Nov

23

Progress is always circular

Filed Under B2B, Blog, Industry Analysis, Workflow | 2 Comments

It is never a waste of time keeping a close eye on Globalspec. The engineering design community has been for a number of years the poster site for B2B community. Under Jeff Killeen’s outstanding management, and with an understanding investor in Warburg Pincus, which now holds a very considerable asset, the service has shaken the engineering information sector from end to end with a demonstration of what the power of user-contributed content really means – and what it can accomplish if users become wedded to sharing it.

Even so, some may have glanced with surprise at last week’s announcement of workflow tools on the site.  After all, supply chain management, parts catalogues and project management tools were early plays in the late nineties as Reed Business Information and others sought to drive into supply chain management issues as a natural follow through to their own web content. Right idea, wrong time.  We may have spent a decade now demonstrating exactly how much first rate content you need, and how much third party content as well, in order to carry this off.  Most of those services died on the vine: who now remembers VerticalNet?  But Globalspec did not come from proprietory content, but from community content.  Its users came to contribute and utilize, thus building their own directories (Globalspec has 148,000, but users can import their own) and their own parts reference space, cross-referenced to the use of those parts in other designs, which are both natural extensions of why those users are in Globalspec to begin with.  Adding project planning tools on top of that  is a no brainer.

So the lessons are simple: workflow moving towards supply chain management is possible if you have a compelling content place for users and a natural, neutral meeting ground for a community.  There were no short cuts.  Timing depends on brand credibility, traffic volume and community recognition.  You have to be permitted by the community to act for them.

Have Globalspec got this precious timing right?  With the ink not dry on the press release, it is hard to tell.  However, as in other verticals, players will find that users are tending to polarize on one or two services.  These duopolies make it tough to be an outside competitor.  In engineering it may come down to Globalspec, IHS and McGraw-Hill.  Someone has to be a loser.

Nov

19

Baroque intricacies in British Library

Filed Under Blog, Industry Analysis, Publishing, STM, Workflow | Leave a Comment

I went to the launch party on Wednesday for a joint report by RIN (the Research Information Network) and the British Library called “Patterns of information use and exchange: case studies of researchers in the life sciences“. Sounds riveting , doesn’t it? And actually … it is. One of the speakers waxed lyrical about the “baroque intricacies of information exchange”, and I ended, after looking at  the report, by seeing what he meant .

We are still so young in workflow analysis that looking at the ways that researchers in life sciences, for example, pursue their business on the network contains surprises. Patterns are strongly differentiated by niche and subject, there is great individuality, patterns are really complex etc . But did we expect anything else?  Look in this report at the models for epidemiology of zoonotic diseases and for neuroscience in particular, and see the nodal role of analysis, the mapping elements, definitional processes, and the positioning of evidential data . There is never going to be a universal researcher workflow model, but the eight elegant flow diagrams created from this report by Ann Bruce of the research team should be on the desk of every STM publisher who wishes to move up the value chain from the article publishing world into a safer future. Not that articles are unimportant in these workflows – they just take up less time and value than publishers like to think .

Visiting the British Libray is good too. With the huge BioMedical Research Insitute growing up in its back yard, and its recent announcement of the launch of Datacite, a DOI style identifier system for evidential data, it appears to be keeping its focus on its vital  STM customers. Yet there was not a single commercial publisher (unless you count PLoS!) in the room at the launch of this report. Very sad indeed.  There may be valid reasons for publishers to want to change the Library’s view on a great number of topics, but it has to be reckoned with and will not go away.

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