Feb

6

The Collaboration Game

Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, Education, Financial services, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, Pearson, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, semantic web, STM, Thomson, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Multi-tasking may be beyond me. I am finding it very hard to travel and blog at the same time. And having traveled 10 hours by train and over 50 in a plane in the past 14 days I must beg forgiveness for the gap in production on this blog. And the annoying thing is that many of the things encountered on these travels have been red meat for bloggers.

Take as an example last week’s Information Industry Summit, organized as ever by the SIIA and held this year at New York’s Pier 60. This is a really important industry event, and I was pleased to be amongst a crowd of some 250 who enjoyed a very varied and interesting agenda. And specially interesting for me these days since these conferences provide a verbal map of industry sentiment. One would have thought, for example, that for many SIIA members 2012 was a disaster worth forgetting. Consolidation goes on apace but many of the “great” players of yesteryear took considerable reverses, and investor sentiment about the “information industry”, if that means failing print to some, must be flagging. With McGraw-Hill dividing into two, and selling the weaker part, and News Corp dividing into two and racking up real problems in the bad bank side, there are plenty of examples of near terminal troubles. And yet the room was full as ever of investors and analysts. I cannot be certain of course whether they were there to pick over the wreckage, or to re-invest post-digital development, but they are still there. And while they are there I really think we should give them a vision of the future which is not framed by our rear view mirror.

So the conference began with George Colony, the articulate and persuasive father of Forrester, giving a talk about Thunderstorms. Indeed, this was a recurrent theme. It reminded me of where we have been these last 20 years. Do you remember the long years when every conference started with a Christensen-esque speech on Disruption? Well, we learnt to live with Disruption, and we ignored the wonderful advice of the author of the Innovator’s Dilemma. For the next five years we were Crossing Chasms, getting one foot into the digital world, rebalancing ourselves. Well, does anyone know if we crossed? Or are we still poised? Then every media sector got involved, and all of a sudden we were Transitioning and Migrating. These may have been words which pleased investors at the time, and helped to explain why nothing much was happening at discernible speeds, but using them now seems laughable. How many major print-based powerhouses of 1993 can you name that have a stake in digital markets that matches a Google, or an Amazon, or a Facebook? We have businesses like Thomson Reuters and Reed Elsevier who have carved out niches in digital workflow, and players like Pearson who dominate education markets which have been slower to move to the network. But giants? Those have been built anew and elsewhere.

So when the conversation turned to Thunderstorm last week I wondered whether Americans had adopted the English art of under-statement. Cataclysm was the word that came to mind that week as I read Gannett’s results statement. If George Colony meant that our industry was under water then I might agree, but I suspect that he was looking or a metaphor for mindless violence, but came up short. Yet the metaphor led me to the totally sane, healthy and interesting part of the week. One objective of my trip was to help my friends at TEMIS, the French semantic analysis software company, launch their LUXID Community, a collaborative network of software players, content companies and platform providers. I was delighted to find some of the themes of the launch event taken up in the main conference. Look for yourself at http://www.temis.com/join-the-luxid-community or come to one of their meetings and express a view.

When extra-ordinary events take place, and change the entire landscape in which we work within a timeframe as short as 20 years, our reaction as businesses might reflect how we react as individuals in an earthquake or a tsunami. We pool our resources and pull together. I believe in what TEMIS are proposing because I do not think we will develop solutions for customers, or exploit to the full the digital opportunities given us by our content, our data, our market knowledge or our ability to develop high quality software unless we work together. Collaboration and co-operation are essential even if tomorrow we also need to buy or merge with some of those with whom we work today. Above all, this collaboration must extend to our customers: the lonely years of competition for competition’s sake must end, and we have to embrace our customers as partners – or they will become our competitors in ways which would be very toxic indeed.

Here then is a theme we could use to re-invigorate investors. Ask them to score us in terms of our proclivity for partnership. Look at us to see if we have a culture of experimentation that involves combining resources and attributes from several different sources to create a value which would have been otherwise impossible. As we move into a networked world where most service and solutions providers will sub-contract, outsource, partner and collaborate as easily as breathing then we in vital information markets could be leaders in proving that Vital is just as important as Big – and maybe more profitable. The LUXID Community may be a small step, but we could look back at this week as a very important one.

