Apr

20

Dreams can be Iterative Too

Filed Under B2B, Blog, Financial services, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, semantic web, STM, Thomson, Uncategorized, Workflow | 1 Comment

After a break for refreshment (archaeology in the Levant) I am back to face further questioning in the Court of Industry Opinion, and particularly from the colleague who recalled a paper written in 2009 as an Outsell CEO Topic: “Workflow: Information’s New Field of Dreams” and argued that the industry had moved so quickly in the past two years that this did not represent any sort of summation of where we were today. She was right, and a little research shows how I underjudged the real position two years ago, and how the iterated aspiration that lies at the root of workflow as an information services model is now maturing rapidly. Worse, I had underestimated how much the new world was beholden to the old. In the new edition of this report, labelled Version 2.0 and published yesterday (http://www.outsellinc.com/store/products/993), I have retraced my steps and looked again at the importance of metadata and its long history, of taxonomic control and semantic search  as contributors to our dream of creating living models of streams of working activity, involving deeply different parts of the workforce. And I am sure that I shall revisit and develop this area in Version 3.0, should I  ever get that far, and that we shall find that much of the XML-based technology which has been so useful in creating the agile publishing environments of today (MarkLogic would be the market leader with particular resonance here) will be even more useful as we restructure content to fit the shapes required in different workflow roles.

And then something else happened today. Thomson Reuters, whose work in creating a Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) Division I have covered here in detail, launched their Accelus Suite (http://thomsonreuters.com/content/news_ideas/articles/legal/4292965), a rebranding of the 40 or so products and services they bought (Complinet) or borrowed from other parts of the group into 12 solutions areas. I have covered this in detail today in an Outsell Insight (https://clients.outsellinc.com/insights/index.php?p=11468) and do not wish to repeat that here, but it is important to remind ourselves of some key issues. This work has taught us, for example, that the outstanding work done by Lexis Nexis in putting together Seisint and Choicepoint to create a risk assessment workflow engine for the insurance industry is a “vertical” model for the industry. Thomson Reuters Accelus Suite is a “horizontal” model, and while its first targets are financial services players, the elements of the Suite (a Governance, Transactions and Legal Risk set, a Compliance and Regulatory Risk set and an Audit and Internal Control set) are common to all businesses of any scale. In addition, all of these elements require elements of training and education, risk mapping and assessment, audit and accountability, and communication of audited results – upwards, for example, via this Division’s Boardlink environment, a communication tool for risk-responsible directors.

Hang on a minute. There is one problem in all of this. As the Accelus Survey, published with this launch as the first in a regular series reminds us, the one thing we know about corporate life is that the legal department, financial control, the auditors, the compliance officer, the tax advisor and the people who do risk assessment and management all, literally, speak different languages. The Survey points out that 94% of the 2000 respondents saw this as a major issue, and it is surely here that the metadata and taxonomic control elements take centre stage. We will not improve risk management generically unless all of these different people can talk fluently and with precision to each other and to outside agencies, and the GRC Accelus Suite, if it is to succeed, must address that core issue. It is the contention of its leaders that this has been done, and while we all know that “done” is a way of saying iterative development is in train, one assurance lies in the size of the industry sample so far engaged. The Accelus Suite platform now claims more than 100,000 users, from each of the job segments in the workflow, providing a community whose feedback should give drive and direction to fitness for purpose. In this environment, the applications must grow to meet the needs (unlike my new shoes, where the foot must change, painfully, to fit the format!).

So what will these workflow environments grow to become in the industry as a whole? Thomson Reuters position Accelus Suite as a brand and line of business as large in stature and importance as Westlaw or Eikon. This is big. When I spoke earlier in the cycle of building a new business in the interstices between Thomson Reuters’ two well established branded businesses in law and financial services this was no exaggeration. And there is another very striking feature of this launch. Have a look at Regulatory Risk Mapper within the Accelus Suite and you will see an old industry trait  – discovery – and a new one – visualization. The point of the Mapper is to detect change (Thomson Reuters recorded 12500 important regulatory rewrites last year) and map it onto policy. Then it can be flagged and dealt with at a variety of different levels and many different ways. And it is what distinguishes an information solutions business from an information research business. And makes Dreams re-iterate.

