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:

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

20

Publishing as it Will Be

Filed Under B2B, Blog, eBook, Education, eLearning, Financial services, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, Publishing, social media, STM, Thomson, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment

A wise man said that “Content without Technology is lame; Technology without Content is Blind”. Einstein was working his way towards this conclusion, but it was in fact Timo Hannay of Macmillan/Digital Science who came out with this formulation during this week’s ePublishing Innovations Forum at the IET in London (http://www.epublishing-forum.com/). Incisive Media, who also do the Online conference and exhibition at Olympia in December, having been doing this Spring meeting for four years, and I have been their privileged chairman for each. So I know the sea change of the past half decade, I know that change just gets quicker, and I know that Timo is fundamentally right and is one of only a handful who are doing something about it. I also see that “publishing”, if it is useful to retain the term, is almost redefined everytime we hold this meeting, and that the players making strides in solutioning (ugly term), collaboration and community seem to be mining the seams that have revenues and margins embedded in them.

The conference contained several beautifully worked case studies. Take Timo as an example. His themes are about knowledge discovery, research management and software tools (http://www.digital-science.com/). The ability today to read chemical names and turn them into chemical structures and use them to cross search literature and patent databases is a beautiful expression of what we mean when we say that we have to produce solutions that reduce costs and increase productivity. Tomorrow we will want to take this, and his ability to track and map research patterns and structures, and his investments in experiment and project management systems and roll them into career duration, compliance required Electronic Lab Manuals (ELN). Then a few of us will sit down over a beer and reflect that Elsevier sold the ELN market leader, MDL, almost a decade ago. The circularity of markets is only a wonder to those who have been swept full circle several times!

Then lets take David Craig, who came to the microphone to announce that his Thomson Reuters GRC (Governance, Risk and Compliance) division (http://accelus.thomsonreuters.com/) had the day previously finalized the acquisition of World-Check (said on the New York grapevine to be a $530m dollar deal), and was now pushing hard towards the content integration and software services needed to flesh out the complete solutioning picture around regulatory compliance in all its phases. He too speaks the language of collaboration, and now appears to prefer the term “community” to “workflow”. And the distinction is interesting and not an idle one. He does not want to build content-injected process models for the individual corporate units that severally and separately do compliance. He wants to do corporate engines that unite functions to get results, so that he is not tied to the future fortunes of compliance officers or finance departments or auditors or corporate counsel or tax advisers, but provides structures in which they all participate, share content and create outcomes. And if that argues for a different culture in the fully networked corporation, he also sees content creation and sharing between corporates, professionals and othe participants (especially regulators) which allows risk information to be shared rapidly in the network. Again, the high ground is becoming a universal solution which is so widely plugged in that unplugging threatens the health of the participants themselves.

And then take Donal Smith. The CEO of Data Explorers (http://www.dataexplorers.com/) defined what happens to this type of process in the completely satisfying niche. He showed us how certain types of unregulated content must be collected and analysed to keep markets safe from themselves. In this case the content concerns contracts to “borrow” equity against future equity movements – the activity known as “shorting”. Markets must know what proportion of a company’s equity is already committed, so Data Explorers is a venture of necessity, using user-generated content to create indices which allow markets to work efficiently. Its operating principles are ubiquity and non-exclusivity. Process? Collaboration? Its all here.

I could go on. I loved the energy in the education sector, with Cambridge University Press and Global Grid for Learning using similar models in the workload of teachers, and Microsoft, in the guise of David Langridge, their education partnerships director, coming from the other to position the new Office 365 as the vehicle for content integration in schools. And I am aware that by stopping here I ignore many excellent presentations that followed parallel themes. We did interviews and panels which enabled participants to see these trends at work. We looked at the future of the newspaper with Julian Sambles of the Telegraph and the future of the eBook with Tim Cooper of Harlequin (Mills and Boon). Adriana Lukas, coming from the user side as an advisor to major players like Johnson and Johnson, caused a run on the bar by exploring the powerful virtues of five widely used ad-blockers during the opening of her examination of social media as marketing. Elsewhere we discussed the importance of metadata and even paradata (could be my new word!) and finally Geoff Metzger of Superdu brought us down to earth by revealing marketing technology in a box – how to create instant web presence (without waiting for the IT department) to promote books and services. Back to earth, and back to books, in a voyage that began with Kate Worlock, for Outsell, defining the global marketplace, its growth, strengths and weaknesses and some of these key trends. I can now tell you how it feels to introduce one’s own daughter as a keynote speaker (Wonderful!!).

And so much more that I must apologize to those who I have omitted. I wandered away from the IET (Institute of Engineering and Technology, appropriately enough) no longer wondering why they changed their name from Institute of Electrical Engineers. Its the technology, stupid. And now we cannot do without it.

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