong turnings that turned out to be right turnings. (http://digital-science.com/press-releases/)

So will there be 20 of these? Well, there may be two, but if figshare gets an early lead perhaps there will only be one. After all , the reason  researchers would come to value this storage would be having their content in close proximity to others in their field. And while early progress is likely to run quick in Life Sciences, this application has relevance in every field of study. And it also calls into question ideas of what “publishing” actually is. By storing and making available these data, are figshare “publishing” them. They are certainly not editing or curating them. Network access alters many things and here, once again, it catches publishing on the hop. If traditional publishers confine themselves to making margins solely from the first appearance of an article then traditional publishing in this sector is in severe difficulty, whatever happens to the Open Access debate. Elsevier and Nature clearly get it: go upstream in value terms or drown in commoditized content where you are. But does anyone else see it? And why not?

At the heart of the Oracle launch is a Hadoop license. This baby elephant lies at the heart of almost everything. The two Hadoop – based commercializations, have both raised finance in the lead-up to 2012: Cloudera ($40m) and Hortonworks ($20m), while other sector players like MapR who also exploit Hadoop found 2011 a really good time to raise money. And this had a radiating effect on the whole data handling sector. Neo 4j, a database technology (NeoTechnology, based in Malmo and Menlo Park) for  graph storage and resolution raised $10m in a round led by Fidelity. Meanwhile, Microsoft signed a deal with Horton works, IBM said it would launch Hadoop in the Cloud, EMC (Greenplum) went for MapR, Dell announced a Hadoop-based initiative, and the world waits and wonders what Hewlett Packard will do, now that it has Autonomy for analytics.

So now we have plenty of initiatives, and, as usual, not much idea of who the next generation of users will be. The first generation speak for themselves. We can see the benefits that Facebook derive from being able to used Hadoop-based tools to find connections and meanings in their content that would have been impossible to cost-effectively reveal in a prior age. And the same would be true of such unlikely bedfellows as the Department of Homeland Security, or Walmart, or Sony (think Playstation Network), or the Israeli Defence Force, or the US insurance industry (via Lexis Risk), or Lexis Nexis (who announced a Big Data integration with MarkLogic), let alone the two players who effectively started all this: Yahoo! (Hadoop) and Google (MapReduce). So asking where it goes next is a legitimate question, but one which can only be answered if we accept that the next group of users are never going to recreate  the Google server farms in order to break into these advantageous processing environments. The next group of intensive users will have their XML content on MarkLogic, or their graphical data on Neo 4j. They will want to use the US census data remotely (so will contract with Amazon for process time on the Amazon web presence), and will use a large variety of third party content held in similar ways. Some of their own content will still be held locally on MySQL databases – like Facebook – while others will be working in part or fully in the Cloud, and combining that with their own NoSQL applications. But the essential point here is that no one will be building huge data warehousing operations governed by rigid and mechanistic filing structures. Literally, we are increasingly leaving the data where it is, and bringing the analytical software to it, in order to produce results that are independent of any single data source.

And this too produces another sort of revolution. The front door to working in this way is now the organizational software itself. When Lexis Risk announced at the end of last year that they were going to take HPCC open source, a number of critics saw that as turning their back to an exploitation opportunity. Yet it makes very real sense in the context of Oracle, Microsoft and IBM seeking to build their own “solutions”. Some businesses will want to run their own solutions, and will make a choice between open source Hadoop and open source HPCC. Others in systems integration will seek out open source environments to create unique propositions. But since it was always unlikely that Lexis Risk was going to challenge the enterprize software players in their own bailiwick, then open source is a way of getting a following, harvesting vital feedback, and earn not insignificant returns in servicing and upgrading users.

