May
8
100 Years of Marshall McLuhan
Filed Under Blog, eBook, eLearning, internet, mobile content, Publishing, social media, Uncategorized, Workflow | 1 Comment
Since I learnt this week that this is the centenary of the great Canadian scholar and mystifiers’ birth, I cannot resist using the fact, and using it to get back into a groove that seemed to escape me last week. I justify this by saying that I only write when I have something to say. On the other hand I have something to say far more often than I write, but I need an impulse to get me over the hump and force me to find time and concentration. That impulse is almost always the ability to use this to postpone starting something else equally important. In this way my life turns into a series of deadlines, each one creating pressure and driving activity. I dread to think what might happen if these pressures to perform were removed: would I sit down and read the whole of “Colonel Roosevelt”, the third volume of Edmund Morris’s grand life of the progressive President, and my current obsession, in one go, like some greedy schoolboy, the Fat Owl of the Remove, consuming chocolate cake? Probably. I am not a very refined person. And I do like to gloat.
Which brings me back to writing. This week’s impulsion came during the Publishers’ Forum in Berlin. I was listening to one of the beguiling masters of change, Robert Stein, describing his experimental work in his SocialBook Inc operation. I have no doubt that he is right: in a networked society reading becomes a social activity, and that I should not be secretively curling up with the Colonel, but actively debating with you and other readers (and I do know another current reader as it happens) whether Roosevelt was right to run against Taft in 1912. And was it Woodrow Wilson who was the true progressive? I know perhaps 5 people with whom I could have this discussion, and no doubt I could find 50 more online if this book were a social document. And it would be cream on my chocolate cake to have those talks, but they would slow down and retard the progress through the book, which now occupies late evenings and weekends. I read 37 books of this size last year: how many would I read in a social hall of mirrors? And would the conversation and friendship derived from Bob’s social vision, from his four styles of social reading embedded in a browser-type interface that allowed me to annotate pages, read other readers comments and interact with them, would all that compensate me for only reading 5 books a year?
Earlier in the session, part of an increasingly highly regarded meeting, put together by Klopotek, the publishing workflow specialist (http://www.klopotek.de/enindex.htm), I heard Liza Daly talking about ePub 3. I welcome this with open arms, delighted by the speed with which this revised standard is being produced, warmed by Liza’s clear and emphatic summation of its aims, and only depressed by the liklyhood that hardware vendors will take their time in introducing compliant devices. As Liza summarized it, the major advances, as well as using HTML5, are in language use (however did we persuade ourselves that vertical reading as well as horizontal left-right as well as right-left was not necessary – and thus exclude at a stroke Chinese, Korean and Japanese!); interactivity; audio and video; and design/layout conventions that allow pages to refocus themselves appropriately in terms of the screen size being used to view them. The gains here will be for graphic novels, the beginnings of multimedia in eBook, and, I would guess, for the further evolution of the eTextbook (whatever that may be). As Liza came to an end I found myself at once delighted by a real progress report by a real expert on real progress made, and straining to see the expression on Stein’s face to see if he was thinking what I was thinking: “Fifteen years on the Internet and we are only now installing the features that were so important, in the early 1990s, on multimedia CD-ROM”!
Unfortunately he was sitting in front of me, but in those days in the early ’90s when “bandwidth” meant “fixed disc”, not Broadband, Robert’s Voyager operation was the shining example of creativity in the US market in this sector. His example was very encouraging to people like me, an advisor to and non-executive director of Dorling Kindersley Ltd, who, through the drive and determination of Peter Kindersley (an impatient innovator whose background as a designer helped no end in the creation of this medium) were following rapidly along the same track to create a generation of interactive disc-based reference products whose ingenuity and use of content and software have not yet been emulated in the eBook world. DK also produced a publisher of real note in Peter’s colleague, Alan Buckingham, who proved a master at stitching together resources and effects to produce deeply engaging learning and reference materials. Alan was the first maestro to paint with the whole multimedia palette: when eBooks grow up and they start giving awards for them, they should call them the “Buckies”!
So here is one example of the way in which markets sometimes have to loop back and rediscover themselves: Marshall McCluhan knew all about that when he spoke of the effect of television on film. Another Publishers Forum speaker said something similar: “Longtail is not a lucrative market unless you are an aggregator” said David Hetherington of Baker and Taylor. Which is why print on demand providers are aggregators and why publishers surrender their digital files to them. Which heralds the day, which David did not say, when publishing margins are more rentals and royalties than retail, pushing publishing even further away from organizing the marketplace and imperilling its position.
A hundred years ago a man was born who well described these and so many other changes in media marketplaces, and did it from the user viewpoint, creating a sort of sociological view of media access. Nothing here would surprize him in the least: he would have claimed it all as his.
