May

20

Publishing as it Will Be

Filed Under B2B, Blog, eBook, Education, eLearning, Financial services, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, Publishing, social media, STM, Thomson, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment

A wise man said that “Content without Technology is lame; Technology without Content is Blind”. Einstein was working his way towards this conclusion, but it was in fact Timo Hannay of Macmillan/Digital Science who came out with this formulation during this week’s ePublishing Innovations Forum at the IET in London (http://www.epublishing-forum.com/). Incisive Media, who also do the Online conference and exhibition at Olympia in December, having been doing this Spring meeting for four years, and I have been their privileged chairman for each. So I know the sea change of the past half decade, I know that change just gets quicker, and I know that Timo is fundamentally right and is one of only a handful who are doing something about it. I also see that “publishing”, if it is useful to retain the term, is almost redefined everytime we hold this meeting, and that the players making strides in solutioning (ugly term), collaboration and community seem to be mining the seams that have revenues and margins embedded in them.

The conference contained several beautifully worked case studies. Take Timo as an example. His themes are about knowledge discovery, research management and software tools (http://www.digital-science.com/). The ability today to read chemical names and turn them into chemical structures and use them to cross search literature and patent databases is a beautiful expression of what we mean when we say that we have to produce solutions that reduce costs and increase productivity. Tomorrow we will want to take this, and his ability to track and map research patterns and structures, and his investments in experiment and project management systems and roll them into career duration, compliance required Electronic Lab Manuals (ELN). Then a few of us will sit down over a beer and reflect that Elsevier sold the ELN market leader, MDL, almost a decade ago. The circularity of markets is only a wonder to those who have been swept full circle several times!

Then lets take David Craig, who came to the microphone to announce that his Thomson Reuters GRC (Governance, Risk and Compliance) division (http://accelus.thomsonreuters.com/) had the day previously finalized the acquisition of World-Check (said on the New York grapevine to be a $530m dollar deal), and was now pushing hard towards the content integration and software services needed to flesh out the complete solutioning picture around regulatory compliance in all its phases. He too speaks the language of collaboration, and now appears to prefer the term “community” to “workflow”. And the distinction is interesting and not an idle one. He does not want to build content-injected process models for the individual corporate units that severally and separately do compliance. He wants to do corporate engines that unite functions to get results, so that he is not tied to the future fortunes of compliance officers or finance departments or auditors or corporate counsel or tax advisers, but provides structures in which they all participate, share content and create outcomes. And if that argues for a different culture in the fully networked corporation, he also sees content creation and sharing between corporates, professionals and othe participants (especially regulators) which allows risk information to be shared rapidly in the network. Again, the high ground is becoming a universal solution which is so widely plugged in that unplugging threatens the health of the participants themselves.

And then take Donal Smith. The CEO of Data Explorers (http://www.dataexplorers.com/) defined what happens to this type of process in the completely satisfying niche. He showed us how certain types of unregulated content must be collected and analysed to keep markets safe from themselves. In this case the content concerns contracts to “borrow” equity against future equity movements – the activity known as “shorting”. Markets must know what proportion of a company’s equity is already committed, so Data Explorers is a venture of necessity, using user-generated content to create indices which allow markets to work efficiently. Its operating principles are ubiquity and non-exclusivity. Process? Collaboration? Its all here.

I could go on. I loved the energy in the education sector, with Cambridge University Press and Global Grid for Learning using similar models in the workload of teachers, and Microsoft, in the guise of David Langridge, their education partnerships director, coming from the other to position the new Office 365 as the vehicle for content integration in schools. And I am aware that by stopping here I ignore many excellent presentations that followed parallel themes. We did interviews and panels which enabled participants to see these trends at work. We looked at the future of the newspaper with Julian Sambles of the Telegraph and the future of the eBook with Tim Cooper of Harlequin (Mills and Boon). Adriana Lukas, coming from the user side as an advisor to major players like Johnson and Johnson, caused a run on the bar by exploring the powerful virtues of five widely used ad-blockers during the opening of her examination of social media as marketing. Elsewhere we discussed the importance of metadata and even paradata (could be my new word!) and finally Geoff Metzger of Superdu brought us down to earth by revealing marketing technology in a box – how to create instant web presence (without waiting for the IT department) to promote books and services. Back to earth, and back to books, in a voyage that began with Kate Worlock, for Outsell, defining the global marketplace, its growth, strengths and weaknesses and some of these key trends. I can now tell you how it feels to introduce one’s own daughter as a keynote speaker (Wonderful!!).

