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

25

Back to Skool

Filed Under Blog, Education, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

I have been enjoying the press coverage of News Corp’s purchase of Wireless Generation. This is a hugely progressive move and one which could point to an entirely different developmental direction for News. However, repeated doses of hype from the buyer’s PR department induced a light sleep, during which I found that I had typed the following dialogue. Of course, any resemblance of this to the truth of the matter is entirely co-incidental, and since I do not know the people whose words I have imagined this should be treated as the fiction it really is.

SCENE:  A boardroom somewhere in Manhattan. The Strategy Team are all assembled and are talking in hushed tones when the Chairman comes in.  He addresses the Head of Strategy (HoS):

RM (for it is He): Well, guys, have you got the answer to the little problem I set you?

HoS (gulps nervously): Well, Chairman, we think so. We looked at DMGT, the FT, GMG and the Washington Post as you commanded, and they all have one thing in common. Somewhere within each of them there is a potentially game saving educational play, and it appears that investors and analysts believe, or can be encouraged to believe, that this is a hedge against the wheels coming off the newspaper industry.

RM (growls): No wheels are coming off my papers – we’ve got satellite and network television to keep them warm. And don’t tell me the pesky internet will undermine them too. Tell me about the Education Hedge.

HoS: Well, what you need is something Startlingly Digital, which hasn’t been seen and rejected by Pearson already. Then we can claim we are going to leapfrog everything and establish a unique positioning. We fancy something in assessment, with an automation/productivity angle so that you look like a benefactor of those grossly overworked teachers.

RM: I warm to this, despite the fact that these self-same teachers are too often dangerous radicals, and some are Democrats. And none of them read or watch our stuff. Say, could we do a Fox Education channel?

HoS: Perhaps a later step, Sir. Meanwhile we fancy Wireless Generation, a sound technology, deep in assessment and labour-saving, and not in any of those troublesome curriculum areas. But we think as a preparatory step you should retain a real education figure, to advise and to indicate our corporate will to enter this field. Mr Klein is just leaving the leadership of the New York School systems and would be ideal.

RM: What, a Clinton man! But I see the point – you want us to seem bi-partisan and  above the fray. A sort of Mr White- and- Klein (Carruthers, make a note of that for the next edition of The Wit and Wisdom of RM, coming for Christmas from Harper Collins).

HoS: Precisely, Sir. Then we make an initial purchase, planning to spend around $360m, and start to build a division. Soon we shall have our own Kaplan.

RM: And a completely new departure for me. Education, eh? Did I ever tell you what happened to me at Oxford…

HoS: No, Sir. But we could dress this up as continuity, since you already own an educational publisher.

RM (slightly nervously): We do? Not somewhere important, I hope?

HoS: Actually, no, Sir. It’s in London and part of Harper Collins there.

RM (morosely): No one tells me anything! And London – you know, those limeys are trying to stop me buying the rest of Sky – and trying to win the Ashes Down Under as well.

HoS: Sorry I mentioned it, Sir. But cheer up – you are no longer Australian or British but American, and we can concentrate Education here. A little Agile Publishing and we shall soon be on our way with a development unit.

RM: Now watch Agile. I am no longer a young man. But we can certainly move quickly. We can do The Daily Education on the iPad, and deliver a Killer Sudoko App with it. Can’t fail.

HoS: We should leave it to the Professionals, Sir. You can’t get stuck into Education like a mass media environment.

RM: But that’s what you said about My Space, when we bought something we didn’t understand, and kept having to hire new sets of Professionals and now I am No 2 and sinking. We are even sending the FaceFellows or whatever they are called our customers. Please promise me it isn’t one of those?

HoS: No, Sir, it isn’t. It will work just like Kaplan.

RM: OK, lets go for it. Buy this Bush radio (or was it Telegraph), but if I have to do Agile publishing give me agile margins as well. Now, next problem. I seem to be unable to work the page turner on my beta Daily – and you told me it would be “just like a newspaper”…

Around this time I awoke, and found my dreaming had resulted in a fantasy.


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