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Crystal Ball: Key
Trends for Professional Content and Technologies in 2004 |
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29 December
2003 |
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The allure of business trend forecasting
still seems to hold its attraction for many, so as we sign
off on a very interesting year in content and technologies
we welcome in 2004 as the year when "The Walls Come
Tumbling Down." Content and technology vending will become
increasingly entwined as professional content profitability
moves to models that combine the best of individual and
institutional markets. Say hello to the Publishing
Organization, the institution that uses publishing
technology as a capability that can add as much to the top
line as it does to the bottom line. Webloggers look to
profits, search gets personal, ads go where they've never
gone before, Global markets get local, web services get
real and print publications face the reality that real
profits are electronic first and foremost. Look out below,
here comes a rough-and-tumble year! |
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Business trend forecasting is a
black art at its best and self-serving at its worst, but
necessary for us to set our course towards reasonable goals.
The trick is to come up with something that's actionable either
for new directions or course corrections; that's where the
trouble starts. If you're warning of incoming asteroids, you
better have their trajectory down pretty finely or the advice
is fairly useless. If you predict which houses they're going to
hit, heaven help you if they hit the ones down the street
instead. The best that we can do is to warn some key
neighborhoods and hope for the best. Here goes...
If I had to pick a theme for 2004, it
would be "The Walls Come Tumbling Down." The markets for
professional-grade content have had many artificial separations
between individual and institutional business models, between
technology companies and content providers, between
organizations that think of themselves as publishers and
organizations that they think of as their clients. Many of
these distinctions have come under stress in 2003, with a lot
of questions raised as to what content really is as these
forces merge. With maturing technology standards, recovering
economies and ever-increasing pressures for solutions that can
address both global markets and specific sectors, 2004 promises to be a
breakout year for those that challenge those walls and
concentrate on the intersection of content, technology and
people that is producing
vContent. Key trends that Shore will be watching
within this theme during 2004 include:
- The Publishing Organization comes
into its own. In 2003 we saw the deployment and
integration of enterprise portals, content management and
storage systems and collaboration tools on a large scale that
have enabled institutions of all kinds to foster an online
publishing culture that has spurred productivity and improved
knowledge formation and retention dramatically - oftentimes
without a great deal of Knowledge Management gibberish
getting in the way of these key KM successes. Institutions
are beginning to become aware of themselves as Publishing
Organizations on many different levels as never before and
discovering that many of their key limitations have more to
do with their ability to foster this new culture efficiently
and effectively than with specific technology improvements.
Expect 2004 to be a year of regrouping and refinement in
portal deployments as organizations sort out how their
staffs, their clients and their content sources should be
working together optimally in these improving and innovative
publishing environments to produce results that feed into the
top line of profits as much as to bottom-line cost savings.
- Individual publishers start to
focus on profits. In many ways 2003 was the year of the "blogger",
with weblogs taking center stage as a new and powerful
publishing medium offering a voice and methodology for
enabling individuals to communicate to broad audiences very
effectively at little or no cost. But for all of their
importance in 2003, there were very limited breakthroughs in
weblogging as a business model. Expect this to change in 2004
as key events unfold in general and professional news circles
that are picked up first and foremost by independent voices
that find their ways via weblogs and other technologies into
the general flow of content services on an attributed basis.
Some of these new voices will have institutional sponsorship,
but many will begin to form their own collaborative alliances
that guarantee both content independence and a new level of
editorial authority unimpeded by existing business models.
- Workflows win, but raise key
questions. Workflow-oriented content solutions were all
the rage in 2003, with offerings from many vendors vying to
gain control of integrated desktops in legal, financial and
scientific industries. As important as these offerings were,
though, it's not clear that they've significantly improved
the long-term profitability of the underlying content
subscription products that depend on this kind of integration
to support their value proposition. Expect a renewed focus in
2004 on trying to capture unique content value through the
community-oriented publishing capabilities of private and
vendor-supplied platforms and increased pressure on content
vendors to define just how and where their content is adding
value in the workflow model.
- Print meets its match. Two of
the key events in 2003 were the recognition of online-only readers
by the Wall Street Journal and others as a key component of
their core circulation and the movement of professional and
academic journal services towards online delivery as
principal business models. 2004 will be the year in which
many professionally-oriented publishers recognize that the
way towards profitability and survival is to adapt an
electronic-first attitude towards their operations. With
years of investment in content management and increasing
orientation towards XML-based publishing, the easiest part of
this transition will be the operations side of the business,
while the business side struggles to refine their marketing
models for online optimization.
