InfoInnovation

SIIA Information Industry Summit: Morning of Day 1

First day luncheon keynoter Mark Walsh, who personifies the intersection of politics and the information business, provided a convenient frame for summarizing the rest of the morning’s program.  He predicted that “micro-scripts” – a new term for the sound bites and bumper stickers that play all too large a role in what often passes for political discourse – will be increasingly important to business messaging as well in the overflowing media environment.  At the same time, he forecast that the more thoughtful political style of the new president will help shift the political (and business?) culture toward more transparency, accountability, and forethought, resulting in better decisions and analysis.  (However, when I asked him what near-term events we might look to as evidence this is happening, he answered a different question…which – as he acknowledged – is more representative of the discourse we know.)

So, what were the most effective micro-scripts of the preceding morning?  The morning's opening speaker, Pearson CEO Marjorie Scardino, offered that education is what Pearson is about in all of its businesses, not just Pearson Education; she declared that learning needs throughout society will provide opportunities for information companies of many stripes.

The core of the subsequent panel, entitled “Sink or Swim?  How Can You Grow an Information Business Now?" was provocateur Michael Wolff’s observation that the low margins associated with direct marketing have always precluded much investment in quality original content; and with the Internet (read: Google) following the direct model, it is no wonder that now “the primary strategic question is ‘how can we pay less or nothing for content?’”  The other panelists (from Time Digital, Congressional Quarterly, and various professional information businesses), all representing different aspects of the business of original content creation, found this premise hard to rebut convincingly.  So when all general news and consumer content costs nothing, who will fund, for example, professional journalists in Baghdad and Kabul?  Could it be left to the “public trust” i.e. private philanthropy or (heaven forfend) the US taxpayer?

Glenn Goldberg, president of the Information & Media Services segment at McGraw-Hill, (interviewed very effectively by Hal Espo) provided a succinct rule of thumb for identifying attractive information businesses:  are there industry benchmarks and quality standards that can be measured, analyzed, and imbedded in workflow?  This may be as close to a “golden rule” of high-value business information as I’ve heard. 

Looking ahead in 2009

A goal this year is to achieve a better balance of paid and unpaid thinking and writing, work and play, business and (other forms of) self-expression.  The focus here will continue to be, as described in my first (2007) post, on the industry comprised of “organizations large and small who source, package, distribute, and/or apply information content products and services that are specially valued by particular groups of users and their sponsors, whether business and professional enterprises, advertisers (esp. B2B), academic and research institutions, or individual users.” 

More specifically, some of the themes likely to be of special interest to me in the coming year include:  The increasingly “real-time” web and its implications;Thematic and functional content (and other) strategies for the “downturn”; Social media business models; Google’s evolving relationship with the rest of the information industry, and the latter’s responses; “Post-print” tactics and strategies of traditional publishers more generally; the next stages in the evolution of information content user empowerment (from disintermediation to self-publishing to…?)

In the meantime, one of the blogger’s best friends is a substantive conference program (the content comes to you, packaged and ready for comment!).   Even better when one has participated in the program planning, and that’s the case with two upcoming events:  the SIIA’s Information Industry Summit, and the NFAIS Annual Conference (where I’ll be a moderating one of the panels).   Thanks for your attention; stay tuned.

Looking back at 2008

People are saying that 2008 may have been a year “that will live in infamy” along with 1929 and that day in 1941.  (We can only hope that in time the election of the new president will have come to be regarded as more pivotal than the financial crisis.)  For me, it was a year of inconsistent blogging (to put it mildly…apologies to those who tried to follow and offered encouragement), but also consistent engagement with clients. 

Projects whose particulars can’t be disclosed don’t make for very compelling reading in this or any medium.  Suffice to say that they included: a “classic” strategic planning engagement leading to two initiatives now underway; multiple new product development efforts ranging from initial concept exploration to final confirmation of pricing and positioning; business development assistance; corporate presentation development; acquisition hunting and assessment; crisis management case studies (in, yes, financial services); win-loss and customer satisfaction / competitive positioning surveys; and technical editorship for a strong new book on social media-enabled marketing.  Topics, in no particular order, included: IT advisory programs, technical standards, humanities scholarship, engineering workflows, academic research grants, corporate innovation, federated search, investor relations, library information services, back-office content technologies, and social networking. 

So it was a “business year” in which my relatively new consultancy hit full stride…and built momentum into the (potentially) challenging year ahead.