Moderator: Lee Greenhouse, President, Greenhouse Associates, Inc.

Panelists:
Diane Corrado, Vice President, Sales, Wolters Kluwer Health
Tom Brown, Vice President, Financial Services Solutions, LexisNexis Risk and Information Analytics Group
Joe Jaksha, Vice President of New Product Development, Thomson West

My former Quotron colleague Lee Greenhouse kicked off a panel of major enterprise information services providers from legal, credit and medical sectors. Lee's kickoff question: Michael Wolff said that the value of content is declining. Is that so?

Tom: For public records, applications built on them can quantify value. Maintaining a certain value proposition requires the ability to add to it constantly.
Diane: Clients say content is king, if the right data isn't there, then it's not worth it.
Lee: But they won't pay a king's ransom for it.
Diane: They don't want twelve million hits, they want one hit.
Joe: Raw aggregated content is less valuable, but you have to have that and layer on more value. Unfiltered, unannotated content is less valuable but clients expect it to be there.
Lee: How has West added value to content?
Tom: Classification of laws, the legal code, was the first step. Now focus on specific customers and wrap it in a package with sophisticated technologies and a services model (COMMENT: Again, it comes back to the Wall Street model. Lou Eccleston from S&P didn't come - again - but it would be nice for a financial person to nail this concept home). Adding value to the public record so that it's the authoritative record. Deploy analytics to make it more actionable in high-volume enterprise environments. In banking, help them to prevent money laundering, help them to know the individuals with whom they are doing business. Also focus on identity theft, will get worse as economy deteriorates and people from the inside help crime. Help customers evaluate companies that are not covered by the credit agencies, on terms that are acceptable to the consumer.
Diane: In legal and medical, years ago you had to bear a gift to get information from a corprorate librarian. Now it's in the hands and the pockets on portable devices of users. Books in a big room have to exist now on an iPod and be fast. Google is fast, but you don't want five million hits, you want the information that you're looking for, with as little librarian intervention as possible. Use contextual design process, work with clients in non-standard way. Usual client interviews give usual answers, contextual design watches how people actually do their work. (COMMENT: This is a key, key factor in product research, I've learned more in interviews just being quiet and watching how a subject responds to a phone call or works at their desk). Helps to reduce fatigue from information use - sometimes as much as 65 percent. We are a publisher, but also integrators, integrate from Thomson and other sources, new tools manage these sources side-by-side. Has revolutionized our industry (COMMENT: Again, done decades ago in finance, corprorate world is just starting to have the technology for more general content sources to catch up). We carry both peer reviewed content and clinical use information, so people can see both the theory and the practice side by side.

Joe: Focused on smaller information bites, could be just a piece of metadata that's monetizable, as a publisher you can take that same piece of information and present it in many different contexts. Contract attorneys get what they need at the point of need. Have to understand what target customers need.
Lee: Do you really get more money from customers or is it treading water?
Joe: Definitely a mix of the two, bigger part is making it a sustainable business model, contextual content changes how our clients do business, the "sticky, viral" way of doing business becomes part of what they do.
Tom: Depends on how much it's a pain point for customers, adding coverage, that's where the pain point is, clients are required to vett each client they do business with, if it's just redundant information, less valuable. Also new applications are key, in some ways we're in a nascent market sector, what we're doing is providing information about the "underbanked" to help people understand them.
Diane: It's also helping our customers' customers, our clients have to do more with less, if you have a relationship with their clients you can command higher prices, you can get a larger share that enhance client relationships, puts us in a unique position. Many are clinicians, scientists, drug manufacturers, defending legal cases, customer's customers could be doctors, consumers, product developers, important to prove value to them. Providing better materials that explain what the product does is valuable, getting the buyer to understand the value is key.
Tom: That's the essence of what we do, we try to be more relevant to the client.

Lee: What's the hard stuff?
Joe: Combining unique combinations of content that cannot be replicated by the next hot technology play. Customers are more and more specialized, means that where they get a question outside of their area of expertise, they need help. (COMMENT: Good point, and a very interesting one). People on the end of a phone line can help, too.

Lee: Lessons from failures?
Joe: Shoehorning content in a product or space where it doesn't belong, looks good on a drawing boards but doesn't work in real like. In contract law, we tested and re-tested things, but if you guess wrong with the customer, you may as well start over.
Tom: If you assume that the need is greater than it is, you can wind up over-engineering products.
Diane: We were working on a high-end product, someone released a similar thing as freeware that wasn't too bad. Have to make sure that it's a unique need.

A good panel, danced around some of the key challenges such as clients and third-party technology platforms eating up the same value proposition, but showed the typical best practices of today's enterprise publishing services.

Labels: credit, enterprise, events, legal, medical, SIIA Information Industry Summit 2009, STM