“Innovation in the Information Industry”
Interview by Teri Mendelsohn
Mendelsohn Consulting, Inc.
4 May 2009
On May 4, I moderated the panel discussion, “Innovation in the Information Industry,” at the Software and Information Industry Association’s NetGain 2009 conference at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. Joining me were: Mark Bernstein, President and Center Director, Palo Alto Research Center; Peter Jackson, Vice President and Chief Scientist, ThomsonReuters; Paul Pluschkell, CEO & Founder, Spigit; and Michael Tchong, Trend Analyst, UberCool. In preparation for the panel discussion, we spoke on two occasions. The following is an edited transcript of our exchanges.
Teri Mendelsohn: Peter, you are responsible for integrating new technology into ThomsonReuter products. Could you describe a recent innovation success at your organization?
Peter Jackson: I work with four different divisions (financial, legal, healthcare, tax and accounting) and all do innovation differently. It’s a layer cake process – as we build layers of technology, we develop capabilities and enable businesses to think larger thoughts. For example, West in our legal division had a directory of a million attorneys in the US cobbled together by sales but unconnected. We used name recognition technology to link occurrences of names in text to a database on attorneys and supplemented the database by finding names and firm names not in it, making the information current and navigable. The ability to build layers of complexity is very powerful.
TM: Michael, Facebook and Twitter interactions -- how have they influenced the emergence of new ideas?
Michael Tchong: I see a number of social phenomena that are interesting. People are organizing pity parties to commiserate about the economy. Jelly is getting people in a large room to work together to get cross-disciplinary inspiration. I am going to lead one of them myself. There’s a massive amount of marketing trends going on, but most of them are still grounded in affiliate and viral model so they are not truly innovative. There are examples of companies leveraging trends from memory loss and financial woes and they have innovative solutions like helping consumers manage web-based budgets.
TM: Paul, what kind of company needs innovation products like Spigit’s?
Paul Pluschkell: We focus on front end of innovation. Spigit allows executives to talk with all employees but only hear important conversations. We use an algorithm like Google’s Pagerank to figure out what you need to make better decisions. Initially we targeted large companies but ThinkBomb (former Forrester analysts) use Spigit to create topics that become the focus of conversations.
TM: Mark, PARC approaches research on information from the perspectives of biomedical informatics, enterprise and Web 2.0 systems, human information interaction, intelligent image recognition, non-paper printing and ubiquitous computing. Tell us what new developments you anticipate for the enterprise in those spaces.
Mark Bernstein: The information challenge in the enterprise is to improve the productivity of knowledge work. PARC's ethnographic research with clients has confirmed what we have all experienced. Not being able to find the right information at the time of need is the dominant source of the problem. Whether the information is somewhere in the personal overload glut or it's somewhere else in an enterprise info silo, keyword search or e-mail sorting is wholly insufficient to the task.
TM: Michael, you cover media, technology, demographics and other fields. What tools do you use to capture and analyze the data?
MT: I’m an information hound. I collect data -- anything I see that is relevant and could form a basis for a good story, I collect. It might be demographic, event-driven, programming. I get downstream information from Twitter followers, Facebook friends, PR lists. I spend 2-3 hours per day Twittering, and, on top of that, a couple more hours reading.
TM: It’s still largely manual.
MC: You can’t automate it because information is not distributed in an organized fashion. No writer sticks to the same formula like they should. Even the Wall Street Journal won’t use the first paragraph, but will use the third or fourth paragraph as the pull quote for the lead-in to the page-one story. If everyone followed the XML-based structure – key point here, introduction there – it would make it a lot easier. But we haven’t gotten there yet.
TM: Mark and Peter, I have your ideal customer here. Aren’t you building answers for him?
MB: PARC is working on a "contextual intelligence" platform of technologies that can be used to address the challenge. It has these characteristics:
- Information delivery can be triggered by user activities that preclude the need for search. For example, you can be presented with all the documents relevant to an upcoming meeting or to a financial report you are working on.
- Information can be retrieved in ways that humans think. For example, find the presentation on technology trends that Jim gave Susie sometime last month.
- A large amount of relevant information can be condensed for quick perusal to keep abreast of what's happening. For example, a sales person can have a daily digest of activity in her company and outside news relevant to her customer.
There are a lot of technologies that underlie our ability to deliver these advantages. Text Analysis extracts facts and identifies topics in structured and unstructured documents. Image Analysis indexes graphics and their associations. Activity Detection recognizes what you are working on and links your tasks to related information and to other people with related interests.
Together, this relationship among documents, activities and people provides a natural and powerful sense of context for a broad range of information tasks in knowledge work.
PJ: Reuters Insider will be launched in June. We’re taking breaking video news, indexing it with entities, industries, and so forth that are mentioned in the video segments and showing the latest documents and linking from entities to company fundamentals and other information. From one place we are giving people access to video content, textual content that will give them background to the video, and data.
TM: How do you create value through professional networks using social networking technology?
PJ: LinkedIn is taking a stab. Pieces of Facebook are being fenced off to provide a more work-oriented social environment. What’s the key value proposition? People don’t want to belong to 25 networks, so how do you deliver professional value through a network in a way that is compelling both as a business proposition and as something people want to do in addition to all the other stuff they are already doing?
