May
16
Up and About in Amsterdam and London
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, eBook, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Search, semantic web, Uncategorized, Workflow | 2 Comments
It is about seven years ago now that I crowded into a meeting room in San Mateo, California, and was introduced to the entire staff of MarkLogic. I was in the midst of a negotiation just up the road in Burlingame to sell my company to Outsell, but I had been energised by a conversation with Dave Kellogg, the very charismatic CEO of the young MarkLogic, to pay them a visit. “Stand over here”, said Kellogg, “and tell us where Europe is”. Presuming that he meant European publishing, rather than the Alps and the Pyrenees, I began a halting description of a market in slow digital transition, but was soon overtaken by other voices. Apparently, MarkLogic was the latest thing in database technology, and apparently the primitive nature of the market I had been apologetically describing, was pure opportunity lurking in the shadows and waiting to be turned into the stardust of a new age of media management. I drove away feeling that we might have gone an adjective too far in our enthusiasm but that something here had to be watched. This week I found out what that was.
Since that meeting I have had a long and pleasurable association with the company, and last week its annual user show arrived in a Europe it now knows intimately, with MarkLogic World 2015 conferences in Amsterdam and London. Alongside these events a dinner for publishing people took place, and I was able to attend and speak at both. With revenues last year marching past the $100m marker, and with a further funding round completed last week producing a further $100m in investment from backers that included Sequoia and Wellington, this is another emerging Silicon Valley force to be reckoned with in software. You would need a conference facility to speak to its 400 plus staff, and it is currently just discovering where AsiaPacific is – in media terms. And while publishing was a very proper starter market, the company is deeply embedded in government computing (Obamacare), broadcasting (the BBC Sports Olympic coverage was a breakthrough moment for a database that could allow 13 million viewers that ability to configure their own personalised view of the content), financial services and in all those accidental publishing places where entities who never thought of themselves as media now find that in a network context that is exactly what they are.
I am not the right person to expound on NoSQL databases, though I get a stronger sense each year that I am looking at the next Oracle, now directed by the equally charismatic Gary Bloom, a business leader whose own experiences were shaped in the Oracle that now faces this competitive pressure. Nor should I be writing about semantic analysis, triple stores or the vital importance of being able to work with structured and unstructured data in the same context. But I do now see clearly what happens as a result, and the transformation these technologies are creating in the lives of the people around those dinner tables. Job titles here become meaningless. These hard-working people were various designated as CTO, CIO, Chief Data Officer, Data Architect, Chief Product Manager, Business Development Manager and many more combinations of these. But they were around those tables because of a shift in power that has taken place throughout the media, and I slowly realised how little we have taken that shift into account and what it means for creativity in our businesses.
In the dim and distant past, in Old Publishing, editorial direction was the root of creativity. We spoke of “flair” and “hunch” as components in the business of selectivity. Then, we had Marketing, and we spoke of “fieldwork” and “research” as the drivers of creative decision making about how to formulate our products and develop our offerings. Many of us have now moved to the next stage as well, but it could be argued that we are in some respects still living in the Marketing-driven world. In very crude terms I could argue that the Editorial world was driven by format – books, magazines, newspapers. The Marketing phase was driven by content – trying to assemble content ever more carefully to meet the perceived needs of customers. The current drive, although it began in the search for ways of speeding up new product development, is towards Solutions, producing answers to real problems expressed by users, but creatively organising those solutions so that they produce measurable customer benefit, aka Value, often expressed in terms of productivity or cost saving.
And who in our information business is organising this new creativity? Not the editorial department, who are now just a part of process, if they exist at all. Not the Marketing department, who are solely occupied in presenting the results of what we produce to the customers we are trying to reach. The real creatives in information companies are those responsive to the unrecognised force derived from living in a networked society: in a networked economy the service requirement derives from the all-powerful user. All those job titles listed above, from CTO to Data Architect, are increasingly being turned inside out, and ceasing to be functions of internal systems development. Instead they are becoming the way in which we respond to what markets need, design solutions that make sense to end users, and create wealth.
If this is the case then some will feel that the creative role of the Data Architect is grossly under-recognised. I would agree, though the power in these roles, derived at once from a networked economy and from the rapid proliferation of intelligent ways of organising data like MarkLogic, is shown both in the scramble to recruit talent in this field and by the growing influence it has on budgets and expenditure. And this also raises a worry. If these people are the creative cadre of the future, are information businesses exposing them sufficiently to their customers. And given that customers never entirely told the truth in the long history of market research (a bit like political opinion polling?) do the designers of our solutions get enough observation time inside the customer context to discern where value may lie? We have the project development strategies (Agile et al) and we have the tools and structures, but do we have the evidence upon which to make decisions that will add value in contexts where our customers expect ever more customized responses from us?
