Nov
13
Hyperlocal: Lost in the Data Mix?
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, Financial services, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, online advertising, Publishing, semantic web, social media, STM, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
On my good days I scan the screen for the re-invention of local news in a personalized framework, which is how I have defined “hyperlocal” for some years now. On the bad ones, I search for news of Ashley Highfield, erstwhile creator of the BBC web customization service, iPlayer, and now running Johnston Press. If he cannot re-invent the press, then who can? Or maybe there is another Johann Carolus in somewhere like Strasbourg, just about to do digitally what his namesake did in 1605, and develop the first news sheet. Yet Mr Carolus put the news to work for local businessmen (seventeenth century Germany was as yet oblivious of the bogus distinction of B2B from B2C), and it thus occurs to me that I may be looking in the wrong place for the renaissance of local news.
These thoughts were triggered by a piece in the New York Times (November 10) which did look as if it was going to tackle my “hyperlocal” anxieties.
(http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/11/technology/gathering-more-data-faster-to-produce-more-up-to-date-information.html?_r=0&adxnnl=1&pagewanted=2&adxnnlx=1384288878-xYaeMfcYZuVjg950SS64xg&pagewanted=print) This piece, entitled Big Data’s Little Brother”, is in fact a story about data analytics, featuring Premise , a service which collects and analyses photos of market stalls around the globe in order to compile inflation and availability data for food supply and cost analysis, and Clear Story data, which does custom predictive analysis from the data available on the web and/or supplied by clients. Indeed this works with my own observations: SaaS in data analytics is becoming a boom industry, with players like RecordedFutures.com now creating multi-faceted analysis from cyber intelligence to competitive positioning. And these tools can only get smarter, which leads me to believe that we may have to re-create “news” for people who will have commercial reasons to pay before we can personalize news for the general reader/citizen at large.
So what are these data- driven, analytical insight organs going to look like? Well, for a start, we shall have to redefine the word “news”. The services that grab the attention now do not use the news to report something so much as to predict something. When Takadu.com is deployed by a water utility company, it is putting together analysis around sensor, image, staff and public reporting on water leaks. Since 25-30% of global water supplies are NRW water – non-revenue contributing, a glorious term for leaks – this is as vital to the utility as it is to the globe, but the important matter may not be the leak itself, but the trend, the order of repair, and the potential future impact. While it is hard to appreciate FoodGenius.com, which helps food processors develop ever more nutritional disasters for our consumption, it reads 300,000 menus daily to find the trend and create the prediction – lambs’ kidneys in guacamole will be big in 2014 – and will be available everywhere. And moving swiftly to a subject that makes me feel less emotional, companies like Molecular Connections can use the analytics on one side of their business for advanced drug discovery processes, finding and analysing news from the future, while using their technology to give meaning to archival news, as they have done with Nature, the pre-eminent science journal.
None of this is News as we know it, and part of me now accepts the idea that the networked society will never quite want News as newspapers once knew it. Things like the Huffington Post are hybrids, the results of miscegenation, not a new evolutionary track. Things like Buzzfeed are entertainments, brilliant if you want to contemplate the life and works of Rob Ford, Torontonian mayor/buffoon/jester, reduced to 22 captioned images, but only customizable in the “more like that” sense. Nothing here speaks to me about the use of the one thing we have in plenty – data – to inform us of the patterns of our lives and the way that they may change in future.
And we know so much. Isotrak.com reckon they are saving their haulier clients £150 m per annum on areas like building patterns of more efficient driving. This links to my interest, already expressed here, in lower motor insurance costs as your car speaks to your insurer via your smartphone and reports your performance. While recording your journey on Wayze, and noting car accidents and traffic congestion as a result. So maybe these services of the future have active advertising – not just “buy our service to save money” – but lets do it and save it now! And maybe the “news” is about you – in society, against the backdrop of the performance of others, all living anxiously in a rated, graded world. After long years when news tycoons and advertising gurus fought to create “My” service environments and telling us all how to behave, it would be poetic justice if we ended up making them for ourselves, and letting the data modelling tell us how to behave.
Which is what I think we will do. Soon the tools will become available to view all the niche networks that we join in the post-Facebook world in a single viewer which allows us one view of our separate networks for family, for college friends, for business and professional associates, sports aficionados etc. Here we will pull in more data – is anyone getting better wholesale prices for his home- produced electricity than I am? And analysis. And prediction. And we will move the dial from the congested relief road to who is standing for office who wants to do something about it. And before we know it we are back to wondering how any group of well-adjusted people elected Rob Ford, or Boris Johnson, or any other mayor, and then we want commentary and analysis to explain these things. Here “journalism” is by definition self-employed.
But in the meanwhile, the deconstruction of news has to be total before we can begin to reconstruct the flows of data and information which will make a digital economy in a networked society perform and function. So it is probably just as well we have the guys we have in charge of our press. From power-broking to phone hacking , they are doing a grand job of destroying public trust in the world of paper and preparing us all for the digital yet to come. So good, in fact, that rather than put them on trial we should give them an award!
Oct
31
Giants in Transformation Contrast
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, eBook, Education, eLearning, Financial services, Industry Analysis, internet, Pearson, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, Search, Thomson, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
There are some major similarities and differences between the giant market players in the information/publishing media sector which are not all about markets and competition. For example, Wolters Kluwer and Reed Elsevier have clearly become portfolio strategists. If rumours in New York a month ago about leaving the law market, and rumours in London about a major entry into credit rating are anything to go by, markets clearly see Reed as a player who now has the scope to restructure the portfolio. But Pearson and Thomson Reuters, both in the $6-9 billion USD range in annual revenues, are not at all like that. The transformation they seek is about global markets and building bigger sectoral presence in order to dominate the workflow of professionals with solutions that become a requirement in markets which are duopolistic at most. Perhaps it is time to catch the flavour of “transformation”.
