Apr

18

With Milton in Fiesole

Filed Under Big Data, Blog, data analytics, eBook, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, Search, semantic web, social media, STM, Thomson, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

He scarce had ceas’t when the superior Fiend
Was moving toward the shore; his ponderous shield
Behind him cast; the broad circumference
Hung on his shoulders like the Moon, whose Orb
Through Optic Glass the Tuscan Artist views
At Ev’ning from the top of Fesole,
Or in Valdarno, to descry new Lands,
Rivers or Mountains in her spotty Globe.
. . .

So wrote the poet and so l learnt at school from Paradise Lost that the valley of the Arno was indeed a paradise, and that from the “top of Fesole” you could indeed seek out new lands, on earth as well as the moon. And, a week ago, with the annual Fiesole STM Retreat back at home in that town, courtesy of the wonderful hospitality and organization of Casalini Libri I responded eagerly to an invitation to apply my Optic Glass by way of summing up and closing the meeting.

But you cannot get away with a few genial generalities and then open the Prosecco with these people. This is a rare meeting – a mixed audience of librarians, publishers, scholars and technologists. How Katina Strauch, Becky Lenzini, Ward Shaw and Anthony Watkinson, representing the Charleston side of the agreement that keeps Fiesole’s agenda in shape, manage to do so speaks well of their acute ear for market discordance. The series has now run 18 years and you can see the results – and this year’s slides – at http:digital.caslini.it/retreat/. As an example, look at the pre-conference session on eBooks. Now, what is there left to say about eBooks? Ann Okerson described this session, which she chaired, as as the parable of the blind men and the elephant. And her speakers duly obliged by touching the beast and describing its very different characteristics. Sven Fund saw it as a business with flaws, needing to move the model away from the apparent print parent. Eileen Gardiner and Ronald Musto saw it as an original format underdeveloped, Lauren Schoenthaler of Stanford exposed the legal protection weaknesses while Wolfgang Mayer of Vienna’s massive University was clearly intent on never buying a book again where digital was available. All fascinating, and a reminder that whenever we wish upon the new name of the old, we imprison it in false expectation and limit its development. We should offer a prize for the renaming of the Object formerly known as eBook – especially when they become fully interactive with each other and, as Marvin Minsky once foretold, the books on our shelves really do talk to each
other.

The conference was blessed with two main speakers – Roly Keating of the British Library and Mike Keller of Stanford. Roly has now fully conquered the brief and the plan has wonderful dynamics and is shaping up brilliantly as a sector of the Kings Cross Knowledge Quarter. But how I wish we did not fall into PR-speak in trying to make libraries seem relevant. “Living Knowledge” and “living Science” – to distinguish them from the dead, hidden-in-print versions? Or the work of living as distinct from dead scholars? Or do you need to be alive to visit the British Library? Like Milton’s apparitions, I carried these thoughts into three great sessions on discovery and discoverability. On reputation management, and On new business models. This is one of the few audiences I know which can have a lively discussion on standards, so Todd Carpenter of NISO faced lively questions, while Graham Stone made a strong case for resource discovery tools.

Reputation management really ignites audiences at STM conferences these days. I sense a sub-text, never frankly stated, in which some in the audience are saying to themselves “Is this all it is about – what happened to scholarship?” While others are murmuring “I knew this was the endgame – why not cut to the chase and just create a new index of Scholarly Worth?”. Charlie Rapple of KUDOS and Sara Rouhi of Altmetrics laid out the new territory while Andrea Bonaccorsi of ANVUR, the Italian Research Evaluation Agency, created the framework of need very effectively and charmingly. I have a feeling that we all now recognize the terrain, but I had promised the conference that in my Optic Glass I would fit a new lens suitable to our times. I suggest that, from Snowden to the Panama Papers, the business model we should be applying is the leak. We would get a far shrewder evaluation of scholarly reputation if all the data was known but all the judgements were secret. Then someone could leak the rankings of institutions and individuals onto a website in Kazahkstan, which would demand we all paid attention and made positive contributions to ensuring that ratings were reasonable.

And new business models took us satisfyingly all over the map. Stephen Rhind Tutt deserves a prize for getting data collections into our focus. How we treat and make data available and searchable should be a subject for the 18th agenda. France’s Pinter rightly celebrated the gathering strength of Knowledge Unlatched and Toby Green of OECD described his freemium model in detail – a gloriously left field business model for a very conservative organization, but one which succeeds excellently in adding value and growing revenues for an institution which is bound to release its data free of charge, with excellent topicality we ended with Daniel Schiff describing Thieme’s successful experience of Open Access.

