Really Strategies Blog

"Barbarians at the gate?" NFAIS Conference

I was highly interested with the title of the upcoming 51st Annual NFAIS Conference.  Quoting from the brochure: "Barbarians at the gate?  The impact of digital natives and emerging technologies on the future of information services"  Essentially the gist of the subsequent write-up is that those who were born in the digital era and have almost exclusively known digital communications, are getting ready to storm the world and start driving the information technology revolution from inside companies and organizations (presumably the way they have with consumer communications). 

How perfect.  This is what all of us in the publishing technology community have been waiting for and have started to see out there in the last few years.  It means that it is less and less important for the publishing technology revolution to be driven by the visionary technical whizzes.  Less problematic to convincing companies to adopt more and more advanced digital workflows and systems.  As the 'digital natives' come into their own, demand for better systems is beginning to drive things.  What a great thing to happen in publishing technology!  Of course this process proceeds differently in different publishing verticals, with more scientifically oriented (e.g. technical) companies already there.  But now we can expect the non-science oriented publishing to come aboard. Magazine and book publishers should be coming around, and goodness knows, we have been waiting for this moment in educational publishing - the slowest of publishing verticals to change. 

Marjorie Scardino at SIIA: Doom and Gloom - or not?

"Education will be THE force that drives economic and political determination around the world."

Marjorie Scardino, CEO of Pearson, opened the SIIA Information Industry Summit yesterday by highlighting our opportunity to teach tomorrow's workforce "21st century skills". 

What are 21st century skills?  (Marjorie referenced a report from the Partnership for 21st Century Skills)

• manage information
• communicate effectively
• work flexibly and in groups
• deal with complex issues
• exercise imagination

When discussing more of the hard skills, Marjorie focused on critical thinking, math, and science. 

What are your thoughts?  What should we be developing in ourselves and teaching our children?

Start With XML Conference

Attended the Start with XML conference on Tuesday and am happy to report it was excellent!  This bodes well for the next O'Reilly conference - Tools of Change, where we will have a booth and where our own Lisa Bos will be speaking.

There were a lot of highlights for a single day.  The morning keynote by David Young, Chairman & CEO of Hachette Book Group USA was an engaging overview of why to start with XML. (All presentations are on the Start with XML conference site, though some may miss something without the talk).

Several presentations by top production leaders were also interesting.  In particular, I'd like to point out the accomplishments of Rebecca Goldthwaite's team at Cengage Learning in developing standardized design that does not appear standardized(!).  Amazing that so many strikingly different appearances can be auto-generated from XML and layout templates.  It just goes to show that their design teams 'get it' and more importantly, that design teams in general can remain highly creative in the world of XML.  Take this to heart people!

But the presentations were all very good.  If I start mentioning all the good ones, then I'll be mentioning everyone.  I think this may indicate a watershed year - the number of people who have quality knowledge of the business, technology and people issues in developing an XML workflow is potentially reaching critical mass.  Perhaps we are ready to move forward in publishing after all.  If Start with XML is any indication, then the larger Tools of Change conference will be a watershed event this year.  It's a very exciting time.

Why a CMS? why now?

Maybe you've got a gut feeling that it's time to buy a content management system.  Maybe you've  gotten a demo of one and gotten general buy-in from the team.  Now it's time to justify it financially. 

The first thing to keep in mind is that a CMS is a tool.  It is a tool that serves two purposes, so there are two angles that can be taken for justification.

First, and easiest, if most mundane, a CMS serves to wring out non-creative tasks from content development.  Think about how much time is wasted in content production: routing, tracking, moving, backing up, converting from one format to another, cutting and pasting, rekeying, etc., etc.  All of this takes time and an efficient publishing operation will reduce this work to a minimum by using a contemporary CMS so that more resources can be put into making the best content available.  If you produce a lot of content, then these numbers may surprise you once you pull them together. 

Ordinarily, publishers won't want to rock the boat with this stuff, it just causes angst and is hard for management to relate to hot topics in expanding market presence, competing with other publishing organizations, etc.  However, many publishers are feeling angst anyway, and have no choice at this point.  Profitability is a serious issue as is well known.  But more compelling, publishers are now feeling the weight of these non-productive tasks now that electronic distribution of content has expanded so dramatically - and along with it, manual production tasks.  Content must be agile, and this won't happen if production staff or offshore vendors have to touch every piece, every time.

Second, and much, much more interesting, a good CMS can put some forms of content distribution in reach that were never in reach before. In this sense, a CMS can be part of a new initiative to compete in the publishing market. For example, a traditional publisher may want to slice and dice their content to form specialized publications for niche customer segments.  A licensee might be willing to pay for certain topics of content, if it can be delivered in usable form.  In many cases, this was never seriously considered because it was never financially possible before - there would have been too much manual and editorial labor in finding and organizing appropirate content, and producing it in appropriate forms.  But today, with a native XML CMS like RSuite, this is financially possible.  And the first publishers to execute well will be able to create specialized demand and win customers.

