Feb

6

The Collaboration Game

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

Multi-tasking may be beyond me. I am finding it very hard to travel and blog at the same time. And having traveled 10 hours by train and over 50 in a plane in the past 14 days I must beg forgiveness for the gap in production on this blog. And the annoying thing is that many of the things encountered on these travels have been red meat for bloggers.

Take as an example last week’s Information Industry Summit, organized as ever by the SIIA and held this year at New York’s Pier 60. This is a really important industry event, and I was pleased to be amongst a crowd of some 250 who enjoyed a very varied and interesting agenda. And specially interesting for me these days since these conferences provide a verbal map of industry sentiment. One would have thought, for example, that for many SIIA members 2012 was a disaster worth forgetting. Consolidation goes on apace but many of the “great” players of yesteryear took considerable reverses, and investor sentiment about the “information industry”, if that means failing print to some, must be flagging. With McGraw-Hill dividing into two, and selling the weaker part, and News Corp dividing into two and racking up real problems in the bad bank side, there are plenty of examples of near terminal troubles. And yet the room was full as ever of investors and analysts. I cannot be certain of course whether they were there to pick over the wreckage, or to re-invest post-digital development, but they are still there. And while they are there I really think we should give them a vision of the future which is not framed by our rear view mirror.

So the conference began with George Colony, the articulate and persuasive father of Forrester, giving a talk about Thunderstorms. Indeed, this was a recurrent theme. It reminded me of where we have been these last 20 years. Do you remember the long years when every conference started with a Christensen-esque speech on Disruption? Well, we learnt to live with Disruption, and we ignored the wonderful advice of the author of the Innovator’s Dilemma. For the next five years we were Crossing Chasms, getting one foot into the digital world, rebalancing ourselves. Well, does anyone know if we crossed? Or are we still poised? Then every media sector got involved, and all of a sudden we were Transitioning and Migrating. These may have been words which pleased investors at the time, and helped to explain why nothing much was happening at discernible speeds, but using them now seems laughable. How many major print-based powerhouses of 1993 can you name that have a stake in digital markets that matches a Google, or an Amazon, or a Facebook? We have businesses like Thomson Reuters and Reed Elsevier who have carved out niches in digital workflow, and players like Pearson who dominate education markets which have been slower to move to the network. But giants? Those have been built anew and elsewhere.

So when the conversation turned to Thunderstorm last week I wondered whether Americans had adopted the English art of under-statement. Cataclysm was the word that came to mind that week as I read Gannett’s results statement. If George Colony meant that our industry was under water then I might agree, but I suspect that he was looking or a metaphor for mindless violence, but came up short. Yet the metaphor led me to the totally sane, healthy and interesting part of the week. One objective of my trip was to help my friends at TEMIS, the French semantic analysis software company, launch their LUXID Community, a collaborative network of software players, content companies and platform providers. I was delighted to find some of the themes of the launch event taken up in the main conference. Look for yourself at http://www.temis.com/join-the-luxid-community or come to one of their meetings and express a view.

When extra-ordinary events take place, and change the entire landscape in which we work within a timeframe as short as 20 years, our reaction as businesses might reflect how we react as individuals in an earthquake or a tsunami. We pool our resources and pull together. I believe in what TEMIS are proposing because I do not think we will develop solutions for customers, or exploit to the full the digital opportunities given us by our content, our data, our market knowledge or our ability to develop high quality software unless we work together. Collaboration and co-operation are essential even if tomorrow we also need to buy or merge with some of those with whom we work today. Above all, this collaboration must extend to our customers: the lonely years of competition for competition’s sake must end, and we have to embrace our customers as partners – or they will become our competitors in ways which would be very toxic indeed.

Here then is a theme we could use to re-invigorate investors. Ask them to score us in terms of our proclivity for partnership. Look at us to see if we have a culture of experimentation that involves combining resources and attributes from several different sources to create a value which would have been otherwise impossible. As we move into a networked world where most service and solutions providers will sub-contract, outsource, partner and collaborate as easily as breathing then we in vital information markets could be leaders in proving that Vital is just as important as Big – and maybe more profitable. The LUXID Community may be a small step, but we could look back at this week as a very important one.