Dec

28

Scraps and Jottings

Filed Under B2B, Blog, eBook, Education, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, Publishing, social media, STM, Workflow | 1 Comment

We had a wonderful Christmas, thanks, – and I hope that you, Dear Reader, did likewise. Immediately afterwards (dawn on Boxing Day) we departed for Nova Scotia to bring greetings to my Canadian mother-in-law – and drove into a violent snowstorm on the Halifax-Lunenburg road which completely wiped my mental tapes of what I was going to do by way of a year end communication. I only recall that I had promised one reader that I would try not to be so apocalyptic in 2013. Well, here then is a first attempt at a lulling, measured message to that individual: “Have no fears for the future – the disruptions that you might have countered are now fully in play, and the only thing we now await is the full effect!”

As I dashed from the Hut on Boxing Day, I picked up two clippings that curiously underline this theme. The first, and Cureus (pronounced Curious) is its name, refers to the announcement of a new Open Source medical journal launched by a Stanford neurosurgeon (http://scopeblog.stanford.edu/2012/12/19). We could, if we wished, take Cureus as an example of the imminent demise of journal publishing in the sciences. Dr John Adler, its progenitor, appears to have at least two issues with current publishing procedures. On the one hand he complains that research results need to be made available immediately: “allowing researchers to publish their findings at no cost within days, rather than the months or even years that it typically takes for research to be made public”. And on the other hand he is an opponent of traditional peer review who wants to crowd source opinion on an article from both expert and non-expert readers. “Nowadays you wouldn’t go to a restaurant without Yelping it first. You wouldn’t go to see a movie without seeing what Rotten Tomatoes had to say about it. But medical journals are stuck in this 200-year-old paradigm.”

So in fact the delightful thing about Cureus is that it ignores both Open Access as practised by PloS and by commercial publishers, or even by the technical evaluation favoured by PloS One, and demands a further level of democratization of access at the same time. “The average Joe has little or no access to the medical literature today. Its a right. Its a human right”. This would delight the early Open Access campaigners in the US, but the crowd source idea is more valuable than the access by non-academic users. We now have a raft of innovations, some of them going back to the Dotcom Boom, which, if fully applied to current publishing processes, would have a hugely disruptive effect. Are we looking at a time when both conventional Journal publishing and newly “conventional” Open Access publishing are both overtaken by the delayed “boomerang” effect of network publishing procedures now taken for granted elsewhere?

I have the same reaction to a wonderful piece by Bill Rosenblatt, a doyen of internet rights commentators, in a piece on 15 December 2012 (http://paidcontent.org/2012/12/15). Entitled “The Right to Re-Sell: A ticking Time Bomb over Digital Goods”, Bill makes two critical points that will be very important on the 2013 agenda. In the first instance, most music and eBook products are now sold without DRM. DRM files were hated by users and arguably created more customer services issues than they were worth. So while legal embargoes on resale or re-use remain in everyone’s licences, the physical barrier has largely disappeared. File transfer between friends – “I’ll loan you that book when I have finished it” – is allegedly commonplace, though I have seen few attempts at quantification. Bill doesn’t offer any, since he has bigger game in his sights. He has been looking at ReDigi (www.redigi.com), a music resale service. This includes a forward – and – delete function so that the company can protect itself against the whole idea that it is a front for IP theft , but could well become the Chegg of the music industry.

Bill’s other issues concern ORI (the Owners Rights Initiative grouping) whose membership brings libraries and resellers together in unholy alliance to lobby for protection against litigious publishers under the slogan “You bought it, You own it”. (http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/you-bought-it-you-own-it-owners-rights-initiative-launches-to-protect-consumers-rights-175435921.html) And here lies the fundamental point that I distil from Bill’s piece. As we moved into the networked world we never resolved the fundamental issue about intellectual property ownership. After 500 years of print reproduction, we thought that we could still own the the content and control its re-use. And we are still trying to do that in a network of users who adhere to a completely different view of ownership. They think that a digital object is synonymous with a physical one, and having successfully ignored or evaded the law in the real world of real objects, they will be able to do exactly the same in the virtual world.

Meanwhile, the current world of digital offers just about every variant on lending and resale rights that one might possibly imagine. And the belwether world of journal publishing illustrates yet further variation on the theme of open network publishing. For publishers and those who aspire to recreate publishing, the key remains how you add value to processes that were once your sole domain, but which now can be performed anywhere by anyone with network access. The key to 2013 remains as it has for the last 20 years: understand how users want to behave in the network, and get there before demand chrysalises with appropriate value adding proposals that they will want to pay for. Next year, as in all those years “just publishing” will not be enough.

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