The people that glue things together

Patrick

I was interested to note that not only do our two respective businesses advocate change, but they have both undergone significant change during their lifetimes. 67 bricks began life as a tech company, before moving into the academic publishing sector – your origins are not in publishing. Conversely, Deanta was born as a publishing services company, but have transitioned to a publishing solutions company, with technology at our heart. I was curious to know why your founders felt academic publishing was the right area to go into with the knowledge and skills that they had?

David

I think there was always an interest in content. Some of our first clients were standards organizations moving masses of documents from traditional physical print to online. The goal was to do more with that digital content, to enrich it. In effect, that's what we're still doing, but in the scholarly publishing space. Publishers have massive journal or book content, and we can apply the same thinking; improve the metadata and improve the understanding of that content so that you can do more with it.

Some of the early things we looked at are now quite commonplace, for example, to take a piece of content – a word - and look up that word in a dictionary to tell the reader what the word means. It's that enrichment that interests us and we see this as having value not just in the academic space, but anywhere where we can empower information providers to evolve and develop the things they can do in the future.

Patrick

Have you seen it as a positive that you were not an existing publishing vendor - that you were approaching this task from a neutral, technological point of view?

David

Absolutely. It’s about how we apply that to our experience, and through our consultants we now have masses of experience in the publishing industry as well as other sectors. Academic publishers, who traditionally have been quite closed, have become more interested in how knowledge-based companies are using content. We can show how other industries are looking at data differently and providing products that are not just full text documents but more componentized content.

Patrick

I was going to ask you to define digital transformation, and I'm curious whether you see it as a demand pull or publisher push in this industry right now?

David

Oh, interesting question. To be completely honest, I think the demand is coming from the outside, from end users expecting more. We are used to living in the digital world and expectations are changing and evolving. Obviously there are other factors within academic publishing, such as open science, open access, the need for digital transformation across the organisation to better use its digital information and how you've got to get your content to the right users. Publishers are asking: how do we set ourselves apart from the rest of the industry and survive.

Patrick

Do 67 Bricks ever get the chance to talk to the end users and customers of the publishers you deal with, or are you still seeing these issues through the publisher’s lens?

David

We tend to work with the publisher or information provider directly, but in many cases, we are helping the publisher gain a better understanding of what the researchers’ needs are, and how best to deliver what these consumers are asking for.

Publishers have generally seen their end users as librarians. Now, going forward, they need an understanding of what the authors’ requirements are, and what the readers’ and researchers’ requirements are. We are seeing from the impact of open access that our customer is changing.

Patrick

I was researching a particular topic recently and I found some content on JSTOR. I was on my iPhone at the time and managed to download this bit of content, but it was just a pdf, and it wasn't searchable. I couldn't do much with it. It was really an unsatisfactory experience. Bill Kasdorf believes a trigger for industry-wide transformation will be the next generation expecting useable information on their phones. Content needs to be fluid and available wherever you are.

David

I think information needs to be within the workflow of your work. So, if I'm conducting research and I'm working within certain software, or technologies, I expect the results to be delivered to me within that environment that I'm working in. I don’t want to have to go off and read something elsewhere and figure out how to find it and download it as a pdf.

That's something we've been doing with a legal publisher where we have created a product called Case Genie which is within their workflow. So, a lawyer, for example, can upload a brief and it then uses that information to find all the relevant pieces of content and information that's going to help them with their case. They don’t need an in-depth knowledge of the context or terminology, which in the past would determine which words to type in the search.

Patrick

Absolutely. A good search is currently based on good semantic knowledge, isn’t it?

David

Exactly. With new technologies the next generation won't even realize they're doing a search. They're simply presented with the information that they need because you have collected it. That to me is where digital transformation comes in, in terms of being more data driven. If you are collecting that information, that data about what people are doing, the context of the content, and the context and profiling of people, you can then deliver the right information to that individual or organization.

Patrick

It’s an interesting example as it requires imagination to go from that raw data to that intelligent solution.

David

Yes. Whereas if, upfront, you’d simply asked the end user what they want, they might say, ‘I just want to do this job quicker; I just want the right information’. But they don't know what that might be, or where to find it. They may say, ‘just build me a search engine so I can type in some words and search for it’. But what if you don’t know exactly what you're searching for? Our process is more about understanding what the end users desired outcome is and what will provide the greatest value.