I am also delighted to see that other winners seem likely to be MarkLogic, since I have been proud of working with them and speaking at their meetings for a number of years. For publishers and information providers, it is now clear that XML remains the route forward. But MarkLogic 5 is clearly being positioned as the information service providers socket for plugging into the Big Data environment. Anyone who believes that scientists will NOT want to analyse all data in a segment, or engineers source all relevant briefs with their ancilliary information, or lawyers cross examine all documentation regardless of location, or pharma companies examine research files in the context of contra-indications should stop reading now and take up fishing. My observation is that Big Data is like Due Diligence: once someone does it, even if the first results are not impressive, all competitors have to do it. The risk of not trying to find the indicative answer by the most advanced methods is too great to take.

The key trends of 2011 will always be, for me, the landmark strides made towards really incorporating content into the workflow of professionals, and the progress made in associating previously unthinkable data collections (not linked by metadata, structure and /or location) in ways that allowed us draw out fresh analytical conclusions not otherwise available to us. These are the beginnings of very long processes, but already I think that they have redefined “digital publishing” or whatever it is that we name the post-format (book, chapter, article, database, file) world we have been living in now for a few years and are at last beginning to recognize. Elsevier recognized it all right with their LIPID MAPS lipid structures App (http://bit.ly/LipidsApp) earlier this month and I should have been quicker to see this. This App on SciVerse does all of the workflow around lipid metabolisms  and is thus integral to the research into lipids-based diseases (stroke, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, arthritis, to name a few). The LIPIDS MAP consortium is a multi-institutional, research-based organization which has marshalled into its mapping all of the metadata and nomenclature available – common and systematic names, formula, exact mass, InChiKey, classification hierarchies and links to relevant public databases. Elsevier adds the entity searching that allows the full text and abstracts to support the mapping and in data analysis terms to draw the sting from a huge amount of researcher process effort. Whenever I hear the old Newtonian saw about “standing on the shoulders of giants” I replace shoulders with “platforms”.

So how do Elsevier pull off a trick like this? By being ready and spending years  in the preparatory stages. Elsevier, in my view, has become two companies, and alongside a traditional, conservative journal publisher has evolved a high tech science data handling company, conceived in Science Direct and reaching, via Scirus and Scopus a sort of  adolescence in SciVerse. This effort now moves beyond pure data into the worktool App, driven by SciVerse Applications (www.applications.sciverse.com) and the network of collaborating third party developers which is increasingly driving these developments (http://developers.sciverse.com). This is and will be a vital component. Not even Elsevier can do all these things alone. The future is collaborative, and here is the market leader showing it understands that, and knows that science goes forward by many players, large and small, acting together. And if developers can find, under the Elsevier technology umbrella, a way of exposing their talents and earning from them (as authors were wont to do with publishers) then another business model extension has been made. There is much evidence here of the future of science “publishing” – and while it may be doubted that many (two?) companies can accomplish these mutations successfully, Elsevier are making their bid to be one of them.

And there is always a nagging Google story somewhere left un-analysed, usually because one could either write a book on the implications or ignore them , on the grounds that they may never happen. But Google is the birthplace of so much that has happened in Big Data that I am loath to neglect BigQuery. With an ordinary sized and shaped company this would all be different. I could say for example that LexisNexis is taking its Big Data solution, HPCC (www.hpccsystems.com) Open Source because it wants to get its product implemented in many vertical market solutions without having to go head to head with IBM, Oracle or SAP. But Google clearly relishes the thought of taking on the major analytics players on the enterprize solutions platforms, and clearly has that in mind with this SQL based service, which has been around for about a year and now enters beta with a waitlist of major corporate users anxious to test it. And yet, wait a minute, Google, Facebook and Twitter led us into the No SQL world because the data types, particularly mapping, and the size of databases involved, pushed us into the Big Data age and past the successful solutions created in the previous decade in SQL enquiry. So is what Google is doing here driven mostly by its analysis of the data and capabilities of major corporates (Google doing market research and not giving the market what Google thinks is good for them!) or is this something else, a low level service environment that may take off and splutter into life, or may beta and burn like so many predecessors. Hard to tell but worth asking the question of the Google Man Near You. Meanwhile, the closest thing to a Big Data play in publishing markets remains MarkLogic 5.0. Coming back to where I started on Big Data, one of the most significant announcements in a crowded December had Lexis Nexis – law this time, not Risk Solutions – using MarkLogic 5 as the way to bring its huge legal holdings together, search them in conjunction with third party content and mine previously unrecognized connectivities. Except that I should not have said “mine”. Apparently “mining” and “scraping” are now out of favour: now we “extract” as we analyse and abstract!

