Aug
14
Things Every Boy and Girl Should Know…
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, Education, eLearning, Financial services, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, Publishing, Search, semantic web, social media, STM, Uncategorized, Workflow | 3 Comments
” Well,” she said, in a determined and slightly defensive tone of voice “the last thing we intend to do is turn ourselves into a software house. We are publishers and cannot be expected to understand software, which is such a terrible distraction. I took my correction silently and philosophically. After all, this has been a litany I have heard for a decade. And the paradox is that the more that software controls and modulates the way publishers create content, and the more it dominates the way in which users view it, the more permissible it has become for very senior executives in all sorts of places that do “publishing” (rapidly becoming a meaningless term) to proclaim with pride their ignorance of some of the basics. Some tell me “that’s what we have a CTO for”, while others tell me that it is not a creative area (yes, really!!) of their business. The largest decisions a modern information industry CEO will make concern software. The delivery – critical decisions a publisher of romantic novels will mainly concern software. We cannot avoid it – so surely every senior executive should know enough to intelligently quiz the CTO, outside suppliers and potential alliance partners?
You have now been reading for about 60 seconds. During that time, the software that holds us all in place in the network has been mightily engaged. 168 million emails were sent during that time. 694,445 Google searches took place. 320 new Twitter accounts were opened and 58,000 new tweets were posted. 600 new videos were posted – I could go on (courtesy of Go-Globe.com) but I hope you get the message. If people who run businesses they call “publishing” do not understand the platform upon which they stand, as they once understood the possibilities of print, then what hope is there for the traditional end of the market? I meet very many CEOs in the course of a working year, and in every 10 there are three who are brilliant on the bedrock technologies that drive their businesses. There are three more who struggle but know it is important. After that come four who do not really see it at all, and this group is strongest in the areas of greatest current risk – consumer book publishing, magazines and events. I almost feel as if there should be a test: Differentiate and suggest how you would use HTML5 and XML. Distinguish RDBMS databases from NoSQL databases and explain the advantages of the latter over the former. What does Epub3 allow you to do that you could not do before? How would you use the Cloud to support a reduction in Capex in your development programme? What is Open Source and is it cheaper or more expensive than proprietary software? What is entity extraction and how do I use the semantic web to add value? What is SaaS and how does it create scope for your expansion?
Readers here would doubtless have no difficulty with any of this. But still, we all – me especially – need a jolt of recognition of the speed of change at the moment. Venture Capital has a current investment of some $16 billion in SaaS software alone, with about half in business functionality (FactSet). The global software industry will top $1.1 trillion in 2016 (Gartner) – for comparison the current sizing of the publishing and information marketplace is $400 billion today (Outsell). Gartner see media and communications as a key area for the software businesses, with 2012’s spend by the sector of $61 billion rising to $78 billion in 2016. Some $21 billion of this spend ($25 billion in 2016) is for media-specialized applications. This is the top ranked vertical sector for software in 2016. My argument at the moment would be that this sale is resting on the shoulders of a very small, technically-capable group of senior buyers – it is time now for a better informed cadre of senior management to help to bear this burden, and for boards to have a generally better informed decision-making discussion which is capable of putting the view of the CTO and the professional advisers and evaluators into the medium term context of the business.
Finally, lets just look at one section of the information waterfront. This week I noted with interest the acquisition of a company called Edaboard.com by Design World (WTWH Media LLC). This brings together a leading brand which provides information services on design engineering with a community-driven forum focussed on electrical engineering topics. We have seen deals like this, and will see a lot more. But the decisions that come next – one platform or two, in-house or outsource, service integration, Cloud-based services etc will be critical to the success of this investment. I do not know Design World and I have no reason to believe that they are not fully capable of doing the job, but in many corporations of my acquaintance many of these decisions would be taken by a small coterie of tech-savvy operators, with some of the most senior people acting in faith and trust that someone else had made the right tech bets.
In a great allusion, Mike Olson of Cloudera remarked that “We are living through a Cambrian moment in database history”. As the Age of Data morphs into Data Science, we all struggle to keep up. As major data concentrations meet the Cloud, and we have to work with PaaS (Platform as a service) and DaaS (database as a service) it is not going to get slower or easier. But it is clear that the boundaries around “what we need to know to do the job” are radically changed as well. None of us should be frightened about going back to school!
