Dec
13
I wish I had done that …
Filed Under Blog, eBook, Education, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, Search, STM, Thomson, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
Now , strategy is simple , execution is the real difficulty . Having written strategy for my friends in the industry for the past 25 years , I know the truth of that . And if we are going to deal in truth for a change , I was a dab hand at strategy as a digital law publisher , but found turning those elegant bullet points into service values and USPs that people would pay for a far more difficult game .
So here is a chance to salute a master this week , and at the same time acknowledge another truth : to be a maestro you need an orchestra , and it is very difficult to execute anything in a place which is not receptive to change . So it is a good job that Dr Timo Hannay works at Macmillan , where they have produced a management that welcomes change , and a trading atmosphere that concentrates on the essentials while coping with customers forever on the move and shifting their priorities . The strength of this mix is shown in last weeks announcement of the long-awaited Digital Science Ltd , which solves two problems in one : ” How does Macmillan/Nature punch above its weight in a market of larger players like Elsevier, Wiley and Springer ? ” and ” How do we find a suitable role for our chief technology change agent and strategy inventor given that his Nature inventions must now be given time to shake down and mature ? ”
In another age that second question would have been disallowed . At length we are beginning to realize in the industry formerly known as publishing , that talent is scarce and must be nurtured . And the first qusetion would have been answered by lateral growth : publish more things in more subjects . Fortunatly , the networked publishing world widens the options , and a content provider can now relocate himself to another place in the value chain and compete with his more traditionally minded competitors in a wholly different way . Digital Science seems to me to be a prime example of this strategy on the move . There are limits to how much can be cloned under the Nature brand . This is already a broad-based journal publishing brand now erupting into education and into collateral ebook developments . The time of rapid service experimentation is over , and the bits that work identified and in process of being iterated ( see Nature Networks and its recent announcements ). There is clearly recognition that growth from this base is ongoing but structurally finite : any ordinary publisher at this point would make an expensive acquisition , fire half of the new staff and spend five years cutting costs while finding out which things worked and scrapping the rest .
Not the Macmillan way , at present . The option taken has been to re-concentrate on the working processes of the researcher . Not ” how can we sell him more articles ? ” but ” how can we help him to organize himself more productively , make better decisions over the content he uses from all sources , and , possibly , stay within ethical and academic guidelines for what constitutes good research ? ” In other words , Digital Science is an elegant workflow play in the making .
This sounds like a delightfully easy strategy piece to write : I may have written it myself several times in the past few years . Move up the value chain to a point in the workflow where you can provide process tools and support . Then develop said tools and become the integrated point of analysis for all content – your own , third party , and user-derived . Here you get growth , greater knowledge of changing customer behaviours and a locked-in market that finds it hard to leave the bar once it has bought the first drink .
But the power lies in the execution , not in the strategy . So Timo and his colleagues have beaten the bushes for tools and environments that users /researchers really respond to , and coupled them up as acquisitions to create not a 1+1=1.5 scenario , but instead a 1=1=1=4 configuration . There is chemistry in everything in science , so SureChem , a specialized text mining application ( and also a patents search engine ) was a natural building block . Macmillan bought it last year for Digital Science . Then add an equity stake in BioData Ltd , a lab management outfit designed to be a network-based answer that avoids the complexities of an Oracle enterprize solution . Bring to the boil with Symplectic , , a toolset to improve researcher productivity by tracking the writing and recording of findings to publication .As institutional repositories continue to grow , and academics and their administrators need to track versioning , control deposits and manage bibliometrics for research assessment and other exercises , this becomes more and more central .
All of this sounds like a Life Sciences concentration , and of course that would reflect Macmillan’s other interests as well as one of the fastest growth points in the sector . Symplectic will link to grants applications and proposal development , which completes another wing of the workflow . No doubt ( an old hobby horse of mine ) they will also look at the electronic lab manual as a point of synthesis for individual researchers , as well as a way of demonstarting due diligence and regulatory compliance .
And of course , it is not that these attributes do not exist elsewhere . Thomson Reuters have a strong holding of productivity tools for writing , linked to Web of Science . Elsevier have strength of a different kind in science search and in abstracting and indexing services . What Digital Science appears to want to do is integrate its attributes on the research workbench and then go and get the rest of the requirements and integrate them as well . This strategy has taken a year to execute and now ( December 7 ) announce . It represents a new growth point and a pointer to where , after content , the competitive pressures will be felt . Really , I wish I had done that …
Nov
23
Here be Giants
Filed Under B2B, Blog, Financial services, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, Thomson, Uncategorized, Workflow | 2 Comments
The emerging world of network publishing, if found on the map of a medieval cartographer, might well be seen as a land of giants. A land far larger than that occupied by the noisy contestants of consumer publishing, or the sad and plaintive territory once dedicated to Music, it is built on foundations of business and professional information. No one writes about it much in the press or public media (they have survival problems of their own) but if what is currently taking place on the networks does not produce the expected benefits for global businesses over the next five years, then the ability of the world economy to grow out of recession and still keep control of commercial practices will be inhibited and delayed, with adverse effects on all of us.The promised B2B revolution has to deliver real benefits in improved productivity (more done by less people with improved outcomes), better decision-making (greater security around getting all the factors lined up, and weighting them effectively) and more cost-effective compliance (greater assurance that best practice and regulatory frameworks can be implemented in practice and audited). This is a tough call, but for those who can do it there will be rich rewards.
