Coupling the IT landscape to a changing business model

The not-so-subtle alterations over the past 5-10 years as to how people choose (demand?) information is certainly a study in societal change.  What I have observed and I couldn’t prove it beyond anecdotal commentary is that today’s information consumer has the ability to explore not only a greater breadth of information, but a greater depth.  Not that I would expect anyone to argue with that point, but I wanted to throw that out there as a stepping stone to my next observation.  Pick a topic, any topic and so a search – you know the deal.  I’d even challenge you to be creative in an obtuse way – I ran a query string of “indigenous AND poisonous AND vegetation AND madagascar” and got back over 17,000 page results!  Really?  If I had time (and I don’t) and the interest (I don’t), I could actually become something of a budding expert on poisonous indigenous vegation in Madagascar.  Back to my point…except in instances where someone has a mandate (research paper, etc.) or a burning personal connection (newly diagnosed disease, etc.), a minority percentage of people are interested and take advantage of the depth of information on a topic.  Yeah, so what, all you want is some quick facts.  Great.  I’ll put up a page that says tomatos and dandelions are the only two poisonous indigenous plants in Madagascar and complete the page with plenty of fake credentials.  Yep, you can’t believe everything you read…we’ve all heard it.  Geez, where exactly am I going with this?  I think I will touch on how people get their information, what information they receive and the credence they pay to that information.

Electrons rule the information provider realm.  Prove me wrong – go ahead and try.  Print subscriptions continue to slowly trickle down, magazines are routinely shutting down print operations, and the diversity of electronic information gateways is growing (computers, digital TV, PDAs, smartphones, etc.).  They even have a digital picture frame now that is networkable with an IP address.  What’s next?  More and more ubiquitous stuff – we all know it, but very few of us could predict, with financial accuracy (darn it!), exactly what items, when and with what success.

There are tremendous abilities today for people to customize their information intake.  RSS readers are a good example and, as anyone can easily tell, more and more online providers are exposing their information via RSS.  Let me go out on a limb here, though.  This is a relationship that is generally defined by one-way mandates.  Huh???  Follow me on this.  Subscribe to an RSS feed for Chicago Cubs news – easy.  The Cubs make the playoffs, but you hadn’t subscribed to the MLB playoff feed.  Maybe you get some playoff news, maybe you don’t.  If you had the gumption to follow 162 games of the Cubs, it should be a safe bet that you would want to know every tidbit of playoff news.  The only guarantee you have now is to take action yourself even though it is obvious what you really want.  See?  Because you have to SUBSCRIBE to this type of environment, there is no ability for your information intake to be modify unless you explicitly do it.  That is going to change – you, me and everybody else knows it.

Not everything you read is true.  Prove it?  Easy – the sun rose in the western sky this morning.  Done.  Now on with the intellectual discussion.  How is it that an infomation consumer develops trust in a source?  I think that is a very personal decision.  I always laugh when some entity describes themself as “Your trusted news source.”  I don’t think so – that’s my decision.  There are some interesting thoughts on helping people wade through the swamp of information.  An interesting topic on Transparent Journalism is here: http://newschallenge.org/transparent_journalism.  I contend that many people put trust in an information source mainly through some form of familiarity.  This familiarity could be transitive trust based on family members, co-workers, etc.  After all, if it is good enough those you know really well, it is likely to be viewed by you as good enough.  I also believe people trust sources that are more local.  For a local/regional information provider, that is a key business element.  If that connection with the local community is ever allowed to degenerate or spoil, all might just be lost.

So…IT landscape…title…stop rambling, right?  Got it.  The conclusion to which I was heading is relatively simple.  IT in the information provider realm needs to refocus on the data and information and obssess less about specific products.  The transportability of the information is critical and that requires an open architecture at the data level and that primrose road could be called “Know Thy Data.”  After that (defining, rationalizing, documenting, etc.), you are probably making decisions that are really just variations on a theme.

Enabling an information provider of choice.

