HTML5 key for publishers in the digital era

I'm working for a couple of years in the media & publishing world already. One thing that I noticed is the vast amount of effort publisher have to do to get their content into a digital format. Typically authoring tools like Microsoft Word and other desktop publishing suites are being used to create the content. This content is then transformed into formats like DocBook or proprietary formats to drive the print process.

Publishers are in the midst of creating e-book variants of these to provide a digital copy and some even repurpose their content into online databases and dropping the book concept as a container of content.

Safari Books is getting it right

Every now and then you see steps in the right direction in the media and publishing industry. Safari Books Online (O'Reilly and Pearson Education) created a new innovative online product called Safari Flow. The product is simple, smart and personalized with a capital P.

Architectural boosts for SMB companies

Many SMB companies today face similar issues as their bigger counterparts when it comes to effectiveness of their IT. They share the same problems of IT decay also known as technical debt. They also struggle to transform into the digital world of today.

Personal expectations @work

In our ever increasing technology world we use technology both at home and at work.

Today there's a rather big difference between the two and many people find themselves using simple, user friendly systems and when they come back in the office they look at complex environments.

Simplify your product offering

I just read an article on the Dutch iCreateMagazine Apple site (http://bit.ly/uR6MlX).

All credits goes to the author Daan Jeuken but I found it so applicable in my job as EA that I translated parts of the content in English for you.

Focus

... Apple's $ 30 billion worth, but they only have 30 products. If companies have too many different products, none of them will be great. The secret behind this focus is not to say "yes" to every good product, but to say "no" to hundreds of good ideas."

Simplicity

..."Many people think that simplicity is the secret to keeping products simple and close to their original base. That's not true. If something begins to develop, it quickly becomes complex. That is where most people stop; the point is to make something complex into something simple again."

Courage

Over the years, Apple has quite a brutal decisions. So it was a rebel from the floppy disk to be written off and now it seems to do the same with the CD. Do not hold onto ideas from the past, even if they are successful for you. And don't develop those products because others have. "

Dedication

Apple's commitment is closely related to its focus: "If you are not the best you can in a, don't enter that market."

(read full article on http://www.icreatemagazine.nl/nieuws/rondom-apple/apple%E2%80%99s-4-sleutels-tot-succes/ )

If you offer too many products too your customer, you need to support them all. This means that all your energy will be spread out amongst them. I'm referring to spending resources from all departments, sales, marketing, operations, IT ... Divide et impera?

Financially, companies are afraid to simplify their product offering because these products generate revenue. However, due to the lack of a detailed cost picture, very few companies are able to make a valid business case. And without a business case you can't really tell if the products are profitable. 

So, focus, rationalize and keep that portfolio small. Your customers will love it if they actually understand what you are trying to sell them.

Edit: Just read that Google removed 7 products to simplify it's offering: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/more-spring-cleaning-out-of-season.html. Even the much announced Wave is discontinued. If the profitability is not their, get rid of it as your customers will only be confused and they'll look at you as a company without focus and vision.

How can IT improve business agility

Just noticed this new info graphic about how students look at their future job environments. Again we see that they want to work wherever using their tools of choice. More and more I believe that a company can get much more effectiveness if the right culture is shaped where employees (or contractors for that matter) need to get empowered to help solve the variable parts of the organization. People should be able to sort out 20% of their tools & processes themselves, without any enforcement from the company pushed through the IT department gates.

I see lots of great ideas when talking with people on the coffee machine, but we find ourselves most of the time closing these talks with "...yeah, nice dreams". Underlying are a number of factors that prohibits us to change:

• company culture; people are insufficient encouraged to change and contribute. Motivation is something that needs to come from the area around you.
• stop thinking short term processes, think about your company capabilities. Of course you need to support people in their job which is similar to supporting their processes, however, don't design your entire IT landscape to it. Figure out what your company capabilities are and cater for that. 
• tools; are you still stuck with those dreadful big fat ERP implementations that require 10 governance bodies to keep it workable for everyone. Suppose that a person from sales has a great idea to get new leads on a way you never thought of. Are you able to get this job done rapidly, even if it is only a temporary activity? "business agility" anyone? 