Pearson and Thomson Reuters, despite the differences in their marketplaces, are thus an important comparison in the Transformation Game. T-R have appointed a Chief Transformation Officer, and when they announced third quarter results this week pointed to 3000 job losses as a first transformational step. Let Jim Smith, CEO of Thomson Reuters have the first word (from his quarterly results press release):
“Our improving track record on execution gives me the confidence to now move even faster in our transformation work,” said Smith. “We will pick up the pace of efforts to simplify and streamline our organization, to shift resources behind the most promising growth opportunities and to use every tool at our disposal to drive value creation for all our stakeholders.”
And then again in a leaked memo to staff (www.jimromanesko.com):
“The answer is to accelerate our evolution into a platform company – one that delivers to customers not just a portfolio of products, but the power of our entire enterprise. We have made progress on that front, but there’s still much to be done. To take the next step, today we set aside funding to further accelerate the transformation of our Financial business and to better align resources to our most promising opportunities.”
Here then is a strategy that remains wedded to the idea of cross-selling and cross-solutioning financial services, law and tax professionals, and then moving outwards to the clients of those professionals. It uses the word “platform” both in a technology and marketing sense, and the word becomes a metaphor that suggests that when all the content and all of the customer knowledge is in one place, T-R can use its skills to quickly generate agile services that fit local needs in a global context. To do this you need to eliminate the turf wars which have been such a feature of these great corporations: in my Thomson years it was easier to partner a complete stranger than share a venture with another Thomson division. Mr Smith has indicated that the politicking must stop, and be replaced by an ethic that is mindful of the overall gain, but changing cultures is one of the toughest elements of transformation, and there are few records of success to use for guidance.
But some things are swinging in Mr Smith’s direction. Sluggish early sales of Eikon are now moving forward and have passed the 100,000 installations mark. Job losses will enable the re-organization of skills and assets needed to permit the transformation, as well as improve margins. The share price has risen by a third in the last year, a welcome sign that markets see what is happening and support it, and the latest results seem to underline that. But problems remain. The platform technology architecture is far from in place, and indeed the historical divisions seem locked on historical technological solutions that have real problems in talking to each other. This is surely a frontline issue for a Chief Transformation Officer.
Over at Pearson, John Fallon, chief executive, said: “In trading terms, 2013 has begun much as we expected. In general, good growth in our digital, services and developing-market businesses continues to offset tough conditions for traditional publishing. Our strategy is to transform Pearson into a single operating company that is sharply focussed on the biggest needs in global education and on measurable learning outcomes. With our restructuring programme on track and the reorganisation of the company under way, we are making significant progress towards that goal.”
In other words, investors are invited to see a picture of a new CEO trying to get a global strategy in place (as against a big US core of 10 years ago, plus some good but small geographically dispersed education assets). Today the balance is much more equal, the US is clearly much less influential in the revenues and margins analysis, and the company i.e. recognized as the sector global market leader. Yet every one still gets worried when college textbook sales are described as “soft”. The share price goes off by 6%, even though Pearson is a company that makes most progress in the second half of its financial year. But this year sets challenging targets if they are to end up within reach of their goal.
The big investor question at Pearson was always “can all this globalization, re-platforming and occupancy of the whole education services and solutions niche, not just the learning content bit, be done without a huge debt burden?” So far, this miracle has happened, and with more non-core assets yet to be sold there is great scope for further acquisition-led growth. And education markets in some sectors outside of US College are picking up, so there is a warm reception to the idea of restructuring the company managerially, reducing duplication and unnecessary cost and getting the right technology in place to re -platform for rapid product development.
Nothing in the managerial changes was a surprise except that technology leadership seems to have been dissipated. Investors expect that when markets give Pearson the signal the tech environment will allow product developers anywhere to have access to the whole corpus of Pearson data/content/knowledge to produce very rapid iterations of innovative services and solutions which can be redeveloped and re-iterated in flight. As with Thomson, the fluent use of the whole data environment, of data analytics and of what we might have called Big Data six months ago becomes crucial to the way in which both players relate to their major customers. Does the Pearson divisional structure allow for this, and does the tech unity and architecture exist to permit it? We do not know yet because markets are not quite warm enough to try out a lot of things, but having been sold the idea of Pearson as a global growth vehicle by John Fallon, there will be an expectation of performance over the next 18 months, and a greater degree of immunity to old sectors like college textbooks giving everyone the shivers.
The important fact that investors must now reluctantly accept is that repeat order, edition-based, price-elastic textbook markets have gone forever, and that Pearson are clearing the decks for what comes next even if no one is always quite sure what that is! But for both companies there is a certainty that it is not just change, but “transformation”. And that the market and technology philosophy around “platform” lies at the heart of it. Markets will of course exercise a great deal of concern at the periphery of these momentous changes. They will want to know what assets are core and what are non-core? John Fallon is obviously fed up with being asked when he is going to sell the FT to Bloomberg/Thomson Reuters, even while the MergerMarket side of the FT Group is being broken out and prepared for sale. Jim Smith and his Chief Transformer will no doubt get the same treatment around Thomson Reuters IP and Science activities. But the future of both players is not decided there and for them this is no longer a portfolio game.
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