And in this land there are Giants, and their consolidation is taking them to new places, far away from the craft practices that we might designate as “publishing”. The largest players are consumed by the idea of workflow, and not at any trivial level of integration either. In the last six months I have been privileged to walk the territory, map in hand, sometimes only vaguely recognizing a terrain that I first explored 25 years ago, and many times since, and sometimes getting re-acquainted with old features in entirely new contexts. My conclusion is that Thomson Reuters and Reed Elsevier are now at a transformational stage, that there is blue water between them and the rest of the marketplace, and that if they are able to complete the transformation at significant scale they will tap into an area of margin and revenue growth that exceeds expectations in the information services sector at present. Meanwhile their former sector competitors are still stumbling around trying to redress the past by taking content online, re-inventing advertising models and awaiting the rebirth of format publishing in the networks. It will not happen, and the wisest and best know it.
So what is happening at TR and RE which is so laudable? I have spoken of Thomson Reuters (Rebuilding Inside Out) as re-inventing the core of this huge company through the creation of workflow products and services that start by concentrating the core assets of clients and content across the legal-regulatory-financial services continuum and then creating workflow around governance, risk and compliance that first of all standardizes practices (and thus themselves become performance standards) and then become templates for applications that move out into every business marketplace. The starting points are viral, like tax and regulation. The transformation comes when these solutions, using a mix of TR content, client content and licensed third party content, become a standard enterprize software application that can be bolted into the network (internet/extranet/intranet/mobilenet) or run as SaaS in the Cloud.
This is policy -driven workflow, ensuring compliance and allowing systems to drive governance. But you can take a completely different view of this if your aspiration is to drive business functionality itself. Imagine you are in insurance markets, where RE’s LexisNexis dominate. Workflow is created around risk assessment: know your customer, verify his record, score and categorize him, reject or insure him, check his subsequent performance. The combination of Seisint and Choicepoint at Lexis, plus all the access to public record content, and then to media aggregation like Nexis, creates a bedrock solution (and one so solid that in anecdote it is possible to speak of a new market entrant into the US insurance market basing his market entry plan on this Lexis Risk platform). Where an information-fuelled solution creates the workflow format (and to do this strategic alliance can be important – Experian, for example, is a valued partner to Lexis in the US) this model can be replicated by Lexis in countless markets.
Indeed, it can be created in law markets themselves, Lexis and TR’s Westlaw have long since moved on from information as pure research in legal services. Support for law practice marketing was an early target of both. In research days in the past litigators were the great purchasers of access, so it is noteworthy to see Lexis moving on to litigation support systems – its CaseMap workflow model is now used by 99 of the AmLaw 100, the top litigators in the world. Even more noteworthy is the equal emphasis given to the business of law alongside the practise of law: when current plans are fully implemented in the next few months it is obvious that every sector/customer segment will have business workflow integration at each level of business activity (from billing and time management to marketing) as well as each sector of practise activity. So is Lexis a law publisher when it reaches this point? Or a fully integrated systems supplier with comprehensive solutions supporting all aspects of being a lawyer? (or, if our examples came from the science sides of these businesses, of being a researcher or a medical care provider).
One driver of these changes has been competition. Would these Giants be so impressive without each other. And yet these two Giants are showing that very different approaches are possible even in a very competitive field. As they grow there will be other competitors: are these two the allies or the competitors of IBM, or Oracle, or SAP? Dramatically, Lexis has integrated all of its workflow for lawyers with Microsoft Outlook and Word, to the huge benefit of workflow integration for lawyers (and a great gain for Microsoft as law practices are forced to upgrade). And this in turn demonstates the return to the underlying network, after the Flight to the Web in the late 1990s. Workflow by definition is not a flashy web-based offering, but a series of real internet-based applications installed within the firewall. It is this sort of consideration, as well as the Apps marketplace in consumer mobile, that makes Chris Anderson ponder about the future of the Web.
Mobile and the Devices will get built into all of this (witness TR’s BoardLink for the secure retention of board papers and director’s reports in a workflow tool for company secretaries and directors). I have a feeling that we are still closer to the beginning than the maturity of whatever this is, as well as a sense of wonderment that so many of these changes are happening around that most conservative of professions, the Law. These two players now stand well apart from the chasing pack, and have both done what seemed so unlikely only a few years ago: created a cadre of experienced managers who know digital content and business models backwards, who truly know their own customers, and who have the technical support to make good decisions. It is here, not with Jobs and Murdoch trying to write a new future for the exhausted newspaper format via the Daily, that the real future of “network (electronic) publishing” lies.
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