Maybe you pay for your new CMS through ordinary savings, but take advantage of it by using it to develop new publication types.  Whatever your strategy, the technology is here, is now, and for the new generation of systems, particularly RSuite CMS installed on a Mark Logic repository, the technology actually works well enough to be cost effective.  We know this because our customers are starting to report savings and interesting new revenue stories to us.  All we can say, then, is: go for it!

K-12 education - moving to web?

How far behind mainstream computer usage is the K-12 education market in the US?  This has always been a frustration for me - even back when I was developing educational CD-Roms 15 years ago.  More recently, I've also blogged on the subject.  Enough gloomy thoughts though.

It's better to phrase the question more positively: how close is the K-12 education market to catching up to mainstream web usage?

That is a good enough question that an SIIA (Software & Information Industry Association) committee of which I'm a member was formed to look at the issue.  The Transformation to Web-Based Working Group has gone out and interviewed key leaders at 7 pace setter K-12 districts around the country to find out how ready they are to become web centric in their computing. 

The results of the committee's work will be shared to other SIIA members in a webinar tomorrow afternoon.  If you are an SIIA member, please consider signing up here.

The Evolution of Content (and Us)

Four and a half minutes that are worth it!

Achieving automation: InDesign/InCopy to XML

InDesign and InCopy are built for desktop publishing - giving great power to design and editorial.  This is all great news.  However, it makes exporting XML rather tricky - particularly the development of fully automated XML exports.  Sure you can capture XML coming out of these applications, but can you really push that XML into your CMS without having text processing look at it? 

We've looked at this over many projects and the key issue is, of course, the discipline required by each group in the process.  If they don't follow the rules, then their content might not match what your CMS is looking for.  A deck must be labeled as a deck somehow.  Likewise, a B-Head or run-in head must be labeled appropriately. There are also customer or genre specific structures and metadata that must be maintained - with paragraph or character styles (or one of several other techniques).

The point is that you can't look over everyone's shoulder.  Styling and other structure related errors are bound to creep into your content on occasion.   If you only want to accept well structured XML, then you need the capability to automatically identify errors and only ingest acceptable documents.

While you can create scripts to QC the content during production, this poses a scripting update problem every time you want to change your format structure (every time you do a redesign, perhaps).  And while scripting is extremely powerful in CS2 & CS3, it is pretty low level stuff and time consuming to produce anything complicated.  It is also problematic if you don't have a specialist on staff.  Better to write scripts once and move QC somewhere else.

So what to do?  One solution is a Schema (or DTD) validation technique that allows this QC operation to proceed during an automated export.  The Schema will be more restrictive than just looking at Adobe structures - it will overlay structures specific to your content.  And while updating a schema requires some technical knowhow, it is more straight forward and much faster than updating scripting of any kind.  The reason, of course, is that this is what Schemas are meant to do well.

Using a Schema to validate InDesign/InCopy content can detect a surprising number of human errors with styling and other structuring techniques.  Not all errors, but it can do a solid job if your content is moderately complex.  Content flows into an interim format and is validated before being transformed into its final form in your CMS.  This means that valid content can be fully automated from InDesign to the CMS.  Invalid documents can be automatically siphoned off for review and correction by production.  Users can then be retrained if necessary.

Beats checking every exported document ad nauseum, doesn't it?  Especially at 2am.

Educational publishing - a parent's lament

So my kids are getting older - and starting to move through school.  I haven't seen a textbook come home with them yet, but those massive, weighty, colorful, and engaging things are going to come soon, no doubt.  Aside from needing small forklifts to move their books around, what's the problem?  And there are nice PDF facsimiles of the printed pages online if you want to print them out - or just read online.  There are also fun supplemental educational games and some online multimedia to look at.

Well, as I sit at my laptop writing this, I'm occasionally alt tabbing between a few online newspapers The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, etc., and this blog (not to mention the new 'Demise of Print' blog).  And I think to myself, if I use online publications as a primary source of content, why don't kids use online publications as a primary source of content?  The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal don't put up facsimiles of their printed edition (that would be a laugh).  Why should I settle for that for my children?

When we also look at what is happening in publishing elsewhere, with magazines and newspapers ratcheting up their capabilities to publish simultaneously or web first, with layouts that are ready for  web first consumption, I have to wonder how long educational publishers can hold out.  They are certainly not in the forefront - and they need to be.

