Aug
14
Things Every Boy and Girl Should Know…
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, Education, eLearning, Financial services, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, Publishing, Search, semantic web, social media, STM, Uncategorized, Workflow | 3 Comments
” Well,” she said, in a determined and slightly defensive tone of voice “the last thing we intend to do is turn ourselves into a software house. We are publishers and cannot be expected to understand software, which is such a terrible distraction. I took my correction silently and philosophically. After all, this has been a litany I have heard for a decade. And the paradox is that the more that software controls and modulates the way publishers create content, and the more it dominates the way in which users view it, the more permissible it has become for very senior executives in all sorts of places that do “publishing” (rapidly becoming a meaningless term) to proclaim with pride their ignorance of some of the basics. Some tell me “that’s what we have a CTO for”, while others tell me that it is not a creative area (yes, really!!) of their business. The largest decisions a modern information industry CEO will make concern software. The delivery – critical decisions a publisher of romantic novels will mainly concern software. We cannot avoid it – so surely every senior executive should know enough to intelligently quiz the CTO, outside suppliers and potential alliance partners?
You have now been reading for about 60 seconds. During that time, the software that holds us all in place in the network has been mightily engaged. 168 million emails were sent during that time. 694,445 Google searches took place. 320 new Twitter accounts were opened and 58,000 new tweets were posted. 600 new videos were posted – I could go on (courtesy of Go-Globe.com) but I hope you get the message. If people who run businesses they call “publishing” do not understand the platform upon which they stand, as they once understood the possibilities of print, then what hope is there for the traditional end of the market? I meet very many CEOs in the course of a working year, and in every 10 there are three who are brilliant on the bedrock technologies that drive their businesses. There are three more who struggle but know it is important. After that come four who do not really see it at all, and this group is strongest in the areas of greatest current risk – consumer book publishing, magazines and events. I almost feel as if there should be a test: Differentiate and suggest how you would use HTML5 and XML. Distinguish RDBMS databases from NoSQL databases and explain the advantages of the latter over the former. What does Epub3 allow you to do that you could not do before? How would you use the Cloud to support a reduction in Capex in your development programme? What is Open Source and is it cheaper or more expensive than proprietary software? What is entity extraction and how do I use the semantic web to add value? What is SaaS and how does it create scope for your expansion?
Readers here would doubtless have no difficulty with any of this. But still, we all – me especially – need a jolt of recognition of the speed of change at the moment. Venture Capital has a current investment of some $16 billion in SaaS software alone, with about half in business functionality (FactSet). The global software industry will top $1.1 trillion in 2016 (Gartner) – for comparison the current sizing of the publishing and information marketplace is $400 billion today (Outsell). Gartner see media and communications as a key area for the software businesses, with 2012’s spend by the sector of $61 billion rising to $78 billion in 2016. Some $21 billion of this spend ($25 billion in 2016) is for media-specialized applications. This is the top ranked vertical sector for software in 2016. My argument at the moment would be that this sale is resting on the shoulders of a very small, technically-capable group of senior buyers – it is time now for a better informed cadre of senior management to help to bear this burden, and for boards to have a generally better informed decision-making discussion which is capable of putting the view of the CTO and the professional advisers and evaluators into the medium term context of the business.
Finally, lets just look at one section of the information waterfront. This week I noted with interest the acquisition of a company called Edaboard.com by Design World (WTWH Media LLC). This brings together a leading brand which provides information services on design engineering with a community-driven forum focussed on electrical engineering topics. We have seen deals like this, and will see a lot more. But the decisions that come next – one platform or two, in-house or outsource, service integration, Cloud-based services etc will be critical to the success of this investment. I do not know Design World and I have no reason to believe that they are not fully capable of doing the job, but in many corporations of my acquaintance many of these decisions would be taken by a small coterie of tech-savvy operators, with some of the most senior people acting in faith and trust that someone else had made the right tech bets.
In a great allusion, Mike Olson of Cloudera remarked that “We are living through a Cambrian moment in database history”. As the Age of Data morphs into Data Science, we all struggle to keep up. As major data concentrations meet the Cloud, and we have to work with PaaS (Platform as a service) and DaaS (database as a service) it is not going to get slower or easier. But it is clear that the boundaries around “what we need to know to do the job” are radically changed as well. None of us should be frightened about going back to school!