However, I wish every scraper and miner seeking  a way forward every good wish for 2012. And me? Well, I am going to check out those Orang Utans. They may have rewritten Shakespeare by now.

Until the day before yesterday, that is. For on the 14 December the European Union’s Official Journal published a settlement offer from Thomson Reuters in an competition enquiry which has run for two years (http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:C:2011:364:0021:0024:EN:PDF) The case concerns Thomson Reuters’ use of its RICs codes. Insofar as they have become the standard way in which traded equities are described in datafeeds, the fact that the market bought the Reuters solution as a surrogate for standardization did give Thomson Reuters competitive advantage – and this is made clear by the fact that the Commission investigation was prompted by its commercial rivals. But that advantage was not unearnt, and the standardization that resulted from it brought benefits across the market. Now Thomson Reuters, to end the process, offers licensing deals and increased access to its metadata. This may turn out to be a momentous moment for the industry.

I have no interest here in examining whether Thomson Reuters are right or wrong to seek a deal. From Microsoft to Google to Apple, the frustrations of enquiries by the competition commissioner’s office in Brussels have worn down the best and most resilient. But I do want to comment om what may be happening here. If you accept my thesis that content is becoming increasingly commoditized and that systems for describing it are increasingly valuable, we may have to recalibrate our picture of what is happening as a result of this news. What if, in fact, the commoditization involved here spreads slowly up the entire information value chain over time. In this model, the famous value pyramid which we have all used to subjugate our audiences and colleagues is under commoditization water at its base, which is where raw data and published works are kept. Now the next level is becoming slightly damp from this rising tide, as descriptive modalities get prised off and become part of the common property of all information users. So information vendors scramble further up the pyramid, seeking dry land where ownership can be re-asserted. Maybe more advanced metadata will offer protection and enhance asset value. The Scorm dataset in an educational product can annotate learning outcomes and allow objects and assessment to be associated. Or, following the financial services theme here, maybe we add Celerity-style intelligence to content which allows a news release to be “read” in machine-to-machine dialogue, and trading actions sparked by the understanding created. We will certainly do all these things, because no one will buy our services if they do not accord with the most appropriate descriptive norms available. But will they protect our intellectual property in conent or data? No, I am increasingly afraid that they will not.

It will take many years to happen. And it will happen at a very different pace in different marketplaces. But the days when you valued a company by its content IP, by its copyrights and its unique ownership value have been over for some time. And now we can see that the higher order values are themselves becoming susceptible to competition regulation which seems, in this age, to over-ride IP rights in every instance. So what are we actually doing when we say we are building value? Normally, it seems to me, we are combining content with operational software systems to create value represented by utility. From the app to the workflow system, content retains its importance in the network because we shape it not just for research, but for action, for process, for communication. And that, after all, is where the definition of a networked society with a networked economy lies.

And if we were in doubt about this, reflect on the current pre-occupation about Big Data. Is our society going to be willing to hold up the vital release of “new” scientific knowledge from the ossified files of journal publishers just because some of this stuff is owned by Elsevier and some by Wiley? The water of analytic progress is already flowing around the dams of copyright ownership, and this week surged past a major player protecting his coding, though the proposed licensing scheme does leave a finger in the hole in the dyke. We seem to me to be running at ever greater speed towards a service economy in professional information where the only sustaining value is the customer appreciation of service given, measured in terms of productivity, process improvement, and compliance . These benefits will be created from content largely available on the open web, and increasingly using metadata standards which have gone generic and are now, like RICs, part of the common parlance of the networked marketplace. The language of IP in he information economy is getting to sound a bit old-fashioned.