May
4
A Stroll in the Tiergarten
Filed Under Big Data, Blog, eBook, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, Publishing, social media, STM, Uncategorized | 1 Comment
It was almost May. The asparagus is just arriving and the rhubarb at its best. This can only be the backdrop for the annual Publishers Forum in Berlin, now celebrating its 12th year and consistently performing as the focus for publishing discussion in central Europe, and celebrating the global view Europeans now take of publishing in all its forms and marketplaces. This show is put on by Klopotek for the industry it serves, which is a service that its industry should appreciate With some 260 delegates from Germany and central Europe, that appreciation certainly seems to be in place. This year’s theme “How to Reconstruct Publishing: Competing Visions, Channels and Audiences”, was the first under the direction of Dr Ruediger Wischenbart, but was as typically challenging as ever. A real debate about where we are going is still hard to find.
In a typically stirring piece in Scholarly Kitchen this week Joe Esposito (http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2015/05/04/the-half-life-of-print/) made the point that whenever we debate the future of publishing someone stands up and asks about the future of the book. I agree with him, and I find this as annoying and pointless as he does. Quite apart from the fact that print has disappeared in very many contexts in society, the digitally networked world releases us from this fruitless debate by the promise of being able to deliver anything to anyone at the point of use in their preferred medium. Ergo, print will survive where people value it and disapear entirely where they do not – yellow pages, trade maggazines, academic journals, newspapers…? Well, you see what I mean. Joe makes the point that digital publishing has not yet been kind to coffee table artbooks, so I was interested to hear Rolf Grisebach, CEO at Thames and Hudson, give one of the opening keynotes in Berlin.
His not-unreasonable argument turned on the large file size and lack of a decisive advantage in image viewing that digital currently offers users of art books. In last weeks’ piece in this place I pointed to the virtual reality benefits of displaying architecture online, as practiced by the New York Times. I would like art publishing that allowed me to focus on the eyes of the artist and then move me through a slide show of Rembrandt’s self-portraits in chronological order. I would like a virtual reality tour of Christopher Wren. I have the Waste Land app on my iPad and I am a customer for new approaches to valuing art, literature, architecture and music in a digital age. Here I think we can do more, though I was very grateful to Rolf for re-awakening memories of his company founder, Walter Neurath, and for reminding me that the company is named for its two founding cities, London and New York.
In some ways there was more comfort for the progressives in the next keynote, from Jacob Dalborg, the CEO of Bonnier Books. Here was an integrated vision which sounded like an investible business plan on the one hand, while stressing the way the digital world makes marketing to niches more potentially profitable than ever before. Any session that hammers home the need to build and exploit metadata and expand metadata values must be of prime importance today. With global standard expertise on the agenda (Graham Bell, Director of Editeur) this conference could hardly be accused of ducking the issue, but I still feel that we see this as “marketing utilities” and it always gets sidelined when we talk “creativity”. Well, if you want to create markets there is no more important subject, and it was good to see Jacob Dalborg underlining it.
This conference does bilingual brilliantly, but it also does breakout sessions that create wonderful debate but mean I lose some agenda items. Thus I really wanted to hear Publishing goes Pop: instead I moderated a session with a small group in which a very valuable discussion took place. Across the table was an Open Access STM publisher from Poland and a consumer publishing marketing executive from Germany. The others at the table were left to listen as these two set out to demonstrate the parallels in their very different specialities and effectively draw together the themes of the conference. This was the antidote to any idea that publishing is pulling apart. Indeed, at the end of this I was convinced that the digital network is helping publishing of all types re-focus on the user, and services to the user, in a way that in the world of physically formatted publishing we could only pay lip service.
And of course we had some technology, but it is now noticeable that we do not talk “tech” to these audiences at all. Matt Turner, CTO at MarkLogic, talks about flexibility, about speed of new product generation, and, in this agenda, putting content and context into action. It remains a surprize to many of us that publishers seem to set so much value on creative content, understandably, while according such reduced value to the contextual data about customers and how they use content in general, and their own content in particular. Meanwhile, Steve Odart of IXXUS moved us into a consideration of how we run our businesses and how we innovate when he took the Agile project management philosophy away from tech and into business as a way of working creatively in digital marketplaces.
Two days and we did not even get a stroll in the park – though perhaps that was what we enjoyed in the sort of company which is thinking seriously, not about the book, but about where publishing goes now.
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