Feb

4

Barely a Whimper

Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, Financial services, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, Search, semantic web, Uncategorized, Workflow | 1 Comment

British public policy on data availability for commercial re-use died a sad, whimpering, undignified death yesterday. No one noticed. Years of political neglect, and masterful inactivity by the civil service, meant that it had long since ceased to be a public topic. The idea, borne in the Community in Brussels, enshrined in European Directives, cleverly headed by the Brits in terms of passing secondary legislation and apparently wanting to be best in class at data sharing (how often do we see that the way to best inhibit change is to assume its leadership!) probably fell mortally ill some years ago, when the current UK coalition government assumed office, but we only really woke up to the reality yesterday, when the government abolished APPSI – the Advisory Panel on Public Sector Information – to mark the fact (http://www.parliament.uk/business/publications/written-questions-answers-statements/written-statement/Commons/2015-02-03/HCWS245/). The idea once engendered that the swiftest way to move our society into the inevitability of the networked world was for government to share data with the private sector, to stimulate national information industries by so doing, and to reap a result in wealth creation, employment and a widening tax base is accepted from the US to China. (Think only of the Peoples Bank working with Alibaba et al to keep non-Chinese credit rating at bay.) It is widely accepted in Europe, and many countries have now moved past the UK in this area. Sadly, poor old Britain caught between blind politicians of all shades and civil servants who saw information as power – to be retained at all costs – has lost out on all fronts.

The bitterness here is personal. As a campaigner and lobbyist I fought the good fight for a decade to get the European legislation through, and when it passed I thought, as I took a seat as a founder member of APPSI, that the battle was largely done. How foolish was that! The high ground of British public information was then – and still is – in the hands of state – owned monopolies whose hugely restrictive licences and high fees have proved a barrier to letting a hundred information flowers bloom, let alone a thousand. The UK has the energy – go and look at the thousands of digital start-ups in Shoreditch if you doubt it – and it has the financial investment muscle. But the catalytic element – being able to mash cheaply available, easily licensed data with third party and proprietary content – is wholly missing. And why is that? Because we have Ordnance Survey, HM Land Registry and countless other public monopolies who have the protection of the Treasury and of departments of state still seeking to flesh out a power base and avoid financing the collection and re-use of public information – that is, information collected at the taxpayer’s expense to perform a public duty enshrined in statute – in a proper networked world manner. When the history is written it will be found that Ordnance Survey on its own has been one of the greatest barriers to change in this sector. And if you think this overstates the issue, reflect that this country, which is about to license fracking for shale gas amidst fears of subsidence, still does not universally license the data which would show you whether your home was in danger of subsidence from historical coal mining. For that, you must go to an office in the North of England, pay a ludicrous fee, sit in a search room armed only with paper and pencil and have a search done. And this useless monopoly is a fiefdom of BIS, Britain’s department for Business!

But do not, whatever you do, blame BIS. They are highly attuned to the importance of public data. So highly attuned that when they privatized the British Post Office in this government, they sold it with the databases containing the post (Zip) codes within it. Sold this data, unpriced, not as a separate entity but lumped in with the postboxes and the delivery vans. Turned a public monopoly into – a private one. No special conditions attached to licencing. And then said afterwards that they did not realise what they had done! With people like this in charge of public policy, an Advisory Panel was certainly redundant. Quite superfluous. Almost embarrassing. Just think what such a panel make of the privatization of HM Land Registry. This was halfway down the slipway last year when the politicians lost their bottle, so it was withdrawn at the last moment. Given the way these public guardians treat public data, it would have made little difference if that became a private entity as well, but at least in that instance there was a chance of defining access conditions and securing standard licensing terms in the course of its change of status. As it is, the Shareholder Executive (designed to protect the public equity in these agencies – why does government always work in complete opposite directions to the intention) and the old villain, HM Treasury, work brilliantly together to fend off the public interest and preserve what once was in the face of what might be.

By now you think you are listening to a lunatic on a cold night shouting at the moon. So let me end with the sensible voice of the leading and authoritative academic commentator in this field, Bob Barr: “In the UK we have ended up with a lazy, counter-productive, business model based on holding public data hostage wherever possible, maximising the short term return from users that can derive the highest value, and pay the highest price, and diligently preventing the maximization of use in order to protect the monopoly rents that the high value users will pay.

However cogent, or otherwise the arguments from APPSI, ODUG and many lobbying and pressure groups before us, and no doubt after us, have been, the hidden hands of the Treasury, and its wicked offspring in ShEx (the Shareholder Executive), have prevailed in private. Their arguments are never publicly articulated. They do not publicly assess the costs and benefits of their approach across the economy as a whole but they have the ear of ministers in governments of all colours, no doubt egged on by the custodians of the data. This advice appears to count for much more than any academic, expert advisory or consultancy arguments articulated in public.”

Now government, which never implemented the data policy and has no policy of its own except no change, has shut down the source of advice. Not just a sad day for this debate, but a sad one for entrepreneurial Britain.