Patrick

We often talk about hygiene metrics - 20th-century business metrics like quicker, faster, cheaper, which used to be the obsession for businesses managers and, until recently, were still key goals for digital transformation. One might still argue that whatever you do is still designed to do cheaper, faster, quicker. But there's a gestalt factor when you find you can do things in a different way, and the results become strategic. It can change your mindset.

In your example, that legal company you're working with may start to work in a different way. They may think differently about the people they employ. They may not only spend less time on research but no longer need to employ highly qualified legal researchers to take on that task - the software will do that for them.

David

And that’s the evolution from old style digital transformation, which was often about moving content from print to online and enabling good search functionality. Organizations are interested in exploring what additional value they can provide in a cost-effective way.

It’s no longer about technology doing exactly what an individual used to do. It could be changing what you do. It could be changing the entire setup of your organization. Publishers are beginning to change the way that they are structured and how they work culturally. There's a move to get something out quickly to end users so they can tell you whether it's right or wrong. This is very different for a publisher who traditionally would produce a highly finished article like a book, then ship it.

Patrick

But the leap to make that a permanent connection is quite revolutionary. You can understand how some organizations might talk more to their customers and assess what they want during a transformation process, but the greater leap is to make that connection permanent and have customer data continually feeding back in.

David

It is. And moving away from that mindset of ‘let’s have one of those systems, please’, which in the past might be in place for the next 20 years, to a mindset of being able to adapt quickly to whatever is happening in the market going forward. It’s about giving organizations the confidence that they are going to survive and thrive in an unpredictable future.

Both of our organizations are constantly looking at what might happen in the future, but regardless of our predictions, we cannot really know. All we can do is make sure that our business and the organizations that we work with are ready to adapt and evolve. You are transforming, but transformation doesn't stop.

Patrick

Indeed. Our job is not to predict the future but to help make organizations ready for it by being agile. In essence we help break down what a publisher does into component parts, make each part individually agile and open data channels to enable them to talk to each other.

Are you having to talk to customers about this when you first meet them? You must surely get clients come to you and say ‘that thing you did for them, we’d like one just like it for us. Can you build another one of those please?’

David

The first thought is often to replace something that they already have, rather than look at what it is that they need and where they need it to be in a few years’ time?

We tend to start by exploring the publisher’s strategy. What and where do they want to be in five years’ time. Our task is then to make sure that they have the right technology solutions in place for them to achieve their goals. We often set out not knowing what the final solution will be. Publishers will continue to produce content, but how users will consume that content in the future is something that no one knows yet. So, componentizing and creating the right structure for that content is critical. Then, whatever happens, the client and content is ready for whatever the future needs are.

Patrick

Publishing is a notoriously traditional industry and you’ve talked about how this process can be a cultural shift for many organizations. Are you still finding agitators and resistance within some of those organizations you meet?

David

In most cases we deal with board-level individuals who know that they need to evolve. But there are people in the industry that still think that everything is going to be the same for the next 10 to 20 years. I've been into organizations where they ask why they can't just continue as they are. It's a little like the move to open access, where some publishers are still pinning their futures to subscription models and subscription revenue, as if nothing is going to change.

Quite often it’s the people on the front line who do things day in, day out that understand the need for change quickest. They can see the industry changing and can imagine how innovations in their own department could impact the business. They may be bogged down by work but want to create a new collection of content or a brand new product, and their existing platform wasn't built to accommodate those sorts of products. So, they get frustrated. At a board level, they don't always see that.

Patrick

Are you finding that at board level you are occasionally having to pitch that future that you can't predict, to try and show the implications of your work?

David

We are not pitching a solution to them. Actually we're offering technical consultancy, exploring where they are going and the vision and strategy to get there. We don’t set off to provide an immediate solution. We're getting the business into a position where it understands that change must happen. Collectively, you can then start to make the right decisions on what technology you need to use.