And so much more that I must apologize to those who I have omitted. I wandered away from the IET (Institute of Engineering and Technology, appropriately enough) no longer wondering why they changed their name from Institute of Electrical Engineers. Its the technology, stupid. And now we cannot do without it.

Apr

20

Dreams can be Iterative Too

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

After a break for refreshment (archaeology in the Levant) I am back to face further questioning in the Court of Industry Opinion, and particularly from the colleague who recalled a paper written in 2009 as an Outsell CEO Topic: “Workflow: Information’s New Field of Dreams” and argued that the industry had moved so quickly in the past two years that this did not represent any sort of summation of where we were today. She was right, and a little research shows how I underjudged the real position two years ago, and how the iterated aspiration that lies at the root of workflow as an information services model is now maturing rapidly. Worse, I had underestimated how much the new world was beholden to the old. In the new edition of this report, labelled Version 2.0 and published yesterday (http://www.outsellinc.com/store/products/993), I have retraced my steps and looked again at the importance of metadata and its long history, of taxonomic control and semantic search  as contributors to our dream of creating living models of streams of working activity, involving deeply different parts of the workforce. And I am sure that I shall revisit and develop this area in Version 3.0, should I  ever get that far, and that we shall find that much of the XML-based technology which has been so useful in creating the agile publishing environments of today (MarkLogic would be the market leader with particular resonance here) will be even more useful as we restructure content to fit the shapes required in different workflow roles.

And then something else happened today. Thomson Reuters, whose work in creating a Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) Division I have covered here in detail, launched their Accelus Suite (http://thomsonreuters.com/content/news_ideas/articles/legal/4292965), a rebranding of the 40 or so products and services they bought (Complinet) or borrowed from other parts of the group into 12 solutions areas. I have covered this in detail today in an Outsell Insight (https://clients.outsellinc.com/insights/index.php?p=11468) and do not wish to repeat that here, but it is important to remind ourselves of some key issues. This work has taught us, for example, that the outstanding work done by Lexis Nexis in putting together Seisint and Choicepoint to create a risk assessment workflow engine for the insurance industry is a “vertical” model for the industry. Thomson Reuters Accelus Suite is a “horizontal” model, and while its first targets are financial services players, the elements of the Suite (a Governance, Transactions and Legal Risk set, a Compliance and Regulatory Risk set and an Audit and Internal Control set) are common to all businesses of any scale. In addition, all of these elements require elements of training and education, risk mapping and assessment, audit and accountability, and communication of audited results – upwards, for example, via this Division’s Boardlink environment, a communication tool for risk-responsible directors.

Hang on a minute. There is one problem in all of this. As the Accelus Survey, published with this launch as the first in a regular series reminds us, the one thing we know about corporate life is that the legal department, financial control, the auditors, the compliance officer, the tax advisor and the people who do risk assessment and management all, literally, speak different languages. The Survey points out that 94% of the 2000 respondents saw this as a major issue, and it is surely here that the metadata and taxonomic control elements take centre stage. We will not improve risk management generically unless all of these different people can talk fluently and with precision to each other and to outside agencies, and the GRC Accelus Suite, if it is to succeed, must address that core issue. It is the contention of its leaders that this has been done, and while we all know that “done” is a way of saying iterative development is in train, one assurance lies in the size of the industry sample so far engaged. The Accelus Suite platform now claims more than 100,000 users, from each of the job segments in the workflow, providing a community whose feedback should give drive and direction to fitness for purpose. In this environment, the applications must grow to meet the needs (unlike my new shoes, where the foot must change, painfully, to fit the format!).

So what will these workflow environments grow to become in the industry as a whole? Thomson Reuters position Accelus Suite as a brand and line of business as large in stature and importance as Westlaw or Eikon. This is big. When I spoke earlier in the cycle of building a new business in the interstices between Thomson Reuters’ two well established branded businesses in law and financial services this was no exaggeration. And there is another very striking feature of this launch. Have a look at Regulatory Risk Mapper within the Accelus Suite and you will see an old industry trait  – discovery – and a new one – visualization. The point of the Mapper is to detect change (Thomson Reuters recorded 12500 important regulatory rewrites last year) and map it onto policy. Then it can be flagged and dealt with at a variety of different levels and many different ways. And it is what distinguishes an information solutions business from an information research business. And makes Dreams re-iterate.

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