The question may hinge to some extent on how kids will consume content and learn online - what is an appropriate web format for say a social studies book?  It will be very different from a newspaper layout, certainly,  but It is probably not something that *is* a print textbook page.  So this is hard, particularly for established editorial staffs that have been producing books all their lives.  It's new territory.  But newspapers and magazines have successfully moved forward and developed compelling web layouts for their content.  It's time for textbooks to do the same.

Some are concerned about equal access for kids to computers.  Poorer kids might still not have computers.  This is an important issue certainly, but this has been an excuse for 10+ years - I'm sorry, but what level of access is required?  Certainly the print editions won't go away for a while, but don't make the entire country stay with print while the last 10% or less of the population gets online.  It is well past time to take the plunge - and it would be nice to have it happen before my kids graduate, thank you.

Everyone knows that today's kids - and now young teachers - are more than ready for the online world.  If we are teaching our children to learn to manage information as they would in the workplace and real life, then don't give them an 800 page hardcover book for each subject - let them log-on instead.  By chance I recently shared a plane ride between a teacher from Iowa and an education consultant.  We talked shop and found ourselves discussing this very idea.  The consultant was not convinced.  But then I asked how she got her news and it dawned - she had been reading newspapers online for some time.  And that was food for thought.

The case against competition? The tech angle.

With four big US PreK-12 educational publishers becoming three, the question for a small number of  publishing technology professionals may be how the industry shakes out with regards to editorial and production workflow systems.

There now seem to be two systems currently used by the big PreK-12 publishers - in various states of adoption.

Does this mean there is healthy competition among editorial and production system vendors?  Mmm...maybe there is competition, but I'm not sure how healthy it is. 

Regardless, there are a few big reasons why 2 systems divided among 3 companies is a problem:

First, multiple systems cause problems with the few specialized publishing services vendors in the PreK-12 publishing space.  If a single vendor staffer needs to work on two non-competing projects from two different publishers, each with a different technology then:

- Staff will need to know how to use each technology.  While a more tech savvy generation of editors may be better able to handle this, those who are already finding it difficult to put down their red pencils will find adjusting that much harder.

- IT complexity increases for vendors.  In an age where vendors are expected to improve productivity (e.g. keep costs low), they are being forced to increase their IT management - to switch users from one technology to another.  Does this mean having users work with two installations of InCopy or InDesign?  One for each publisher/technology?  Does it mean they need two machines altogether?  Does it mean a reconfiguration every time a new project comes along?

Secondly, the systems were initially built for magazine and newspaper publishers.  This means that, while there was an effort to make them technically optimized to work with the larger ed pub workgroups, their feature sets are still not fully geared to large educational book publishers.

One example is licensing, which is locked to specific InCopy and/or InDesign serial numbers.  This means that if a publisher is hosting the system, pub vendors cannot use their own InCopy or InDesign licenses.  It means that vendors need to be assigned licenses by each publisher for use with their particular system.  Therefore, the small world of creative services vendors has an IT headache from the beginning of each project.  A more easily adjustable lock to serial numbers, that allows publishers to temporarily assign a vendor's own licenses to the publisher's system (for the duration of projects) would be much more useful.

But how will PreK-12 ed publishers push this and other feature requests on the systems vendors?  In order to be heard among competing requests from magazines, newspapers, trade book publishers, and others, ed publishers need to have purchasing power - found in the total number of licenses and maintenance paid on them.  If total PreK-12 publishing licenses are divided among two systems, then ed publishers will have less power, and ed specific features will be less forthcoming from either system vendor.

In a world where neither vendor is really competing on PreK-12 publishing features, there is a case against competition and for consolidation behind one vendor.  Of course if a systems vendor made the plunge to invest in truly catering to education (healthy competition), then they might just take the whole market anyway.  The problem for the systems vendor in the relatively small education market: Is there enough money in it?

The architect and the interior designer

I heard a story the other day about a store owner who hired an interior designer to design her new retail store. With great enthusiasm they set about designing a great space. It was going to look great - and it did look great in the sketches. So she submitted their plan for approval.

What she didn't know and what she found out very quickly is that she was required by law to hire a registered architect to draw up the submission plans. So the designers sent their plans and drawings to an architect to 'just draw them up'.

Unfortunately, the architect found that there was no HVAC system in their design - oops. Bathroom design was not to code, as were several other things. Well, everyone scrambled, and after much brouhaha between the groups, as you can imagine, the design was revised and I suppose everything turned out fine (if more expensive). But it was touch and go for a while.

The lesson: work with an architect from the beginning, so you can create with the required constraints in mind.

Does this story sound like anything related to print-to-XML/web workflows and print content production in general? If so, then who is the interior designer? Who is the architect? And what is the HVAC system?