Patrick

We often find multiple stakeholders in an organization with different approaches and different attitudes towards what's happening. Part of the challenge is to get those people to be on the same page. Given that Deanta is focused on production, people often come to the table with very preconceived ideas of tasks that need doing like typesetting, copy editing, proofreading, indexing, and so on, and in the past those things have been done sequentially and dictated by communication channels and technology limitations. It’s been that way for years so it’s hard for people to consider breaking out of that.

So, when we start to show them what our new technologies can do, how poorly structured content can be automatically ingested and converted into XML at the outset, how typesetting is automated (within seconds), that copy editing can be partially automated, it’s not easy for everyone to fully understand the positive implications. There’s often a fear that your solution is going to automate the task that an entire department was doing.

David

To me that’s part of the challenge with digital transformation. You've just described a typical publishing workflow determined by a series of processes that the content must go through. Publishers have created separate departments to deal with each of those processes, and they have become siloed. Digital transformation cuts across all those different silos, and if you talk about being data driven, you're collecting data from all sorts of different places here. You might be gluing things together that cross different parts of the organization.

Sometimes, when we go in, we ask to meet with twelve different departments. You might then be able to focus that down into a product team, and I think that's where I see digital transformation, helping to define clear product owners rather than thinking I’m within a specific department. It's just not as linear as it used to be.

Patrick

HFS recently wrote an article suggesting new titles for board members of the future, like Head of Customer Experience. The article was largely focused on enterprise roles, but the thinking still applies to many businesses. It argues that roles will no longer be focused on siloed departmental functions, it's about delivering a customer and staff experience using all the resources the business can muster. It's breaking out of those silos and giving ownership of that outcome.

David

Absolutely, you're basically becoming the owner of a value that you are providing. Customer engagement might once have meant looking after a platform, just hosting content somewhere and making it available to your customers. But the customer engagement should be throughout the customer’s own life cycle. A researcher can also be an author. They're engaged throughout the life cycle, so treating them in silos can create a disjointed user experience.

Patrick

We have similar challenges in that we are only one part of the toolkit that our clients can call upon to change their organization. We are still ultimately a vendor and must work within limits and the brief. So, I'm curious as to how you work with clients to manage that process.

David

Every client is different, but typically we would start off with a discovery phase and get an understanding of the overall organization's goals and aspirations and strategy. We're not going in there to set their strategy - that's their task. We will work in partnership with them to ensure they can deliver their strategy. This might require them to change some of the organisational structure as well as implement the right technology.

We might identify some priority areas to do some proof of concepts or explore how could we get more data out of some of content so we can start to get better insights. Then we work with the client to build a sort of world map showing how you get from where you are now technology-wise to where you need to be going forward.

At board level, people like to see things happening fast, so we might deliver a particular outcome first and demonstrate that that's making a difference. Alternatively, we might build a walking skeleton that will demonstrate the potential and validate the approach. If something works for a single department and a particular outcome, there’s a greater willingness to apply the same thinking for the rest of the organization. That’s when we move into a more sort of agile, flexible partnership which is not simply based on building a product or solution.

Patrick

Transformation need not always be about overcoming legacy tech or redesigning processes. At the New York round table that we hosted, Julia Kostova, Publications Director at Frontiers, noted that since Frontiers is an OA-born digital native publisher, they don't have any legacy tech. Digital transformation to them is not about processes, it’s about using sophisticated technology to become a knowledge-based company and using data to serve their customers better. It's a continuous process, led by the technology that's available to you and the needs of the market.

David

I think there's two things of note there. Pure open access publishers started in a very specific market, delivering value in an almost empty field, so quickly established a mindset and culture open to ongoing change. In contrast, the more traditional publisher may be trying to get themselves away from their existing processes whilst also trying to adapt to new demands of the market and get ready for a new future, and that's really hard.

Patrick

It’s interesting that 67Bricks started with delivery as, in our experience, delivery is a very common place for transformation to start.

David

We never saw ourselves as a delivery specialist. I think that has come about because we are focused on the end user. In the future, delivery will be about getting the content out to wherever the users need it. If users consume content in a certain way, you just need to make sure it's there.

An organization in the US that we're working with said, ‘you seem to be the people who glue things together’. And I think that's where we are heading as a business. We wouldn't build a submission system or a production system, but we can help publishers to extract the right value from all of their technologies.