Jul
30
Revit: BIM brings it all Together
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Search, semantic web, social media, Uncategorized, Workflow | 1 Comment
It was at the hog roast on Saturday afternoon, and I had just bitten appreciably into wonderful Berkshire Tamworth and crackling (a superb achievement in itself – an anthem to a great pig). The father of my hostess said “With BIM in its present state, I as a small architectural office in a country town can work on far larger projects: in fact we are just opening a virtual office in the West End of London”. In an information industry which perpetually recites the mantra about the integration of software with content as data to create solutions it is important to have a reminder every now and then that this is for real and drives men’s lives. The conversation drove me back to see what the industry leaders were doing, to see how Autodesk had defended its AutoCAD territory with Revit, and to see whether there are now any appreciable results worth measuring. And then to think about the changes of the past five years in the context of those years having embraced the worst construction industry downturn in the last century. If the technology can scale in these conditions then it can scale anywhere at any time.
In January this year a McGraw-Hill report indicated that BIM usage had grown from 17% of the US construction market to 70% in 2012. And what are the drivers here? Simply that it has become a requirement for many of those commissioning major building projects that not only does the construction process need an operational model, but that owners need to inherit at completion the final data plot, with the consequent ability to backtrack, find what decisions were made and why and consider them in light of further development or maintenance requirements. Another driver was Green Buildings: how could anyone be sure of the green decisions made unless they were fully documented and attached to the plan? According to Revit, still firmly in place as market leader, there are four distinguishing areas that make the processes involved in the unified content solution flow (architectural design: MEP – mechanical, electrical, plumbing: structural engineering and construction) work at higher levels of efficiency:
* Parametric components – dropping in “intelligent” building design components to increase accuracy
* Bidirectional associativity – all design changes are reflected automatically throughout the model
* Worksharing – all players in the workflow can have access at the same time
* Construction modelling – getting better insight into constructability
It seems to me that there are important lessons here for those of us who talk airily about “workflow and process – and the integration of content into it”. For a start, things can change almost overnight – five years is a very short time. Secondly, the McGraw-Hill survey shows consistent gains in terms of margins for BIM procedures users over their more traditional colleagues. Then, these developments will change the shape of the industries to which they are applied, leading to cross-industry collaboration in some sectors, and cost effective outsourcing in others. So for the vendor of data and content, the nature of the customer can be expected to change. It may also be a factor that recession accelerates change, forcing those who must remain competitive to do so earlier than they might have done in markets where work was easier to get.
Undoubtedly too the three change pressures that have afflicted all industries play a lead role here. All the partners in this workflow model are anxious for increased productivity – and that is probably expressed here by the loss of clerical roles. Everyone must have better decision-making – and that is expressed here by an ability to try the options and select the best. And very powerfully this workflow speaks to the need for compliance with standards, local and national regulation, industry benchmarks and other requirements. It is also noteworthy that this is a “long” workflow, stretching from project conception to the completed building, and then living on as a building management tool. Five years ago we tended to speak in B2B about single process workflow – helping the user to do better procurement, for example. Here we are talking in much more comprehensive terms – and if it were necessary to credit check suppliers then that would be modularized in the process, not left outside of it.
The implications of all of this are huge for formerly passive data suppliers to particular industry functions A glance at McGraw-Hill Construction and Reed Construction illustrates some of the issues. McGraw-Hill got away to a fast start with its Construction Network, really aimed at the Bechtel-Haliburton end of the industry, and at global markets. Reed Construction’s data holdings were aimed at costing and leads, and much of their workflow activity, like the recently launched cūbus + Demand View (29 July 2013) (http://www.prweb.com/releases/2013/7/prweb10950816.htm). This is the smartest development so far in comparative leads intelligence, and makes McGraw’s Dodge Network express look like a messaging service. The UK government is ready to roll (2011 pronouncement: “The Government Construction Strategy was published by the Cabinet office on 31 May 2011. The report announced the Governments intention to require: collaborative 3D BIM (with all project and asset information, documentation and data being electronic) on its projects by 2016.” But while Revit and its lesser rivals are obvious in the market place, neither UBM or EMAP, who hold most of the data resources, seem hot to trot. In fact Barbour, once a market leader, makes no mention that I can find of BIM. This then raises the open question: will the big players in content and data here buy into the software business, or partner with Revit. And do the smaller ones get bought by the software players – or simply get by-passed . The implications of workflow, as demonstrated in this seminal marketplace, get sharper in focus every day.
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