Jan

6

Leaders and Insurgents

Filed Under B2B, Blog, data analytics, eBook, Education, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, online advertising, Publishing, Search, STM, Uncategorized, Workflow | 2 Comments

Lying on my back this last month, recovering from spinal surgery while keyboarding with difficulty, I have had plenty of time to reflect on the industry while not quite having the energy to respond to what I read. Yet amidst the flow of fatuous nonsense that surrounds the interesting and insightful, the faux management guru who pronounced on how hard it was for a leader to be an insurrectionary, and how change could not be expected from businesses that had “transitioned”, got my goat so royally that I am still vibrating with indignation, even now that I am mercifully sitting upright again. And to compound this I missed all the countless award ceremonies and suchlike so I feel out of it. So here come my own awards – For Insurrectionary Leadership of Traditional UK Information Companies in 2014. These awards have not (I hope) been checked for compliance with diversity, gender equality, or any other of the social requirements of modern life. But they do reflect my absolute conviction that the right people in leadership positions can change everything; that from business model to innovation style, everything can be re-invented; that real leadership attracts support, from colleagues and investors, only if it is prepared to question the fundamentals at each phase of our discovery of the challenges and opportunities arising from living in a networked society/economy.

So, without more ado (drumroll), let me introduce my joint winners of this distinctly un-prestigious award. Neither of them work in sharp and shiny Shoreditch start-ups, but in companies which, when last sold by their traditional owners, were seen as commoditised smokestack businesses which had run their course. Today both of these companies are seen as leaders in their respective sectors, reaching global markets with brand enhanced prestige. Significantly, both of these companies were able to recruit senior management in 2014 at a very high level because they were perceived as change agents. Equally impressive, especially for me (having railed at traditional players who did not understand their new users for 30 years), both of these companies are widely seen as being close to users in service value and understanding. Yet, when I first knew these companies in the 1970s, both were subscription based publishers who seldom encountered a user in the flesh, so safely were they protected from reality by library and institutional subscription services. Both had an advertising base which they have had to re-invent. Neither had an automatic access to investment capital and both had to earn their inputs either from private equity or within a corporate ownership where there were other choices.

So as well as a restless questioning of the way business was done, and an ability to get into the place of the end-user and visualize value, both of my winners needed tireless advocacy, and the ability to win hearts and minds and trust. I am sure (omelettes/eggs syndrome) that each has made some mistakes, and that some who got moved on or out – in the disruptive course of change – will feel cause to argue my choices. But at the beginning of 2015 I see no companies that stand higher in the estimation of their users than Macmillan Science and Education, and the newly renamed TES Global. My awards therefore go jointly to Annette Thomas and Louise Rogers.

Of course, there is always more to do. The Education side of Macmillan, for example, remains in transition. But for a company founded in the second half of the nineteenth century, its renaissance in a digital world is remarkable. In 2015 I really appreciated how the use of Macmillan’s Digital Science as a greenhouse for investment in start-ups critical to the future role of researchers was blossoming into the development of investments like ReadCube as hub technologies around which other players, like Wiley in one example, could develop their own access and distribution strategies. In other words, do not compete with your old rivals: work on capturing the new value points. Users will recall 2014 as the year when their subscription value to Nature and its journals reaped additional value through the release of access controls for subscribers. And many of staff will recall the year as their first on an integrated campus site in Kings Cross which brings benefits in communication, and understanding of the whole customer base. Things will continue to change, especially as Digital Education as well as Digital Science, makes a contribution, but for the Holtzbrinck family investors, who bought from the Macmillan family when their nerve failed and whose courage has backed Annette and her talented team, there must be great satisfaction at the value enhancement here, as well as the return.

At TES Global the picture is very different. The Times Educational Supplement and its smaller sister, the Times Higher Educational Supplement, were sold by Murdoch’s News International when he persuaded himself that advertising teaching jobs in the UK would be done on government websites and was thus a dead duck. Two private equity owners have since made real money from this supposed write-off, and a third is shaping up to do the same. Not only have traditional markets been held but taken online and increased. TES Connect, a resource sharing innovation developed to allow teachers to share their own work and lesson plans, commands a global marketplace and has a joint venture with a major US teaching organization. 2014 will be recalled as the year when the new PE owner decided to back management in buying relevant tech companies in Silicon Valley to support this global growth and delver fresh layers of value as a way of getting a leverage on the value added through the resource sharing process. And to widen the market by acquiring agencies in areas of recruitment that the company never previously considered. Here is another company, a child of the great age of late nineteenth century print dominance, which has shown how determined questioning of the status quo can recreate value. As expansion opportunities now appear, 2014 saw several high level managers with new skill sets arrive to take up the challenges. And it was the year when it changed its name – to better reflect the TES brand it has so completely rebuilt.

My two award winners are very different, but share much in common. One has a background as a science researcher, the other as a B2B magazine publisher. Yet both understand the culture of users online in a way that has evaded many of their contempories. Both understand the workflow of their users and how their services must add critical value. Both have been prepared to take historic business models and shake them until they worked, or new ones were ready for adoption. But for me, the award goes to them because they were both prepared to lead change from the CEO position. They have demonstrated that they are prepared to dare to be wrong. This quality is called courage, and there is less of it about in the information industry than we need at a time when the speed of change is ever quickening.

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