Certainly it is always alleged that his predecessor, Dick Harrington, did not know that a discreet negotiation continued behind the scenes bringing Thomson and Reuters together with no place in it for him. That, if true, must have been a surprise. Did Tom Glocer come by a similar “confronts reality” shock, as the FT termed it? And what was the reality that was being confronted? I can think of at least three realities that must needs be in the minds of Thomson Reuters CEOs, and none of them relate to the decline in market value which is widely blamed for triggering these changes. The first, and most important, is the nature of the company’s ownership. Wherever a big player is really 55% controlled by the family of its original founders, confidence issues will come into play. This is real control, not the artificial dominance of voting shares practised by Murdochs or Harmsworths in defiance of market views of good practice. And this real control means that, as in the eighteenth century, once the incumbent first minister loses the confidence of the King and his closest advisor, it is impossible to continue in office. That rule applied to the reign of Ken Thomson and John Tory, as it does in the Woodbridge Trust of David Thomson and Geoffrey Beattie. It is simple and natural; you go when the owners no longer believe you can deliver.

And since Thomson Reuters are the largest professional player in the marketplace, it is worth asking what these men need to have confidence about. As far as the press commentary is concerned, one would think that the only issue is the Eikon terminal and its slow start. Well, the history of Reuters is littered with slow starts, one of which let Bloomberg into the marketplace to begin with, and several of which cumulated to create this peculiar position where the smartest and most modern application is also the cheapest and has lost market share in the recession to Bloomberg’s older and more expensive option. In each of these cycles the market for trading systems has returned to rough parity. Over at the professional side of Thomson they know about these cycles, having sometimes been up and sometimes down, but in that market they are currently in the Bloomberg position and Lexis are in the Reuters position. So did Tom Glocer’s acceleration towards the swing doors relate to all this?

Certainly this may have been the symptom, but perhaps it was not the underlying problem. The mandate that Tom Glocer accepted was to build an integrated company and it is possible, as the company became wracked by the issue of combining the parts to create new growth as a whole, that the Woodbridge owners began to doubt whether this aim was ever going to be achieved through these policies. Certainly the sacrificial slaughter of a layer of Reuters management and the balkanization of the company into an unmanageable number of operating units did not lull any misgivings in Toronto, though they may have given rise to rejoicing in old Thomson management circles, where the attitudes of their new Reuters colleagues had been met with all of the enthusiasm that the Anglo-Saxons showed to their new Norman rulers. In the new dispensation we are back down to five divisions, with former Reuters strategy chief (latterly running GRC) David Craig taking the old Market divisions, Legal going to Mike Suchsland, Tax and Accounting to Brian Peccarelli, and Global Growth to Shanker Ramamurthy. Jon Robson gets the Business Development role. What factor is common to all of these? None of them comes from a very long term Reuters and/or Thomson background. A generation has effectively passed.

And what of Jim Smith, the new CEO. Some commentators have him as a caretaker, awaiting the new strategic leader to be found and installed. Others, and I incline to this view, see him as chairman and arbiter of resource and manpower development and deployment to support and drive the integration of these two companies. So not a traditional Thomson CEO, any more than Erik Enstrom is a traditional Reed Elsevier CEO. In the latter case one has a feeling of a profoundly numerate portfolio owner looking to encourage the growth points with acquisition investment, dispose of underperformers and reward successful managers who reliably produce results. It is almost as if Reed Elsevier does not see a need anymore for an informing central strategy about its market positioning, other that “we will invest in anything that works and avoid the bits that don’t”. By contrast, Thomson Reuters is built around a distinctive market positioning, a “big niche” strategy and definite ideas about what it needed to buy, sell or grow to make the aspiration work. And yet… once you have the strategy in place, here too market strategic thinking devolves to the operating unit quite quickly. Hopefully that means that in both of these market leading players, the doors will soon stop revolving at the speed of light and we can get back  the real problems of addressing the needs of global information markets in times of scarcity.

