Adapting to new business reality

I am at the SIIA Educational Technology conference this week. The opening keynote was great. Maybe more of the same messaging I have heard elsewhere (and am often sending myself), but I liked the presenter's approach to conveying the information.

The presenter was Genevieve Shore, worldwide CIO and Director for Digital Strategy for Pearson. Okay -- she is a CIO and leads digital strategy, like me, so admiting biases, that won points in my book up front. Anyway, her presentation was "how do we adapt to new business reality" and she offered five points of advice:

1- Be disruptive.
We must challenge our companies, customers, employees, etc. How do we change everything while holding on to our traditions? She commented, "This is the moment of our lives when we will see the most changes to [learning]. The next 5 years will be mind-blowing." going on to talk about the disruptive trends that would fuel this radical change to learning in the next five years: gaming, tablets, continuous assessment coupled with artificial intelligence, and location.

2- Be global.
As we transition to a more global community, we must do truly global thinking. She then provided interesting data points or perspectives on India, China, Africa and elsewhere.

3- Be social.
Through several examples and discussions of different technologies she boiled down to a couple questions: How can we be social? How can we make many-to-many work, yet at the same time, how do we make and keep it increasingly personal?

4- Be Valuable.
She commented that, "The world has changed. The most important word on the internet is no longer 'search' but 'share'." In discussing business models she noted that you "need multiple business models today to have a business," which suggests to me the need to think openly and broadly about what we do and how we do it -- and recognizing that we might have "multiple business models co-existing at once" and that there may not be any "one" business model for the future. Her point being that things will be more complex in the future, and that looking for the "one" model is probably a fruitless effort. If anything, the one model is a combination that provides several other models simultaneously.

Her other point in here, which I particularly appreciated was "sometimes you have to be wrong to eventually be right." I would have put this observation under "Be Disruptive," but the lesson to be open to failing and failing fast was well made. She noted that we are just starting to see the first ebooks for education -- and that it is a new product that is not really an ebook. Much as I have tried to talk about "digital course materials" as a more accurate term than "ebook." She also suggested that we find time to talk about metadata -- that it is critical to make it easy for students to search and share. She asked the group to think about working toward global, open metadata standards for the benefit of all.

5. Be Trustable.
Her last set of comments reminded me of comments Chris Tabor at Queen's University often makes about trust. She talked about how we must be careful in how we manage the ownership of data about customers, and the importance of trust in our relationships with students.

Overall, a great session. In the panel I chaired today I pulled out several other comments of interesting, but one particularly stuck with me in the context of the points Genevieve made. Matt McInnis from Inkling had a captivating image of a coming "renaissance of learning materials," that he sees as just beginning. I agree, and that is yet another concept I have been promoting for a while.

It is always reassuring to hear, once in a while, that other thought leaders think things are going in the same direction. The future is not yet determined -- but it is taking shape. I will bang my head on that wall one more time and suggest that stores that stores and the store channel have an opportunity to act, and waiting until 2015 to begin adapting to what will clearly be a new business reality for our channel is not a particularly good strategy for making it to 2016, 2020, or beyond.

Reinventing the print business model

While enticing people to come to their conference, Publishing Business' interview with Brian Kelly, editor, U.S. News & World Report is an interesting read. Here are a few excerpts that booksellers might find reminiscent of our own industry:

By far, my favorite quote in the short piece (and what might get me to attend the conference to see this guy) was the following:

Kelly: In moments of weakness, I still wish the good old days would come back, but then I slap myself back to reality. The most unsettling thing was to come to the conclusion—about five years ago—that the old ways were gone for good, that the industry changes were fundamental and nothing would be the same again. Once I accepted that, my job became creating something new, and that made my stomach feel a lot better.

One on how even top companies can be quickly eclipsed by technology-based change:

News weeklies are one category that has been hit particularly hard by shifts in the marketplace, including the way consumers get their news (and what—or if—they’ll pay for it). So, while it may have been a sad day for news weeklies, it wasn’t necessarily shocking when U.S. News & World Report first announced in 2008 that it would shift from its weekly frequency to bimonthly in 2009, and then later announced that it would shutter its monthly print publication entirely, after 60-some years as one of the top news magazines worldwide.

One on changes in business models:

Kelly: We were fortunate that we had developed a strong website and had other print products, so we knew that we had a good business and a large audience beyond print subscriptions. The subscriber business model just didn’t work for us. I thought about having a proper wake, but in this climate you can’t afford nostalgia.

So if I were to take some lessons away from this for the college store environment (and associated/related industries), they might include concepts such as: it is time to stop thinking about how things used to be and begin to embrace new ideas and the future. The importance of having a strong website/ecommerce presence and developing a diversified mix of products. Our future role is to not to shepherd the past to the grave, but to create something new that will will revitalize our businesses and our channel.

What College Students Think

Coming up in February the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) will be hosting a half-day conference in NYC entitled What College Students Think: Making Information Pay for Higher Ed Publishing. The focus will be on the changing needs of college students around course materials.

Julie Traylor (who leads OnCampus Research for NACS) and I will be presenting. However, in addition to speakers, the event will feature an exclusive preview into the findings from BISG's recent student survey: Student Attitudes Toward Content in Higher Education. The survey provides a new look into how students currently enrolled in 2-year, 4-year and for-profit institutions perceive and use different types of educational materials in their course of study.

Kelly Gallagher, Vice President of Publishing Services for Bowker commented that "The timeliness of this event, and the relevance of the data presented, will help academic publishers walk away with tangible insights into these areas." The same is likely true for those of us working in the college store industry, or using textbooks in the classroom.

I hope to see some of you there, and we will report back.