MB: Everyone recognizes that there is a composite of value that we’re not beginning to touch based on the collective intelligence of communities we operate in. Everyone thinks about being able to tap into that collective intelligence as the aspirational value of social networks. But how is that going to happen without creating a tremendous overhead for individuals? When people have pressing matters like work and family, to make that work is a challenge. For Michael, it is a full-time job.
MT: It is a challenge. It takes 6-7 hours a day. I have to stop myself. I view myself as a publisher, out there to distribute information for a large group. Others like Guy [Kawasaki] and Brittany Spears, they don’t Tweet themselves; they use other people to do it for them and help them maintain their relationship with their brand. We need better semantic tools. We need to be able to manage it. We already have the ability use certain tools that simultaneously update on Facebook and Twitter. I can see where that will be useful when one belongs to 20-30 social networks. The Kiwanis has something like 80 thousand organizations worldwide, the sports clubs have 20 thousands, and all these organizations have upwards of one million social circles and all of those are eventually going to have their own social networks. You can’t actively monitor that many networks but you are going to have to be able to maintain some level of visibility within some of them. Out of the 30 you belong to, 10 are important to you. You have to have tools that allow you to engage with those 10 networks on a regular basis. You need tools to engage (reminding, pinging, suggesting that you have underposted in certain networks). All of these are coming. Twitter is a microblogging service, i.e., we’ve got the click-through tools, the follower metric tools, the risk-reciprocity tools, and all of these things are multiplying like mad. Everyone’s going to join the open architecture approach. In the next generation of social networks, everyone’s going to keep the updates open. It’s a quandary: Never enough, always too much. A thousand channels, nothing to watch. Boxie and other social groups have huge popularity and cater to the social sharing of video and music, which are not part of the current proposition of most social networks.
TM: What information-related innovation would you like to see?
MT: More drag and drop tools like CRM. Since we are in a software forum, we need to light a fire under the participants to get them to do things that customers want as opposed to what’s good for the bottom line. I want to incite a mini-riot because the biggest enemy is the technology industry itself.
PJ: I would agree with that totally. Technology helps you find documents. There’s almost no technology that helps you sensibly construct documents in a creative way.
MT: We are locked up by monolithic giants with zero innovation. It’s the constraining factor for an industry. Imagine if Henry Ford had had a monopoly in 1920s—what would have happened to the car industry? That’s fundamentally what we have now. It’s been 30 years since the birth of the PC. Our productivity rates are still pretty healthy but they are no longer booming like in the 90s because we are no longer seeing the same level of innovation driving our technology industry. We could boost productivity by 10% to 15% per year if we had smart venture capitalists investing in services that businesses and customers really want. But no one’s listening. Everyone’s saying, Let’s put out another another Google or another Facebook. Meanwhile people can’t spell El Nino or center a letter on letterhead or get pictures printed seamlessly without having to hassle with Bluetooth.
PJ: Everyday tools are awful.
MT: Everyone is struggling and it’s getting worse. Look at our home entertainment systems and the quagmire of cables. The consumer can’t manage this.
MB: We’ve taken the marketing breakthrough of planned obsolescence of the 1950s and turned it into nightmare. Everything’s incompatible and it doesn’t last for more than six months.
MT: Until a CEO can press one button and email one thousand of the company’s best customers a customized email, we have not succeeded. That is impossible. First of all, we don’t even know who their best customers are. Someone has to cobble together who the best customers are with a spreadsheet. Then we have to go talk to the IT department to write a custom script.
MB: Then the customer spam filter is going to block it anyway.
PJ: It’s a good point. The routine things we do every day are poorly supported by software tools.
MT: Look at how we spend our days. You’ve got an avalanche of emails. You have got a ton of social nets and pings and pokes. Your calendar is deconstructed in myriad ways. You’ve got your Google spreadsheets and docs sitting somewhere else. It’s a huge nightmare and no one is thinking about that. How we spend our day in 2009 compared to how we spent our day 1994 is radically different yet the tools are virtually identical. As a technology group we need to get this industry cooking again. What will that take? Who is going to step up to the plate so Silicon Valley can stop focusing on its bellybutton?
MB: What do the business community and venture capital communities need to do to reduce the barriers to innovation?
MT: The VCs are responsible for two-thirds of America’s innovation. The universities and private industry do the rest, and now that’s been turned way down. We’re sitting on $43 trillion of global wealth that no one’s investing. There’s no leadership among venture capitalists to do anything innovative – they are all too afraid. Someone needs to step up and say, “Adobe, get off your butt. PDF, Illustrator, you are still regurgitating profits based on age-old metaphors.”
MB: I have a Pogo cartoon prominently displayed at home. It shows Pogo with a tortoiseshell helmet on and he’s got his wooden sword, and he’s saying, “I have met the enemy and they is us.”
Mendelsohn Consulting specializes in the development of online information products in science, technology and medicine. We help clients achieve growth through innovation. Contact us at www.mendelsohnconsulting.net.
