May
13
Omniscience and Omerta
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data protection, Financial services, Industry Analysis, internet, news media, privacy, Search, semantic web, social media, Thomson, Uncategorized, Workflow | 1 Comment
“Although we have long made limited
customer relationship data available to
our journalists, we realize this was a
mistake.” Doctoroff went on to note
that Bloomberg terminals are also
equipped with cameras that can see
through the clothing of female
subscribers, but he stressed that
images collected by the cameras are
not shared with ‘those nerds in the
News division.’
I much enjoyed the ChartGirl (http://chartgirl.com/pdf/BLOOMBERG.pdf) take on the Bloomberg story, and as is very often the case, Hilary Sargent got more sense into a chart than I can get into a thousand words. But we are now two days into the story, and already I note the appearance of stories saying we are giving Bloomberg too hard a time, that this could have happened anywhere, and that using online services is courting insecurity so we really should not be so very surprized. I am sorry, but this part of the development loses me completely. Is there any difference between Bloomberg allowing its news staff to access customer sign-on and usage data and News Corp tolerating a culture of news snooping that led to widespread phone-hacking? In principle, No. In degree, there may be differences, but if you aspire to be a trusted service provider then you simply cannot allow this to go on. I have no doubt that Thomson Reuters have spent the day checking their security, and Dow Jones have been explaining their policies at length. But neither so far has been revealed in the Bloomberg light, and it may say something about the cultures of these various players that this is the case.
The principle at stake here was taught me by the head of a London law practice in 1981. He was an early Eurolex user when I was running that early online service for lawyers, and he burst into my office at 8 am one morning bearing yards of printout. “Have you been watching the questions my staff have been asking”, he demanded, and when I said No, and explained we had confidentiality undertakings in our employment contracts, he calmed down and explained that the questions and search routines asked by his staff indicated exactly how he was going to defend a client insurer resisting a claim for damages to the wonderfully fragile legs of a famous actress who had fallen over at the film studios. As he departed he said “What I put into your machine is mine, and when and how I use it is mine also. You can use it, in anonymized form, to improve the service, but beyond that you may not go”.
It seems to me an important principle. As we as a society prepare to defend ownership of our supermarket bills, protect our phone usage from all comers, dream of building ePassports and eWallets to repatriate our own information to us, so that, if we wish, we can sell it to the highest bidder, we shall all of us call upon such principles, invoking them as property laws in our increasingly user-centric networked society. So how come that Bloomberg got things so shockingly wrong? Bloomberg, that secret cavern of a private company, whose whole culture is omerta and whose staff are sworn to secrecy beyond mortality? It comes down to an identifiable trait in private companies. It is about an omniscient esprit de corps. It reflects a certain arrogance that says that if you have grown fast enough and with enough certainty then you can make your own rules. In the pre BusinessWeek days Bloomberg was renowned for never buying anything, but instead for emulating what it wanted by “doing it again – better”. This admirable and industrial culture clearly also has a downside. It breeds people who can walk on water where confidentiality is concerned. The result will perhaps be a sobering ducking.
And hopefully the shock of cold water will touch the rest of the industry as well. Often, even in the financial services sector, users will want to put their content together to create a resource that the market needs. DataMonitor as a service combining anonymized information from banks and hedge funds on shorting contracts and equity leasing is a case in point. But it does not just indicate data that could be used to help create better markets. It comprises data that belonged to the traders and was theirs to sell, regardless of the ownership of terminals or networks which created that data. Unless we adhere to this idea we shall not have a networked society in any real sense, since all players will feel obligated to work one on one to prevent the data leakage.
We got this right 30 years ago: we cannot afford to sell the pass now, as we move into the Age of data analytics and the semantic web.
May
6
Meet You in a New Reality…?
