What we have is a constrained ability to consume the existing information.  Perhaps more importantly, the missing resource or the thing that every reader seeks to be able to engage the published information…  We seek context.  What does this mean?  What does it mean to me?  What action might this inform?  What insight might this invoke in me?

So context tends to be the missing ingredient or the scarce resource in this post-internet age of ours.

ADeM: Yes.  Really, you can’t erase the “people” part of this.  “People, process and technology.”  At the end of the day, the media itself is the message that affects the people. How do people get their news today?  Do they sit every morning reading the newspaper or are they getting their sound bytes off of the internet or by listening to Fox News or CNN?  In our office building we have monitors in the elevators feeding us news clips constantly.  Does the news mean more if it is pushing to us or is it just easier to digest the sound bytes?

MM: I might even go further to say that it’s the social interaction.  The communication and the interaction and the collaboration.  It’s the social interaction that generates new context.  Or deeper — more nuanced context.

ADeM: Or the demand for that.

MM: Yes.

So it’s the socialization of the information.  It’s the communication, interaction and collaboration around the information.  That’s the juice, I believe.

ADeM: I do agree with that.

I think that community — companies like YouTube, for instance, have created an entire…  I don’t even want to say generation, because it spans generations, but an entire audience of viewers who want immediate media that is shared in a global way.  It doesn’t really matter if that message is tasteless or tacky or if it is poignant.   The media itself spans the generations of people that are using media-visual feedback to do all sorts of things with very, very little investment.  Look past what is being played and see how it is being played out-that is the future of communications.

MM: And when you look at one of the key demographic trendlines as it affects a company like McGraw Hill, the millennials — the 20-year olds, today — are consuming less and less printed media.  They’re reading fewer magazines.  They subscribe and read fewer newspapers.  For the most part…

ADeM: They’re living in sound bytes, that is probably true.  So, it is our job to make those sound bytes meaningful.  Whatever is digested has to make sense and has to have meaning to our lives.

MM: Not only they’re living in sound bytes, but for a certain and very significant portion, the Daily Show with Jon Stewart is their primary source of news.

ADeM: Yes.  I know.

MM: When you think about that, what does that mean?  What does the Daily Show really give you?  It gives you context.  That’s the whole point of humor.  Humor is the clash of context.  Of action context.

ADeM: We really are changing.  It’s almost hard to even comment on it, because every day it’s different.  But should we put pressure on Jon Stewart to make his show meaningful?  I think that what type of message (satire or sardonic humor for instance) needs to be understood by the audience.  It is not up to us to say to the producers of The Daily Show, ‘You need to provide your audience with meaningful truth.’, because that is not what that show is about.   But if Jon Stewart were to pass himself off as a serious journalist and his message as factual truth, then this would be a clash of context.  Humor doesn’t work against context, it just provides us with another viewpoint with which to comment on context.

MM: Yes.

MM: You’d mentioned one thing earlier, when we were talking about the catalytic events and/or business problems to solve.  One was getting greater involvement with your community.  This kind of leads into a larger conversation of social media, user-generated media and content.

Can you talk through this with us here how that lands within a publishing group such as yours?

ADeM: Well, regarding user-generated content, it depends again on the business problem.  If you’re attempting to create a community of users, user-generated content might be a good way to go.  If you have people on the outside who are contributing content to your site — enriching it in that way — photo contests and just contributed photography, but also contributed articles, too.  And blogs, vlogs, podcasts, etc.   All of these kinds of community things that are popping up are very, very important because they give your customers the power to contribute their thoughts and ideas and imagery to your site.

It’s important in the content supply chain to be able to provide content to that, as well.  RSS feeds are becoming a very big thing on websites today.  Well, to do an RSS feed, you have to understand how that content is flowing at a dynamic level.  I think that’s, in a way, a part of a user community, as well.  It’s not necessarily user-generated, but many users are incorporating RSS feeds in their daily life.

Whether or not you’re having a photo contest on your website or if people are contributing words, giving people a voice has always been a very powerful thing.  YouTube is a classic, classic example of user-generated community content and has become a powerful media tool in a very short amount of time.