PS. One very good reason for going to this conference, let alone the excellent content, is being inside Berlin’s wonderful conference centre, the Axica. Built by Frank Gehry for a bank that now cannot afford it, to our great advantage, the conference auditorium sits in the womb of the building beneath a glass canopy, while seminars are held in a wooden egg suspended above it. I got to use this, and can testify to its wonderful sound qualities: spectators sit in rising seating above the (?) bank’s board room table, for all the world like speaking in one of those anatomy theatres of the sixteenth century (Uppsala university has an outstanding example).
Apr
20
Dreams can be Iterative Too
Filed Under B2B, Blog, Financial services, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, semantic web, STM, Thomson, Uncategorized, Workflow | 1 Comment
After a break for refreshment (archaeology in the Levant) I am back to face further questioning in the Court of Industry Opinion, and particularly from the colleague who recalled a paper written in 2009 as an Outsell CEO Topic: “Workflow: Information’s New Field of Dreams” and argued that the industry had moved so quickly in the past two years that this did not represent any sort of summation of where we were today. She was right, and a little research shows how I underjudged the real position two years ago, and how the iterated aspiration that lies at the root of workflow as an information services model is now maturing rapidly. Worse, I had underestimated how much the new world was beholden to the old. In the new edition of this report, labelled Version 2.0 and published yesterday (http://www.outsellinc.com/store/products/993), I have retraced my steps and looked again at the importance of metadata and its long history, of taxonomic control and semantic search as contributors to our dream of creating living models of streams of working activity, involving deeply different parts of the workforce. And I am sure that I shall revisit and develop this area in Version 3.0, should I ever get that far, and that we shall find that much of the XML-based technology which has been so useful in creating the agile publishing environments of today (MarkLogic would be the market leader with particular resonance here) will be even more useful as we restructure content to fit the shapes required in different workflow roles.
And then something else happened today. Thomson Reuters, whose work in creating a Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) Division I have covered here in detail, launched their Accelus Suite (http://thomsonreuters.com/content/news_ideas/articles/legal/4292965), a rebranding of the 40 or so products and services they bought (Complinet) or borrowed from other parts of the group into 12 solutions areas. I have covered this in detail today in an Outsell Insight (https://clients.outsellinc.com/insights/index.php?p=11468) and do not wish to repeat that here, but it is important to remind ourselves of some key issues. This work has taught us, for example, that the outstanding work done by Lexis Nexis in putting together Seisint and Choicepoint to create a risk assessment workflow engine for the insurance industry is a “vertical” model for the industry. Thomson Reuters Accelus Suite is a “horizontal” model, and while its first targets are financial services players, the elements of the Suite (a Governance, Transactions and Legal Risk set, a Compliance and Regulatory Risk set and an Audit and Internal Control set) are common to all businesses of any scale. In addition, all of these elements require elements of training and education, risk mapping and assessment, audit and accountability, and communication of audited results – upwards, for example, via this Division’s Boardlink environment, a communication tool for risk-responsible directors.
Hang on a minute. There is one problem in all of this. As the Accelus Survey, published with this launch as the first in a regular series reminds us, the one thing we know about corporate life is that the legal department, financial control, the auditors, the compliance officer, the tax advisor and the people who do risk assessment and management all, literally, speak different languages. The Survey points out that 94% of the 2000 respondents saw this as a major issue, and it is surely here that the metadata and taxonomic control elements take centre stage. We will not improve risk management generically unless all of these different people can talk fluently and with precision to each other and to outside agencies, and the GRC Accelus Suite, if it is to succeed, must address that core issue. It is the contention of its leaders that this has been done, and while we all know that “done” is a way of saying iterative development is in train, one assurance lies in the size of the industry sample so far engaged. The Accelus Suite platform now claims more than 100,000 users, from each of the job segments in the workflow, providing a community whose feedback should give drive and direction to fitness for purpose. In this environment, the applications must grow to meet the needs (unlike my new shoes, where the foot must change, painfully, to fit the format!).
So what will these workflow environments grow to become in the industry as a whole? Thomson Reuters position Accelus Suite as a brand and line of business as large in stature and importance as Westlaw or Eikon. This is big. When I spoke earlier in the cycle of building a new business in the interstices between Thomson Reuters’ two well established branded businesses in law and financial services this was no exaggeration. And there is another very striking feature of this launch. Have a look at Regulatory Risk Mapper within the Accelus Suite and you will see an old industry trait – discovery – and a new one – visualization. The point of the Mapper is to detect change (Thomson Reuters recorded 12500 important regulatory rewrites last year) and map it onto policy. Then it can be flagged and dealt with at a variety of different levels and many different ways. And it is what distinguishes an information solutions business from an information research business. And makes Dreams re-iterate.
« go back — keep looking »