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, social media, Thomson, Uncategorized, Workflow | 1 Comment
I blinked at today’s announcement with incredulity. Neilsen Expositions sold to private equity for $950m? (http://www.followmag.com/2013). Where does this madness end? Since 2008 we have been living, in traditional B2B markets, with the reality of the network. We have all talked increasingly confidently about the irreversible decline of advertising in print, and our inability to replace it in a satisfactory way online. We have talked of companies getting smaller – but more profitable – and we have talked about the future in terms of creating workflow solutions for our customers, using our data to create these service solutions for them, and using our metadata as the sandbox of new product development to build applications that really bind customers to us. The opportunity is now open to us to effectively lead our markets into the future, basing our claim to our clients squarely on the proposition that we can improve their productivity (and thus cut costs), and enhance their decision-making by getting all the salient knowledge into the right framework at the right time, while protecting their backs against the thorn hedge of re-regulation that encroaches the post-recession world. This is a wonderful opportunity, and how good it is to see Thomson Reuters, Reed Business, Lexis Risk and others getting fully to grip with it.
Meanwhile, how sad it is to see the old B2B players in Europe dodging the inevitable. While Schibsteds and Axel Springer in the declining newspaper market now make a fetish of collecting B2B classifieds services (Reed sold Total Jobs to the latter very shrewdly), mainstream B2B in the UK, outside of the market leaders mentioned, seems to have something of a collective death wish at the moment. Like Gaul, EMAP is in three parts, each of them unsalable as they stand. The data section is too diverse, the exhibitions is too small, and the magazines too unprofitable. Over at UBM, they now talk the language of exhibitions and conferences as if it was the golden hope. B2B at Informa remains a collection of fragmented and unrelated businesses, which was how management wanted things historically, but now ignores the need to centre on data, and play the combined strengths of all the data into the key markets you want to grow. And if Datamonitor does not provide a rich way of enhancing service values across the group then what does? Meanwhile Incisive and Haymarket seem to groan for solutions, while only Centaur amongst the smaller players seems to have woken up and smelt the coffee.
I am reciting this doleful catalogue as a way of steeling myself for this week’s PPA Conference in London. What would make me most happy is hearing someone say – “Yes, we are re-investing our events portfolio with a transformative agreement with a software partner. The object is to build readership into virtual events, extending our conferences and exhibitions into year-long happenings, open 24/7. Yes, we know we have to give attendees at real events more – find out what they want, research and book meetings for them etc, while giving exhibitors a better deal, client introductions and profiles, and a year long follow-up with new product releases and regular contact. Yes, we know that, even if it almost too late, we need to build community urgently before we finally lose the chance, and we know that conference delegates, exhibition attendees and exhibitors all want a better deal. Not several better deals – just the one will be good enough”.
I was once, briefly, non-executive chairman of an events software company. I know that rapid development has taken place to assemble data, match buyers and sellers, set up itineraries and update core data holdings with key changes year by year. And I go to about 15 conferences and exhibitions each year, but have yet to be asked who I wanted to meet, or what I wanted to realise from the experience. Afterwards, however, I am deluged with surveys about what I accomplished and how good the show was. This seems to me to be quite upside down. Like most of my fellow citizens, I am well-known in the network: find me on LinkedIn or Twitter and you could even guess, from my friends and contacts, who else I might like to meet. UBM bought the rights to reality-failed COMDEX, and launched a virtual exhibition in November 2012. It attracted an audience that seemed to please UBM, but on the website I see no mention of a 2013 edition, or even of a web presence continuing from the last effort. And last year’s registration asked none of the questions that might be thought relevant to using the meeting effectively. Yet, as I have mentioned here before, if virtual reality is cheap enough to teach language learners spoken English proficiency (www.rendezvu.com) then it will surely sustain the 5000 visitors and 50 exhibitors that came last year. Or will it just slip away, just as London’s Online show has slipped back into a library conference in the hands of Incisive.
So I am worried by what I will find at the PPA. Meanwhile, virtual reality is being used intensively in other places – particularly in the cash-starved museums and art galleries of Europe. Maybe our publishing directors should organize an outing to the local resource to see how its done!
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