Dec

11

Education and Knowledge – Unlatched

Filed Under Blog, eBook, Education, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, Pearson, Publishing, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

You never come away from a meeting with Dr Frances Pinter without feeling that everything is possible. If, in the whole world of print to digital transformation, you had thought that the scholarly monograph was the most certain lost cause to publishing, then you need to take tea with her – urgently. She is the supreme exponent of the idea that I have long held dear: that the network turns business models on their heads and that if you have the courage to stand on your own head to view them, then eventually a new mode of operation will result. Frances calls her new company “Knowledge Unlatched” (www.knowledgeunlatched.org). I call it Logic Unmatched, but before we consider what the new pre-sold scholarly monograph model might be, just lets think about what has been unlatched this last week in education and scholarship.

For me, it started with Ingram (http://www.prweb.com/releases/2012/12/prweb10192884.htm). I know that Coventry University in the UK is not a high fashion place of learning, but the announcement that Ingram as a book supplier (yes, those funny printed things) would be working on free distribution of textbooks as part of course fees struck me as fully redolent of “standing on heads” style of changes. Once our society begins to accept that learning materials are not extras that students buy but a constituent element of the service that the university provides to them, then we are on a roll. A roll that may change the functions of every other part of the system – and not least the library. The idea of “all-in” course materials, once rooted, has the capacity to change publisher-courseware selector-user relationships fundamentally, and the idea being pursued in print in Coventry is deeply relective of what is happening digitally on a widespread basis. I do not care what Harvard and Cambridge do: things only get interesting when Coventry do them. So I was not really surprized to next encounter a press release from Pearson’s EQUELLA digital educational resource about its work at Palm Beach Atlantic University. Another unfashionable, but deeply normal, institution, one suspects, but also one that relishes solutions for the problems of “efficient sharing and repurposing of learning objects for online course developmentin a team design environment”. EQUELLA is really very interesting, especially when used with its Content Exchange extension:

“To support continued innovation, the EQUELLA Content Exchange, part of EQUELLA version 6, provides an easy-to-use platform to share and sell content between EQUELLA instances. Private exchanges within a consortium, free exchanges of OER resources, and various eCommerce models can now all easily be powered by EQUELLA. Resources can be provided free of charge, sold outright or by subscription. At launch, the EQUELLA Content Exchange offers nearly one million Open Educational Resources from a variety of sources. These resources can easily be discovered and downloaded for free to any version 6 installation of EQUELLA via Content Without Borders, an open access repository powered by EQUELLA. This publicly accessible repository promotes and provides access to resources contributed by academic institutions and repositories from around the world, which are available through content harvesting, and direct access to the website.” (http://www.pearsonapac.com/index.php?id=247&action=view&section=46&module=information_librarymodule&src=%40random4e816d5c9ff34)

EQUELLA, of course, is a Pearson APAC development, so now our range of revolutionary budgeting, content course provision, and upside down thinking rings the globe. And so does the stress for old style publishing seeking accommodation with this new world. This week brought results from Wiley (http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/PressRelease/pressReleaseId-101829.html), and while it is good to hymn the arrival of another Wiley generation onto the board, and good to note acquisitions like Deltak and Electronic Learning Systems (ELS), this is not a brilliant set of figures. Hopefully post-Hurricane Sandy catch-up will help, but education at Wiley is 6% off in the second quarter, and profit contribution to group is down 12% on the period. For the players who now trail Pearson round the world, these are worrying times. Have they invested enough quickly enough? And, in terms of this week’s news, have they understood enough about what has happened to their customers to stand proficiently on their heads?

Which brings us back to Knowledge Unlatched. The problem with much of our publishing effort, especially where shortrun printing was concerned, is the inability of users to be able to afford to pay the price needed to redeem the publisher’s origination costs from his initial print run. And since realistic pricing compels a fall off in volume, the problem intensifies over time. Library sales fall off as controlled budgets permit less acquisition than before, leading to the sort of lamentations in this week’s Wiley report. The whole cyclical process of decline, which has now been in progress for at least 25 years, has already driven many publishers out of areas of their traditional books business. Ten years ago we thought that print on demand would solve all of this , and in some ways it does. But it does no resolve the question of those origination costs. Take them away and the publisher could print to order. Which is where Dr Pinter comes in. If, she argues, you could put together global library consortia with block buying power, then you could, if the group were large enough, recreate eighteenth century subscription publishing and have all of the origination costs covered, for the titles selected, by the library digital purchase prior to publication. This then plays a key role in feeding (Populating) the resource development engines being created by people like Pearson. Then the publisher will be able to deal with the Long Tail by ebook or print on demand, pricing to margin on every sale. And the library will be Open Access!

I know. When you are standing on your head the blood rushes to your head as well. But think carefully about this. Contrarian business models must make sense in a business which now has no sensible business model of its own.

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