- Digital rights start to redefine
content collections. In 2003, the digital rights movement
began to take on some real form for the first time in the
consumer sector as music and eBook distributors began to
implement purchasing schemes that were instrumental in
establishing new models for profitable content distribution.
As Microsoft's "Longhorn" platform begins to roll out
institutionally and other more object-oriented DRM schemes become
favored, we can expect 2004 to be a year in which authors,
publishers and institutions become more aware of how to
manage and protect the value of intellectual property as
individual items more effectively. The combination of content
and functionality in more web services will leverage digital
rights capabilities to define and reinforce the evolving
value of persistent objects as they are purchased, amplified
and onpassed from one party to another. Start thinking of how
the eBay auction model for discovering market value can be
used to exploit these opportunities for value-added content
objects.
- Everyone will be Googling, but not
necessarily with Google. The centrality of effective
search technology to defining content value has been
popularized as never before via the Google search engine and
its related technologies, making the Mountain View company
both a media darling and a target for skepticism in 2003. But
the truth is that many other highly effective search
technologies have been evolving at least as quickly as Google
in the arena for professional content, enabling both
information professionals and individuals to identify
valuable content quickly and effectively. Expect 2004 to be
the year of personalized search solutions, with both
web-driven and desktop-driven technologies enabling
individuals to have search "concierges" helping them to find
content that's valuable to their context and the context of
others who hold trusted opinions on content quality. Expect
the human element in general to become a much more important
part in defining valuable content location services, both in
terms of enabling technologies and the value-added
capabilities of in-house and outsourced information
professionals.
- Ad driven online content finds new
homes. One of the more significant - and quiet - events
of 2003 was Ovid's decision to introduce advertising into its
online journal collections offered to institutions. This
marks the beginning of aggregators and publishers exploring
significant new ways to exploit contextual content value for
institutional revenues in ways that were heretofore thought
of as "dot com" solutions in professional circles. 2004 will
be the year in which these companies realize that as their
clients turn to content to solve real-time business needs,
they in turn must refocus their revenue models to exploit the
value of those needs more effectively if they are to maximize
their competitive profit potentials. Expect long-established
players such as financial market data companies to start to
face up to these real-time realities - or to face takeovers
in a consolidating market for utility-like solutions.
- Global content markets get local.
2003 saw many major content companies fine-tuning their
global distribution models to account for local differences
better through fine-tuning content offerings and improving
the availability of local language presentations. We expect
this trend to continue in 2004, but it will be further
supplemented by regional content companies that are more
intent on spreading local content to new marketplaces
worldwide - oftentimes without the services of traditional
aggregators who had helped to fulfill these needs in the
past. Expect companies in markets such as India, China and
Latin America to gain much more self-confidence as global
publishers in this environment.
- Web services go from lip service to
full service. In 2003 the groundwork was set for web
services to be taken seriously, with new standards
established to promote their widespread use. As the portal
movement matures, the importance of being able to integrate
content from new sources quickly and effectively will
accelerate the introduction of content services based on the
web services model. Don't expect 2004 to be a breakout year
for web services from publishers and aggregators, but do
expect many content vendors to see the light and to start
developing contextual content based on web services
capabilities - including new multimedia products that make
the most of improved streaming media technologies and
increasingly prevalent instant messaging and VoIP services.
- Content aggregation moves from a
product to a service. The recent declaration by AOL that
it wants to get out of the content production business is
emblematic of a wide range of subtle changes in content
aggregation that continue to place technologists in the
driver's seat of large-scale content distribution. Thomson
Financial's deal with network provider Radianz, the expanding
success of specialized connectivity providers such as
Macgregor in the securities industry and broadband providers
in the consumer sector emphasize that content aggregation is
becoming one of a range of business services that are
provided by network companies. Expect 2004 to be a year in
which network services companies become more aware that
providing business content aggregation is placing them in an
increasingly important lead role in the professional content
industry.
Hopefully that's a good taste as to where
the real action will be in the coming year. So put on your hard
hats and dig in, because when the walls come tumbling down
you'll want to be on top of the pile - not underneath it!
-
John Blossom
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