MM: This is the last items we’ll discuss, given our time.  One of the more interesting things that I’ve seen in a social media, user-generated content space has been Wikipedia.  More specifically, not the articles themselves, but the behind-the-scene discussion — argumentation around what actually is valid or not valid, or a valid point of view or a biased point of view — et cetera, et cetera.

So the discussions — the socialization of the content that actually is formally published in the Wikipedia…  The discussions tend to provide a much deeper, richer, more meaningful context for the actual published article.  In fact, I might argue that in some cases, the discussions are more valuable than the article itself.

ADeM: Wikipedia — I don’t go on that too often, unless I’m looking something up.  But I really do believe that the discussions behind the formal statements are really much more interesting to read.  Because you get to see how the final statement has developed. The logic behind that and what people are really thinking about that particular subject.  Wikipedia becomes its own community, in a sense, of people who really are concerned about how words and phrases are used in popular culture.  Historical linguistics and understanding where language is coming from is a very passionate subject of learning and discussion with many people.

There’s a huge community around that.

MM: Yes.  This perhaps will allow us to summarize on perhaps a coda around this discussion.  One could easily conclude that today we have too much information.  The internet has only unleashed tsunami after tsunami of information overload.

ADeM: Yes.  That’s a true statement.

MM: Increasingly, doing these proof-of-concepts or these soft-launch products or services, require or entail the participation of 1 or 2 marketing partners.  Is that correct?

ADeM: Yes.  Oh, sure.  Probably more than that if it’s a complex pilot.  Yes.

MM: Could you speak a little more on how you particularly approach that as a problem or how you work through that?

ADeM: Well, there are marketing partners and then there are technology partners.  So as a technology team, your job is to really take a look at that problem from a technology point of view-from application options, functionality through to the right infrastructure.  Identify what planning and preparation steps are needed, and then find the right technology platform that will deliver that type of content in such a way that the business can make use of it.

Then the business — perhaps — will have to partner or collaborate with the marketing arm to be able to help with web-trend analysis or marketing analysis or focus groups or whatever it is that they’re going to need in order to judge the value of that program.

What’s interesting about doing a pilot is it marries the business with the technology all the way through to the database level.  So you as a team — you’re not just getting requirements, doing a project, doing UAT, bouncing it back to the business and then launching, you are really focusing on the specific business case scenario and following it through to validation in the market.

MM: UAT — User Acceptability?

ADeM: Yes.  User-acceptance testing.  Then bouncing back to the business.

In a typical IT project, that’s what used to happen.  But in a pilot program and in subsequent projects off of that new type of process, you are actually part of the business.  So you’re partnering with your business.  You’re working together.  You’re brainstorming.  You’re doing think tank work together, to really say, “Okay.  This is your business problem, and this is what’s out there.”  We’ve completed a couple of successful pilot programs at McGraw-Hill and it is very exciting when we see the entire circle completed.

The IT group or team or whatever you have in your business, it’s their responsibility to help enable the business — the business solution.  We can only do that by constantly being out there in the industry and seeing what new vendors are out there that can supply.  Always remain product-agnostic in your strategy.  I’m a big believer in that.

The products are always changing.  You can’t marry yourself to one vendor or another, or one type of technology.  It’s changing so fast.  You have to constantly poll the universe, to see.

That’s why companies like Gardner and Jupiter and all of these analytics companies are so important today.  They kind of do that.  They help you through that very quickly.  Who’s acquiring what company?  And how?

For instance, the Adobe-K4 partnership was a strategic partnership for Adobe.  But there were other companies out there — like WoodWing and companies like that that were sort of doing the same work as K4.  But you have to be aware that Adobe chose K4 to partner with.  That sort of changes the landscape.  5 years from now, it might be something different.

You constantly have to be supplying that information to your business, and the business has to view technology as truly part of their core team.  Information Technology is no longer the segregated group over in the corner administering e-mail and setting up the networks and all of that. It’s really an integral spine of the businesses today.

MM: Let’s say the business problem is we’ve got all of this stuff — we’ve got all of this content.  There’s got to be better ways of monetizing it.  There’s got to be a better way of unlocking the value.  Every time we’ve tried to go out there, people say, “It’s really good stuff, but it’s not in a usable form.”  Is that a good statement or problem?