No one on the hill of Fiesole could have used an optic glass without seeing new lands. The new map emerging is no longer journal-centric, and the meaning of Collections is shifting. How we measure the worth of a far more productive scholarly community, and how we effectively map their communications, remains on the dark side of the moon, though community suggests some answers and yet more questions. But there cannot be a better place or a wiser crowd amongst whom to consider the issues.

Mar

25

On Co-creation and Procreation

Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, Financial services, Industry Analysis, internet, Reed Elsevier, Thomson, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment

A few days have gone by and I have read a great deal of commentary on the merger of IHS and Markit. It has been interesting to see the various hopes expressed for a dynamic future, the justified faith in valuations borne of data and analytics, the readings of the leadership tea leaves in analytical circles and the various interpretations surrounding the decision to move the tax base to London. All good stuff. But it leaves me puzzled about the questions not asked and the analysis not performed. I have known IHS since it was a Thyssen Bornemiza company years ago, aligned with search engines of the 1980s like BRS. Seeing it then as the Information Handling Services outsource for the aircraft industry of Denver (think taxonomy when we called it thesaurus!) I have watched it grow at least once before out of control, re-niche itself around energy and engineering, and then regrow again in wild acquisitive profusion. Likewise I have watched Markit’s lusty growth, it’s move into data markets (recall DataExplorers) and its competitive issues with Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters.

So, what I wanted to know from the commentators was fairly basic: Does this mean that the IHS rapid acquisition strategy has failed? Is this a portfolio company that, once again, needs weeding and reconcentrating? Will that be done more effectively in London than in Denver? Does this mean that the strategy of buying high value, profitable operations and keeping them in their niches is at an end? When they decide which business areas they want to centre upon, will they create a new data platform, concentrate all of their data from these currently unrelated companies, and begin again on new product development in co-operation with their clients?

And the questions go on. Does this mean the end of using acquisitions as a way of goosing the share price and a return to strategies based around organic growth? Does it suggest a strategy that returns to the old portfolio ideas (it’s never raining everywhere), or, hopefully, is there a Thomsonesque idea here of a Markets company, with the glue not corporate law and compliance, but a specialization in the energy and engineering sectors, the former especially being of great interest and a wider concern for all corporates at large. So does such a strategy foreshadow a bid for Thomson’s IP interests, now available, which would cement a traditional specialization of IHS in industrial documentation from standards to patents? And having just swallowed IPIS, the oil pricing service, can they let Argus Media, now on the block, go to a competitor with similar strategic aims (like Verisk, owner of Wood Mackenzie). (Perhaps, since it will probably go to private equity, this should not disturb a night’s sleep!).

Nature abhors a vacuum! Since I have no answers to hand from managers or analysts, I may have to supply some of my own. IHS owns many stunning properties. But it really does need to get them onto one coherent platform, along with the user data and profiling that has arisen from their historical usage, and get into the service provision mode of co-creating new services in conjunction with their clients. They need no more than two “broad niches”, and Markit can well cover the market focus of those – sell everything that does not fit these niche definitions. Bring third party and Open niche data onto the platform in order to become once more the focus of user service creation efforts – I have already written at boring length on the flawed decision to sell GlobalSpec. Use the business models that give greatest returns for the greatest amount of user reliance and loyalty – business models are not religious beliefs. Above all, think carefully about new product development. Your data is vital: your productisation of it as of now is less so. Your brands are valuable but they are not static either, so you need to be able to extend them across new services built co-operatively with your customers.

And is there room for such a strategy? And who is doing it? Well, a class example would be Lexis Nexis Risk in the insurance vertical. Thomson Reuters are slowly moving from Portfolio Mode to Corporate Market Services mode (corporates as investment vehicles plugged into a service base of law, tax, risk and compliance). Does Bloomberg see it or not? Bloomberg Law and BNA says they buy some of this – but neither of the large markets players, by their small investments in data (New Energy Finance, Point Carbon etc) has put themselves in anywhere near the position now occupied by Markit in energy markets. How that positioning is deployed and how successful it is could be the key to consolidations as yet un-imagined.

Above all, success will depend upon how effectively these players can co-create with users who know and trust them and procreate new product development. The start-ups cannot be relied on to work quickly enough on seed corn funding. The conglomerates cannot simply wait for start-up trial and error to succeed and buy the results – and then not integrate them into their own operations. If we as an industry cannot get this right- then our users will do it for themselves!

« go back — keep looking »