Mar
14
Catching Up on TV
Filed Under B2B, Blog, Education, eLearning, Financial services, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Search, social media, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
Reading blogs is seriously bad for morale. As a blogger, I do it compulsively, instinctively, and, too often, with a complete suspension of disbelief. “I read it on a blog” has become this century’s equivalent of “well, I read it in the newspaper”. Neither stand up completely to scrutiny, though nor do any other media outlets either. We may have to revert to “I met a man who knows about these things and he said..” And my finding from last week was that when you do meet a man who knows, it is really surprising how much there is to be learnt.
Last week there was an Open Day for IXXUS, an excellent UK integrator with a really good track record. They use MarkLogic, and in a very effective case study around the parliamentary publisher, Dods, Simon Thompson, who manages Dods, demonstrated how effectively you can reposition a media company like this once you have full control of all of its content, the ability to search unstructured data, and thus the ability to redefine services as solutions to user requirements. And if this was not a surprise as such, the neatness of the Dods solution was certainly impressive.
The day also brought in other elements. As an Alfesco user from time to time, I was quietly amazed to find that this UK-based operation, the second largest Open Source player in the world behind Red Hat, has now registered 3 million downloads and proudly boasts 19 quarters of consecutive revenue growth. If anyone doubts the importance of workflow then take a look at this, but the element that stuck out for me was Alfresco’s concern for content management in the context of social media. It is all at http://www.ixxus.com/webinar/ and well worth a look. It is also good to be reminded of the continually growing power of open source search, especially in vertical market contexts. On show here are Lucene/Solr. With customers like the Guardian, Cisco, Salesforce, Zappos, and publishers like Taylor and Francis, this presentation spoke volumes about how far open source search has travelled in the past few years, “They came for the cost, they stayed for the flexibility” quoth the man. And Lucene is now 10 years old.
So in a week that jolted from received impressions in so many different ways I was not entirely surprised to get a note from my friend, Ian Nairn, on Internet TV. Now I am not a regular watcher. Glued to the rugby matches I find, like the current candidate for Chairman of the BBC, Lord Patten, that it is fairly hard to watch most of the time. Yet Ian is a provider of good leads, so I followed this one to http://www.ednetinsight.com/news-alerts/the-heller-report/you-on-the-tube–the-internet-tv–channel–to-the-family-flat-screen.html and found plenty of nourishment. In schools one could readily imagine the television screen becoming an engine of integration, backed by Cloud-based storage. After all, we have had two generations of LMS and VLE, and while the technology is widely deployed in western schools it is neither simple to use for the demotivated (staff and students) and the service provision in schools is neither intuitive nor technician-free. In fact IT has created a new school power base and less than 10% of teachers are seen as natural users in the sense of creating, deploying and storing lessons online.
And one of the elements of this article which triggered my enthusiasm was its reference to Cambridge’s Global Grid for Learning (GGfL). Here is a context where a resource creating, permissions cleared global resource of actual and embryonic learning objects comes into its own. We know that Internet TV, strongly driven by Google, is happening and will change many relationships. I had not factored learning into this environment, but now that I have I certainly think it creates scenarios ready for dynamic change.
And do not even ask me what I was doing in the China Daily. But it produced this thought (http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/cndy/2011-03/13/content_12162539.htm) via the New York Times. There John Markoff has discovered e-discovery software for lawyers. No surprises fro those with their heads in this space, but a graphic example of how a $2.2 million dollar legal workflow process in 1978 can be done today for a fraction of the cost – $400,000 in fact. The fact that legal fees do not seem to decrease is a mystery that I may never crack, but here are witnesses to a truth that we must put into the centre of our considerations: the major professions are now rapidly automating, with an impact on society with which we have not yet come to terms. The article has some great examples of pattern recognition and linked me back to the IXXUS day, and to the man who said that 80% of corporate data is now email. Mike Lynch reckons that one lawyer will be able to do the work of 500… unless of course you met a man last week who said differently.