Jun
3
Post-Modern B2B: Doing the Unthinkable
Filed Under B2B, Blog, Education, eLearning, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, STM, Uncategorized, Workflow | 3 Comments
Unthinkable is not too strong a word. The world in which I grew up in B2B is now over, and some weeks you live through a few days when everything you see and read hammers the message home. This has been one. I find huge encouragement in what I see the business and professional business markets doing – risking their lives to save their lives – yet I am still amazed, given the conservative resistance to change, that they are doing it at all.
So the tech stuff we can now take for granted. In my life in work we have gone from dial-up to fixed disc to IP network and now to mobile and still many people who call themselves “publishers” are doing fundamentally what they have always done, while reacting to change by altering the filters, adjusting the business models and hoping for the best. And what did I think would happen? Well, here are some of my expectations of Post-Modern B2B:
- there would be a diminishing emphasis on content, its ownership and proprietory nature
- the asset would become the understanding of customer needs, and turning that into trust and authority by virtue of satisfying those needs with solutions that satisfied my mantra: productivity gain, decision-making enhancement, and compliance management
- the business model would change in line with this, and settle around service contracts and content rental
- users would stop being researchers and start being fully informed participants in workflow and process
- and in order to make this happen, those who had formerly fought to the death about content ownership would cross licence content to each others’ solutions, co-market solutions around shared content, enter into lifetime rental arrangements with users and generally behave in an almost exactly opposite manner to the way they have generally behaved for the last 40 years.
All through the early Internet years, whenever someone like me suggested to a roomful of publishers that the very fact that individuals were networked to each other would completely change the way in which information was used for communication in business or the professions, there was that funny little smirking smile, that faint twist of the lips, that suggested that the listener was humouring you, and you would soon get better. These were the years of “Well, just show me somewhere where it has worked” or “I see what you mean, but who is making money out of it?”. There were days when I wondered if I would live long enough to see a new world of communication and information unfold.
And then there are other weeks, and this is one, when I cry Hallelujah! Have your read your Outsell Insights this week, for example? Or looked at some of the key press releases? Outsell’s David Bousfield reports (https://clients.outsellinc.com/insights/?p=11489) on a new move by Elsevier to create geographical workflow. Its GeoFacets interface, designed as a solution for the research problems of geosciences researchers, enables them to map all of the data contained in Elsevier’s massive collection of scholarly publishing. But it would not be a solution if it did not also map into this context the commercial research created and held by completely different sorts of organizations. So it did the rational thing and struck a deal with IHS and Wood Mackenzie, leading sources of the commercial data, in order to invest in GeoFacets the one thing that is vital to solution -orientated users: completeness. David’s fascinating note reminds us that geophysical content, because of the overarching presence of GIS systems, is a natural for this, but, for publishers, as Dr Johnson, would put it, this type of collaboration is as hard as a woman preaching or teaching a bear to dance. Since both of those are now totally commonplace I expect to see many more deals like this.
And so I went to a different screen and found another model at work. On 2 June, Wolters Kluwer Health and Pharma Solutions announced a deal with Decision Resources governing those customers who these two big players in pharma information have in common. They will effectively provide joint access to their pharma markets data which will allow both datasets – WK’s Source Data Analytics and Decision Resources’ Fingertip Formulary and Health Leaders InterStudy – to be integrated. Existing customers – and no doubt new ones seeking the cross-over deal – will be able to create their own solutions with a complete dat environment. Any bets on how long it takes to move best of breed client solutions into marketable products, or indeed how soon these players will want to be doing joint marketing? (http://www.news-medical.net/news/20110603/Decision-Resources-Wolters-Kluwer-Health-Pharma-create-TPA-process-for-mutual-customers.aspx).
Elsewhere in the Outsell oeuvre this week I found David Curle (https://clients.outsellinc.com/insights/?p=11499) in a state of shock. He had discovered that lawyers were spending less time on research than in years gone by. Having spent formative years building law databases I read his piece with mounting excitement. So lawyers too want answers, not research facilities. When the most conservative of our brethren begin to feel that they don’t want look up, but they do want the assurance that what they should have been aware of they have been notified about, then “solutioning” is about to break out full flood.
And, finally, let me end where I started the week. The Nature Education announcement on a new style of educational resource (I refuse to pander and call it an eTextbook) had a very distinguishing element. The removal of “product ownership” with its assumed rights of replication and lending, and the start of content rental. This is a hallmark of change, and indicates much about the downgrading of content per se and the arrival of solutions. The Principles of Biology is a solution. It will get you through your exams, so hire it now and we will keep in up to date for you (http://www.nature.com/nature_education/biology.html).