ADeM: That’s a good problem.  You’re trying to monetize.  You have content and you just know there’s another way to make money off that content.  You’re not sure how to do it.

MM: Are there any other top-of-mind catalytic events that would be of sufficient magnitude to warrant a policy [inaudible]?

ADeM: Sure, there are many options available.  One way to unlock a hidden value of your content is to increase community involvement on your website.  Another option is to go beyond web delivery and into wireless device content channels.  There’s a business problem for you.  Hey.  We’re publishing a great website.  It’s very popular.  We’re making a lot of money, but we want to be able to port this over to the cell phone or the PDA.  How do we do that if we’re not in XML publishing standards at this point.  Or how do we convert our content or syndicate our content out to wireless devices?  That’s another problem.  That’s another issue.  All of those options open doors of opportunity for your business.  They also introduce other issues and risks.

I think what you start with is a case study.  You have a use case of, “What is it?”  It has to incorporate the vision of the business leader and what he or she wants to do with the business.  It has to really always start with the business.

Technology can only enable that to happen.  Nowadays with XML standards being more and more defined and XML technologies becoming more sophisticated — we’re able to enable all of those visions.  But you’ve got to start with a vision.

So the business has to have an idea.  It has to have a problem.  Monetizing our current assets so that we can create new services and create new revenue streams.  That’s a critical business problem for businesses wanting to stay ahead of the competitive curve.

Okay.  So what part of your business can you see that happening in?  Then take a slice of that.  It’s all about taking a little slice and creating a pilot program out of that slice, and seeing what you can do in a test market.

I’m a very big believer in proof-of-concepts and pilot testing and validating within a known market that can actually give you feedback and give you something so that you can base your ROI on that.  So you can base your projections of revenue.

Many times business stakeholders will ask, ‘What can technology do for us?’  They want to know what possibilities are there through technology in order to envision the future of their business.  I think that an opposite approach is needed.  You need to envision the possibilities for your business and then see how far you can push the technology envelope.  You don’t need to know everything that XML publishing can enable in order to figure out that the best way to transform your business is through customer centric marketing and services.

MM: As we kind of look at the publishing industry…  because you’ve been in the publishing industry for a while — not only with McGraw Hill, but other organizations…  One of the things that I’ve generally observed is that many of the larger publishing firms have had to rethink their internal content flows — if for no other reason than to make their websites a little more economical to produce.

ADeM: Yes, I agree.

MM: Now we’re beginning to say, “Okay.  You’ve gotten your internal act or your internal house kind of in order.  At least it’s working better than it was when we had 2 separate unsynchronized disconnected flows in terms of web and print.

Now all of a sudden we’re seeing the next wave, which is going outside of the walled garden or outside of our firewall — upstream — in terms of our contributors, authors, subject matter experts — that create or stimulate.  They become the catalysts for a bunch of new content creation.

Then all the way downstream in terms of outside — beyond just our corporate boundary.  But to partners that are syndicating and repackaging content.

ADeM: Oh, sure.  Well, it’s because the businesses are maturing.  Right?  Just like the evolution of the internet.  I actually was at a company once where somebody said, “Well, how could you sell anything on the internet?”  That was in 1993.  They told us, “What a ridiculous thing.  Who would ever be buying anything off the internet?”

Look at where we are, today, only 14 years later.  Not a long time period has elapsed.  It isn’t like a whole generation has passed.  It’s only a little over a decade that’s passed, and the whole world has changed because of that.  It’s just an evolutionary process-and we should always ask ourselves, ‘What is next?’.

MM: How do you then start to think through or tackle this notion of mapping end-to-end flows through multiple enterprises of a supply chain?

ADeM: You don’t start with multiple enterprises.

MM: You start with your own house in order.  Right?

ADeM: You start with your own house in order.  You start with whatever the business problem is.  You’re not going to solve everything all at once, but you have to start somewhere and then keep measuring your success as continue on the journey.

MM: Oftentimes, Abby, we’ve found that when we’ve participated in mapping the current state, clients and/or users go into that with an idea — almost a hypothesis — as far as the business problems are solved.  But in the process of visually depicting an end-to-end business process, they have 1 or 2 or 3 epiphanies.  That changes everything!