PS. One of the items on Jim Smith’s agenda must surely be the finalization of the sale of Healthcare, whose projected disposal was an early agenda item for his predecessor. It is hard to remember but this move has now been projected for almost four years!

After I read the above note I then read Jack Stilgoe’s review of Michael Nielson’s book in the Guardian (26.11.2011). While I have yet to read the book, my head is already in the debate in a micro-sample of three views and you, if indeed you are, make up a fourth. Whether you pass your views on to others or not, we are participating in a rapid sharing process which must have effects of its own on communication. If we were scientists and practising what Michael Nielson preaches we would be sharing our thinking, and our results, in very much the same way, standing aside from the competitive sides of our nature to create progress by collaboration within the network. Question: when we say that living in a networked society will cause all sorts of changes to the way we communicate and act, do we mean that these will be changes for the better in our fundamental characteristics as people? Dear Reader, are you an optimist about the improvability of mankind through communication – in which case Facebook may be the saviour of the race? Or, do you believe, like some philosophers of evolution, that the changes that occur will be random mutations, from which some, over time, will become built into the  prevalent response mode of network users?

This week I have been thinking a great deal about teachers as well as scientists. Teachers now accept the potential gains from sharing content in a way which would have been anathema to their predecessors. We now have approaching (early next year) 2 million teachers from all over the world sharing their own treasured and successful routines with each other on TES Connect (http://www.tes.co.uk/teaching-resources/). This is a huge demonstration of altruism, and a strong desire to be recognized by peers. In appealing to his fellow scientists to adopt Open Science, Michael Nielsen seeks that same altruism, and argues well for the effectiveness of collaboration, but he is doing so in a context where peer recognition is baked into the way scientists report and publish. Of itself, the network will not change that, and all players (scholars, publishers, schoarly societies and librarians) have colluded willingly with the transfer of the networking of the paper-based world into the digital network with great enthusiasm.

So is there no effective collaborative science? Certainly there is. A very good example which I seem to have been writing about for a decade is Signalling Gateway (http://www.signaling-gateway.org/), where users greatly appreciate the need to share results – and analytical techniques and tools – in a very rapid time frame , but where participant research teams seem to retain identity (and probably funding sources). Nothing is more competitive in research than access to the money. Yet collaboration is present, and in neuroscience, or the Polymath mathematics project, or in the human genome  research programme, there are good examples of  collaborative success and altruistic sharing. So, if you think this is a desirable outcome, how do you breakdown the conservatism of scientists?

Much as you breakdown the conservatism of teachers, I imagine. You help them to create local, team or institution -based networking which returns real rewards in terms of workflow and productivity. Just as the school budget and timetable system, and resource sharing  amongst a community of schools to raise standards through shared content have made a real impression on how schools run and teachers teach (I was impressed this week to see that every US state has now adopted iSchool standards which allow for virtual education systems) so I know that as research teams build better internal network usage and more effective control of content, then the confidence required for Michael Nielson’s wider aims will emerge. So hopefully no government will start flinging funds at Open Science: it would be better spent mandating network compliance on the use of lab chemicals and ensuring that networked analytics were available to ensure that what is known to the network at present can be shared by all participants in the network.

And these are thoughts for publishers and information providers too. We are often faced with a radical urge to change emanating from the top of a deeply conservative community of users. Our task, surely, is to work on the infrastructure and let the profession in question take care of the timing. This can be hugely frustrating, but like Michael Nielsen, we too cannot force a model of change on marketplaces.