Mar

21

An Occupation for Gentlemen

Filed Under B2B, Blog, data protection, Financial services, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, privacy, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, Thomson, Uncategorized, Workflow | 2 Comments

I first read Fred Warburg’s volume of autobiography, title as above, in 1968. I have noted on the flyleaf that I bought it in the Charing Cross Road, and, a great blow no doubt to that charismatic publisher, it had been remaindered! This did not stop me from buying, reading and enjoying the second volume from the owner of Secker and Warburg, entitled “All Authors are Equal”. Along with many others in the same genre they formed my first (and intensely romantic) ideas of what a publisher was. Like an amateur rider in a country steeplechase, the thing was to be stylish and show conviction: getting round the course was as good as winning. Publishing was not to be reduced to a science (Sir Stanley Unwin and Geoffrey Cass notwithstanding): we did what we did with something indefinably mysterious called “flair” and devil take the consequences.

That glorious past is both past and, probably, glorious. Yet the “publisher” word, once a badge of pride, now threatens to become a noose around our necks as fatal to breathing as the Old School Tie. Last week, which moved me merrily between the Imperial Boardroom in Caesars Palace, Las Vegas, and the David Lean Room at London’s Bafta (there is a link there but I have no time to fish it out), was lit up for me by a colleague quoting the chairman of a major “publisher” as saying that they could not look at the potential of workflow software to support their users because “we are content people and do not wish to become a software house”. Now, chairmen of large companies make statements like this for three reasons: to confuse the enemy, to console staff for whom the speed of change is too great, and to stop the IT department investing margins in long term developments which are needed for debt repayment or to support re-financing. I quite understand. But in my view that statement draws a line in the sand which is well behind the real situation. Any “publisher” with any reasonable chance of survival already is a software house, even if all the learning experiences associated with that are outsourced and the skills base available inside is not up to the job. It has happened, and if we do not want to call it publishing lets leave that in the museum with Fred and find another word (but, please, a better one than “information services and solutions provider”!).

My collection of news from the week aligns well with this argument. The spate of announcements from Wolters Kluwer , starting on 17 February and concluding with the Enterprize Risk Management software announcement for financial services is a case in point (http://www.wolterskluwer.com/Press/Latest-News/2011/Pages/pr16mar2011a.aspx). Here, following the Lexis and Thomson Reuters lead, Wolters Kluwer are consolidating other content -enhanced workflow environments under the ARC Logic brand. The game here is about providing links that enable a group of corporate functions – compliance risk, operational risk and internal audit – to operate in conjunction with each other while remaining fully updated, sharing the content they need to share while retaining access to those things that one function alone needs. ARC Logics brings together a group of services which the company bought separately – brands include AXENTIS, Sword, TeamMate – and now seeks to deploy them  to combine the “advantages of solution specific software platforms and enterprize integration”. In other words, these are not entirely off-the-shelf packages: they are modularized to create solutions and are intended to integrate with the corporations’ enterprize systems. And once integrated they are very hard to prize loose.

While this announcement was intended for financial services, Wolters Kluwer point out that they serve the same functions in other verticals. They specify insurance,  government, life sciences, manfacturing, healthcare and energy as places where they have clients. In this the are operating in a similar manner to Thomson Reuter’s GRC division, who were organized last year around the Complinet and Paisley acquisitions. And they have a similarly “horizontal” view, which says that similar requirements can be found in a very wide range of vertical market sectors, and that the issues are not about creating new or customized workflow management systems, but finding out how to get the right matrix of functionalities with the right lines of content.

The opposite camp, in some ways, would be Lexis, since its most successful model is in the insurance industry, and what has been built is both an industry risk management model (because insurance is all about risk) but more importantly, a core operational workflow model for running an insurance company. Here there can never be enough data, and while this model works well the US (low-level privacy and data protection legislation) it works less well in Europe. Or does it? The recent announcement that Equifax UK had bought Workload, a company that researches private wealth and asset management information, and is thus able to add content on ISAs, bonds, unit trusts, pensions and mortgages to the existing Equifax consumer files is indicative that data is like water – it usually finds its way round a dam. And it is no accident that the big credit rating companies are becoming entrenched in workflow markets: Experian is a partner of Lexis in the US, and the strategic alliance trend around content looks set to continue.

When we were publishers our duty was to our readers. But access was static and not interactive. In the age of networks  collaboration to build solutions is the requirement if we recognize that readers have become users. We talk change before we live change. Time to get real about “publishing”. And remember that, like authors, all users are equal too.

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