Aug
5
The Future is Already Past
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, online advertising, Publishing, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
Is there a better instance of “speed of change” than that just when you are instancing something as a prime example of future change, you next read of it as history? We keep reminding ourselves that change is running at faster rates than we imagined, or than we experienced in childhood or at other times. My usual counter to this has been to point out how slowly things happen. Between announcement and implementation whole decades seem to yawn, so that when the signalled change does take place, we experience something like dejas vu. Yet I do share the “speed of change” experience myself, and last week, just as I was writing about the automation of aspects of building design and construction, I started to tell a friend, standing on my soapbox as a former farming person, about the developments one could forecast in agriculture. “And so”, I recall ending my peroration,” it is plain to see that the tractor is a robot waiting to happen…”
Well, he was kind enough to wait an hour or so before sending me the article about research at John Deere, and while looking at that I came across Jaybridge Robotics (www.jaybridge.com/news) and their work with Kinze to create Kinze Autonomy, the driverless tractor. This development is capable of performing a complete harvesting workflow in a geo-location-based systems environment which was launched in Iowa on July 29th. My friend kindly wrote “Your prediction was History – but remind me why I needed to know…” And there lies the problem: we need to know how our users are likely to adapt to change at the same time that they make that decision. In an information market where corporate planning times have diminished from a standard five years when I entered work, to a budget plus a forecast it is becoming peculiarly hard to negotiate the hair-pin bends of market change while keeping an eye on the horizon. I even have one colleague who does two six month budgets a year and still complains how hard it is to cope with changing circumstances.
Last Friday, Sonoma issued their interim results. How often have you read a media company boss like Harri-Pekka Kaukonen, President and CEO, say things like this:
“Learning’s solid performance continued in the second quarter whereas
structural changes accelerated in consumer media.
Advertising markets in Sanoma’s main operating countries continued to be
depressed. The likelihood of clearly improving market conditions in the second
half of the year is estimated to be low. In addition, circulation sales
continue to be under pressure, impacting our sales and profitability”
For the past five years we could have produced automated statements to this effect for every media player throughout Europe and North America. And while I am sure that the wise folk at Sanoma have new strategies to roll out in due course, I find it deeply disturbing that much of the consumer print media marketplace seems to have been sleepwalking for the last five years, and for the five years before that when structural change began. So do we really have a ten year reaction time to fundamental change? Lets move forward quickly to James Dolan, CEO of Cablevision, the fifth largest cable player in the US, as quoted this morning by the Wall Street Journal (http://onlinr.wsj.com: “The Future of Cable might not include TV”). Now here is someone who can imagine the impact of structural change when he senses it. In the wars between programme makers, internet distributors and video channels like Netflix he seems determined to be prepared, even if he is not a television player in the future. Allocating capital expenditures of $1.1 billion last year to upgrading his network, he is determined to work as a broadband distributor, offering higher speeds, greater outdoor wifi access and cloud-based storage allowing users the ability to record up to ten items at the same time. He notes that his kids (he has six boys from 6 to 26) use Netflix on Cablevision Broadband. One of his investors remarks” Jim has a multi-generational view, a longer term view”. Some people see change, and are able to think about the unthinkable.
Sometimes the best way to envision the future is to watch other people betting on it. This is why the start-up markets are so interesting, to me at least, and why watching the drift of interest in venture capital-backed plays can be so useful. I have to believe that setting up VC-style growth greenhouses makes sense (as Macmillan Education and Science, and a number of others have grasped). I noted that some now believe that the tech development impetus in Europe has moved from London to Berlin (http://newsle.com/article/0/86896557/), but where it is does not really matter. We all have to go there and see what is happening. In the UK there is a traditional gap between university science park developments and tech development zones like London’s Shoreditch, so I was pleased to see Elsevier sponsoring the Global University Venturing Summit (http://www.globaluniversityventuring.com/pages/global-university-venturing-summit-brussels-oct-16th.html) which takes place in October this year. If you want to smell the future, get into meetings like this, stop thinking about what has changed and start thinking about what will.
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