Michael Nielsen’s book is “Reinventing Discovery: the new era of networked science” (Princeton University Press). I note with pleasure that it was sponsored by George Soros, a man who has done more good than most on this planet, and whose belief in Sir Karl Popper’s Open Society theories, ingested from the great man himself at LSE, have been a lifelong inspiration. But every change has a precurser, and putting Open in front of something does not change anything. A recent Washington Post article on Virtual Schools was contributed by my best reader/editor:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/virtual-schools-are-multiplying-but-some-question-their-educational-value/2011/11/22/gIQANUzkzN_story.html?wprss=

“Duedil is a new business information company that offers free financial information sourced from UK’s Companies House (Public Sector Information). It is so confident in the quality of its data, that it offers a £5 payment if one finds any discrepancies in its financials, no questions asked. The company was launched in April 2011 by Damian Kimmelman, owner of “We Are VI Ltd” and co-founder of Mackin Gaming. Duedil claims in its website to have the largest database of free company financials in the world! That is a tall order for an upstart that is only several months in operation. Duedil aggregates data from all over the web and bring this to users along-side information which it pays for. It says the information will correspond directly with the information found at Companies House delivering company financial statements, going back 10 years, with company histories, name changes, litigations, director lists, family graphs & more. According to Duedil, it is funded by Passion Capital, who is predominantly funded by the UK government. Other investors are some of the people behind Skype, LastFM, Yahoo!, AOL & QXL/Tradus, and was chosen as a Microsoft Bizspark company.”

This service is well worth a look. For one thing, the data presentation is good enough to seriously challenge the sector players, and for another the information collection is also hugely competitive. But the irony comes in the thought that a freemium model could be used to take a Trojan Horse right into the middle of the commercial credit rating encampment. Industry professionals rightly point out that Duedil would have to support a great deal of advertising to support such a service long term. But what if that is not the point at all. Instead, a cogent strategy here would concentrate on getting very high free usage levels, and all the time stretch those staid competitors by adding more and more Open Web derived content into the mix, so that the comparison was not with publicly available “official” content, but with the Duedil selection above and beyond that. Then, when you have the attention of the audience, you can begin to charge subscriptions for higher level activities: in-greater-depth analysis, time-elapsed reporting on watch lists, custom service applications for automated purchasing systems, social media-style buying clubs based on shared content with user groups etc. And when you get that second level market locked in, then you will be able to sell plenty of service advertising on the still-free core site.

The creators of DueDil have grasped a key point that the established market has long since conveniently forgotten. The market is all about the collection of commoditized data from the web, and there really is no defensible barrier to entry in that business. Insofar as credit scoring and the development of formulae for rating credit worthiness are concerned, the established industry is on safer ground, but as we used to say on the farm in my youth, if you try to sell potatoes with the dirt on them, you get rich for a while until people realize that clean potatoes cost no more, and are better value. Attempts to sell on openly available content as if it was an “answer” fits this case, and this is the bluff that DueDil calls. Soon, as in every other sector in every information market that I know, the players here those who seek survival will be heading up the value chain. Analytics, the application of Big Data principles and practice, the widespread integration of workflow modelling with third party strategic alliances – all of these are part of the future of a sector which we still call Credit and Business Information, but which we will increasingly come to see as whole web monitoring for business and personal performance.

And as that happens, so will consolidation become more interesting. Choicepoint and Lexis may have been an early sign. Both in the enterprize software solutions field and in the major B2B holdings there must be potential interest in those of the big sector players who add real value. But lets emphasize “value” again – DueDil have demonstrated that the value from pure data collection is negligible, and consolidators, especially if they are deeply into advanced taxonomic search and linked data, may find that smaller regional players in the existing industry have little to add. In the next play, much of their data will look as insignificant as the large and once much vaunted databases of the directory publishers do now.

In short, DueDil is a mouse that roared, and while the elephant of Big Credit is still in the room, he is trying to stand on the curtain rail!

(Declare an interest – I am currently chairman of BIIA – a powerhouse of industry discussion in Asia Pacific!)