ADeM: Oh, of course!  That’s why doing current flow analysis is so important.  Because you don’t know, really.  You know pretty much the basic problem you want to resolve.  But you don’t know all of the nuances.  You don’t know that Mary Jane is sitting there buried within the research department 5 levels below what you’re looking at.  You’re looking at a 50,000-foot view of how your content flows.  But you don’t know all the people that are involved in that view until you start peeling back the layers.  You find that person who’s actually putting in 45 hours a week, hunting down that picture or that illustration — and you’re wondering, “How are you spending your time?  What else could you be doing to add value to the business if you weren’t doing this?”

MM: In developing these end-to-end process flow maps, you then have to interview almost one-on-one the people that actually do the work.

ADeM: Oh, yes.  Absolutely. For larger organizations, you need to take a ’sampling’ of people, however, because it is impossible to get to everyone. But make sure that you are interviewing candidates from every type of job role in order to have a realistic view of the workload, workflow and daily problems or issues.

You kind of need an activity model, as far as what the various buckets or categories are of activities that are all kind of related to content flows.

ADeM: Absolutely.  You have to talk to the people — without a doubt.  You have to figure out who the major and minor stakeholders are.

A very important point is that there has to be somebody within the business who’s acting as a champion for this type of effort.  Streamlining content-manage lifecycles, and implementing DAM systems is an expensive understanding and not without risks.  So having someone on the business side who understands the future state and future business benefits will help your project to succeed.

MM: Oh, what a joy!

ADeM: Yes, really!  It isn’t like the technology group is going to have this epiphany, “Oh, this is what we need to do!”   It has to be in response to a business problem.  Right?

Whoever is stating that business problem is probably one of your key stakeholders.  You just work down from there.  You have your key stakeholders and you have all the divisional stakeholders and the workgroup members or resources.

MM: It’s hard if you didn’t do the activity-based research on the front end — documenting exactly who spends how much time shag-dogging after contents and assets.

ADeM: Yes.  That’s so important.  Conducting a complete (end-to-end) content workflow analysis is so important when you’re trying to understand the full content lifecycle of either structured or unstructured content.  Where there’s a lifecycle, there’s a flow of work.  If you’re going to streamline that lifecycle or if you’re going to change it in any way, you have to be able to see the current state and have a good understanding of what the future state needs to look like.  Both current and future state need to correlate with how people work, day-to-day.

Relating this to new product development, if you introduce a new television (or for instance, HDTV) to the market, it’s going to change the way people view TV every day, and what channels they use.  Like a new product, content management is a technology that can change what choices people make in their daily work life.

If people are used to coming into the office every day and doing their tasks one after another after another, and you’re changing their environment, you’re going to change their professional life.  You’re going to change how they work every day.

There’s a savings or not associated with that.  Maybe there’ll be a process efficiency introduced that you haven’t expected, or a better way to organize your staff.  But in order to see where the gaps exist-what needs to be improved-it’s very, very important to map out the current state, and compare that with the future state.

For the technology or the professional services team looking to make some kind of strategic change within a particular business, it is critical to understand how people are working day-to-day.  That includes how much time they’re putting in not only tasks, but how much time they’re putting in administratively, how they’re organized and accountability; who is in charge of what.

As an example, if you’re centralizing content flow and you have 10 magazines and there’s an editor-in-chief in charge of each magazine, do you need 10 editors-in-chief?  By the time you’re done with restructuring that content, workflow, you might find that the business now only needs two or three people at that level because you’re centralizing everything. You might find out that organizing your workflow by function rather than product will be a more efficient choice for the business.
So it’s really important that workflow be mapped out, and that it is mapped out end-to-end (from content ingestion or creation through content storage and delivery).

I find often that businesses do part of that, but they don’t do the complete flow, end-to-end.  You really have to see how your content enters the lifecycle, how it’s being managed, where it ‘lives’ and how it leaves the lifecycle.

MM: Are you talking about visually depicting that in terms of a large flowchart poster?

ADeM: Yes.  Visually.  Get out your Visio application and diagram it out.  How is your content being handled?  What are the decision points?  What are the [editive] processes?  What are you looking to achieve?  Layered on top of this diagram is the main question:  What is the business problem you’re looking to solve?

Implementing content management has to solve a problem.