In each of these developments this week I see the movement and re-creation of the B2B markets playing out. So please do not ask me who is making it work and whether they are making money. It is time to pack away the scepticism and embrace change – by living it.
May
27
Education in Everything
Filed Under Blog, eBook, Education, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
We who dare to call ourselves “analysts” of information marketplaces must bear a heavy burden of guilt. As we analyse we are forced to categorize, and as we categorize we over-simplify, and as we over-simplify we construct truly skewed pictures of market activity, sometimes seized upon by sectoral groups to make sectional points. One frustrating exemplar of this for me was always academic spending, as industry strategists sought on the one hand to get a grip on what content access universities bought, while many publishers sought to narrow the focus to books and journals, thus omitting entirely the huge sums spent on data and flattering their market share in a smaller “marketplace”. Similar contortions exist around education and training. I observe that almost every publisher I know is definably “educational” (a context, not a category), and, of course, every vertical marketplace devotes considerable amounts to education in formal and informal contexts. This implies a huge marketplace which is really hard to categorize, so we define it by identifying a sub-group of players whose interests are wholly or mostly educational, and let them stand as a proxy. This may serve for some trend analysis purposes, but it is essentially arbitrary. I was very amused yesterday when one of our finest UK educational publishers said to me that she could discern market share moves “from the EPC figures”. The EPC (Educational Publishers Council), an offshoot of the UK’s Publishers Association, collects data from its members, and thus records the sales of school books and software from sources that define themselves as publishers. Thus it forms a small proportion of school spending on educational content, and one whose trend line may or may not reflect buying patterns in schools. Turn to training and the problem is magnified many times: trainers and corporates buy what suits them whatever the source, and increasingly training and assessment environments are built into information products and services that might ostensibly be about a wholly different process or workflow.
For these reasons amongst others I read Joe Esposito’s two pieces on “Creating a New University Press” on Scholarly Kitchen (http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/author/jesposito/) this week with great relish. Much of what he says applies to starting any form of new “press” (glorious anachronism there!). He clearly feels that what he describes as a “library publishing” model is viable, and I can see that this would make sense of things like institutional repositories, which are surely currently collections without purpose for the most part. But I am wholly on his side when he says that the New University Press “sits outside of any particular institutions, is borne-digital, avoids areas where established publishers have staked out territory, experiments with publishing forms and distribution channels and is NFP (not for profit).” And his examples – PLoS, JSTOR, the Humanities eBook programme at ACLS, and OCLC – while having market impact on spending, are very hard to categorize and may or may not be in anyone’s categorization scheme. Yet they can certainly be categorized amongst the “university presses of the future”, and in some instances, like PLoSPlus, could have a real trend impact on market development and the future of cherished publishing shibboleths like peer review.
And then again, Joe’s piece caught my attention in another sense I have been reading an excellent review article on Linked Data co-authored by Tom Heath of Talis. When Joe pinged Morgan and Claypool (http://www.morganclaypool.com/) as an example of what he was talking about, I found that they were the publishers of this piece. I also found that what I had was part of a really interesting borne digital publishing programme, creating sector reviews in a wide range of academic disciplines as Synergies and Colloquium, and bundling them for license to faculties or individual students. This does not need to be peer-reviewed – the publisher process and the reputation of the contributors does that – so the expense is mostly in formatting and editing – and overwhelmingly in marketing. So, having smugly discovered something new to me, courtesy of Joe, I commenced this blog, and my first research established that this company was founded in 2002, so from the aftermath of Dot Com Bust they are coming up to 10 years old. That’s a millennium in Gutenburg terms, and I have no doubt that they are still not inside anyone’s statistical net. We may be approaching the time when the new markets that we do not measure are as large as the old ones that we do.
Which is not to say for a moment that old publishers are not innovative. A favourite of mine over the years has been Nature (Macmillan) an offspring of the Victorian love affair with Science. Their event this week was the launch (http://www.nature.com/nature_education/biology.html) of a $45 Principles of Biology digital “textbook”. Real innovation here: this is a rental access model, they will update and the pricing is entirely different from the existing print market. And this venture has a strategic partner in California State University. Partner and anchor client (but at least one Californian university group still loves Nature!) Downside (in my view): we still have to call this wonderful product built for an iPad world a “Textbook” when it is really a learning experience – and one which also allows teacher monitoring. Cal State will block purchase and include the cost in tuition fees – and will that get into the market statistics at any point?
So, said my fine educational publisher friend, digital still doesn’t seem to be having much impact on educational marketplaces. To which I must respond, “It depends what you are measuring, but I am certain sure that wherever you look there is unmeasured digital education – in everything.”
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