As usual it's a combination of people, processes and tools. I believe that IT departments can play a big role in this game by:

• Improve your ability to integrate. Forget about the big single ERP that does it all. They do, for the current people and current processes. If you want to be agile you need to be able to swiftly get new parts in and out, the only way to do this efficiently is to improve your integration capability.
• Try to get into a continuous business process improvement routine. Don't just improve the tools, but improve the processes, weed out unused elements and plant new seeds. 
• Review your operations strategy from closed controlled to open and supportive. If someone comes in with a new device for example that they want to use in the organization they want to be able to use it everywhere to access corporate functionalities. Don't smack them with the "not allowed" hammer, work with them, design for consumerization and encourage their empowerment. 

Every company needs a Capability Model

In the past 3-4 months I had the opportunity to work with IT management to help formulate their upcoming strategy. It has been a great exercise so far already and without disclosing any information its kind of interesting to walk you through it, who knows you might be struggling with a similar situationy.

Basically you start out by investigating the strategic directions of the business to get an insight into scope and content. In cheaper words; what do they want. Without diving into the execution of anything (remember you are doing "important" strategic work here... stay away from any architecture, solutions or technology ideas), you need to decide where you'll spend your money. Very few companies can do it all. In all of the years I work in the IT industry I noticed a trend that the demand side is always bigger than the supply side :D. So you need to make decisions based on business priorities and feasibility (you could use a feasibility matrix for this if you want).

So, here you are, you think that you understand the business and you selected the topics you want to focus on. Where do you go from here? Well, it's time to create a story which involves slides... lots of it. Just kidding, the lesser slides the better as long as you can transfer your point to your audience. In this case there are several people ("stakeholders") that are interested in this story. You have the senior management (the people that are usually older than you) that wants to know if their business is going to be supported and that IT is taking care of their needs. There could be a board that decide on the budget or any other "upwards" communication path. On the other hand, the same story needs to be told to your own IT staff. The difficulty is to make one story that can serve all of these stakeholders. Your tool of choice here should be a capability model.

So, what is a capability model then exactly? Let's describe how you could produce one to understand the concept. In IT we typically implement business processes, we analyze these and automate them. Sometimes we develop software to automate or sometimes we buy and configure software for it. The level of automation usually depends on your company culture, capacity or budget. An example is: "Every time the sales rep propose a discount of more than 10%, an email is automatically sent to the manager for approval." So, generalizing this would result into "the sales organization should be capable of approving a discount", the magic word here is capable. It implies that the company needs the ability to execute discount approval without specifying how exactly it fits in a given process. Now this capability is a sub capability which is actually part of a bigger capability called Sales Quotation. So, from a birds eye view you ought to be able to describe the high level capabilities that describe end to end what your company does. Here's an example: http://bit.ly/vuleAI. When you have done this exercise, your result is a capability model. While finding the capability model, be sure to make a proper distinction between process and capability like described here as well.

Ok, let's go back to our strategic story, you now have the capability model, what can you do with it? A lot; here are some examples:

• Overlay the IT Architecture: You can draw the big IT systems that you have in house and place them over the capability model. This way you can communicate to management who are usually less tech savvy the place and purpose of your IT landscape.
• Focus area's for change: You can use this model to indicate the area's where your future project will focus on. This is a very interesting way to communicate to the management what part of the business will be impacted.
• The big picture for your project teams: Sometimes, team members don't realize where they are working, they know they have a certain task they're working on, but they usually miss the bigger picture. Using the capability model, you can provide this bigger picture.
• SOA design: Your SOA service taxonomy could be build based on your capability model. I'm not saying every granular capability is a service, but rather that the hierarchy of services can be based on the hierarchy of capabilities. (see also http://bit.ly/p8XOYk)
• ...

Every time we create a model we actually simplify the reality, a capability model is one other way to do this. In TOGAF terms, we could say it is another Viewpoint.

For us, it helped a lot, hopefully for you too :)