A newspaper with 125 years of dedicated service to a long-standing community.  A television station of good tradition.  Commercial printing company with a customer base that reaches all across the nation.  Multiple niche publications serving farmers, employers, job seekers, local businesses and customers.  Imagine all this under one corporate umbrella.  If your first thought was that it is not legal, you are correct.  Unless…this existed long before certain laws were enacted and a grandfather clause allows it.  Legal, shmegal – on with the point of this.

Gazette Communications in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.  That’s what I am talking about and that’s were I now work.  I have just recently been honored to join the Gazette Communications family and become the Manager of IT.  First and foremost, the strength of the company is (no big surprise) the people.  What a great place!  I won’t rave on and on right now about that…I am sure to do so repeatedly as I continue to write.

Information provider of choice.  Isn’t that a cool phrase?  That’s taken from the company’s mission and I found it to be quite visionary and quite a challenge.  Notice it doesn’t say anything about newspapers, televisions or any specific product.  Just a bit of pondering should reveal that it is about delivering the most relevant, timely and accurate information to our customers by whatever means are available and/or as chosen by the customer.  Newspapers?  Yes.  TV?  Of course.  Web news site?  Got it already.  Mobile devices?  Doing it.  Sounds pretty good so far, but there are obviously more means of delivery and much more interaction possible.

The achievement of success so far has been due to the dedicated employees.  To their credit, they have worked through tough times and most recently continued  operations while building around them were subjected to the great flooding in Cedar Rapids.  They have a deadline and nothing will stop them, even when at a disadvantaged position.  Everyone seems to know, through years of experience, which nooks and crannies hold which data and which systems can get at it and which one can’t get at it.  Did that comment just change the tone of this?  Sort of.

See, Gazette Communications is an information provider of choice.  Here my key: it’s all about the data.  Newspapers and television studios have historically produced their content with their respective delivery product in mind.  When is the last time you read a newspaper and were treated to an intriguing video about the stock market or a local high school’s game?  You get the point then.  It is natural and it was a successful methodology for decades.  My goal is to enable an information environment that supports rapid/realtime information collection from multiple and sometimes unanticipated sources, categorization of the information, exposing the information so that it is visible, accessible and understandable, and usable by our customers in any format.  Okay, so maybe videos in the paper are a stretch – go easy on me, please.  Notice one thing – I said an information environment.  Not a network, not a system of systems, not a portal, not a database or anything else technologically oriented.  Environment.  It will obviously involve the network, the servers, the firewalls, switches, routers, hubs, desktops, disk arrays, applications and other nerdy tech stuff.  It will also involve defining and rationalizing business processes.  It will involve the definition of authoritative roles and responsibilities for those who own the functional requirements – anyone who has ever been involved in standing up a portfolio management capability in an organization knows exactly what I mean and knows the most wonderful IT architecture is only as good as the underlying business processes it supports.

It is going to be interesting.  The culture is certainly ripe for change right now and the leadership’s focus on this will thwart a reversion to old habits and old thought patterns.  The fear of change will certainly grip some and they will just have to get over it or get out of the way.  Technology fixation will be broken.  Hard choices about ownership roles and responsibilities will challenge some to be involved in the details of building an “information bus” within the organization.  Production will continue throughout – no opportunities to call “time out”, make the changes and then start back up.  That’s just not how it works.  In short, the concept of how newspapers and television stations operated as silos is going to be destroyed.  Destroyed?  If you are saying “wow” right now and “how dare that inexperience twit say such a thing” - you are right and, yes, I do dare.  It’s my blog – get over it.  Such is life and we have to change in order to provide the level of adaptive information delivery expected by our customers.

That’s what this is all about.  It will keep me busy.  My intent of this blog is to drill into and highlight interesting developments along the way.  Simple enough.  Ranting, raving and venting are not my intents – more along the lines of capturing salient observations as we reshape the very fabric of an extremely successful and diverse company with deep roots in the community.