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Tech Trends: An Executive Roundtable on Digital Transformations
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Tech Trends: An Executive Roundtable on Digital Transformations
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Segment:0 .
WILL: So we're going to have a loose roundtable discussion today of a series of issues around technology and organizational culture, around how to design organizations and decision making and participation frameworks to enact change. We'll talk about the tensions of managing our publishing and technology business in today's market. And how do we think about our legacy products and potentially new ones. How do we make bets on new technologies, even if they may disrupt our current business?
WILL: And then we'll talk a little bit about worldlier and potentially scarier things. Things such as GDPR, privacy, and the changing technology and policy regulations for digital publishing and [AUDIO OUT] So just to start, I think a common thread of all of these roundtables that I've hosted in the past three years, has been understanding technology and how to apply it is one thing, choosing the technology is another, but rallying your organization to implement a new technology to change their processes, to change their framework for making decisions about what technology can do or how your business can adapt, is another.
WILL: So I thought we could talk a little bit about how our tech leaders joining us today think about shaping organizational culture and changing decision making processes to make transformation more successful. Ann, I think you suggested this topic, would you like to start us off?
ANN MICHAEL: Sure, well I think that just at a very basic level, when you look at the pace of change that's occurring in the world now and honestly it has been for quite some time, and you look at our classic structures for decision making and information sharing, they're just not fast enough. They're not effective enough. They're not optimized. They're optimized for known tasks that occur in a known order, and so I think a lot of organizations, and we're no exception at AIP publishing, are thinking about distributed-decision making and either dispensing with a hierarchy, or if you're all not that all that radical, finding a hybrid model that tempers the hierarchical historical types of decision making with decision making that is really happening where and when in the organization that needs to happen.
ANN MICHAEL: And honestly, for some of the executive team, get the hell out of the way, which it sounds threatening, but it actually is not. And I've worked with organizations too that I have this weird 16 years as a consultant and now at AIP, so I've seen a lot of different organizations. And some have interpreted distributed-decision making as, oh, well, I don't want to make these petty decisions, so let someone else do it.
ANN MICHAEL: And that is not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about meaningful decisions that can be made by other folks in the organization, wherever they are, the ones that are closest to the problem, but to do that, you have to prepare folks for that. They have to have the information they need. They have to be clear about objectives and goals. So people can make decisions and make really good ones when they have the foundational knowledge, exposure, communication that they need, and the organization is clear about its purpose and its direction.
WILL: That's really interesting. And one of the things that I was thinking about, there seems to be this tension in a more participative model, which is, I think you just flagged that folks have to have the foundational knowledge. They have to have a shared understanding of objective and outcomes. Doesn't that put a lot of weight at the front of the process? I guess what I'm saying is, do you see when you've had participative frameworks, does it actually end up being faster or result in a better decision?
ANN MICHAEL: What do you mean by participative? Are you talking about consensus or are you talking about something else?
WILL: No, I thinking about your participant framework, where many stakeholders within an organization are involved, and it's folks at multiple levels of the organization.
ANN MICHAEL: OK, so first of all, I'd like to talk about the word "many." So and that's why I started thinking about consensus. I think historically, especially in societies, and any of you who've dealt with society-decision making, it's not uncommon to find that 15 people will be in a room to make a decision. So that isn't what I'm talking about. I'm also talking about trust. That you have fewer people and the right people making decisions, and people are not threatened by that.
ANN MICHAEL: That the lines are blurried. That really, what you do, is you organize around a purpose. So one thing, for example, to be more concrete, at AIP publishing, we are relying a lot, not only on the traditional RACI structure, so Responsible Accountable Consulted and Informs, but also, we're using this organization called [INAUDIBLE] and they've added on a D for Decision making, which is both the mode and the people that make the decision.
ANN MICHAEL: And so what we've found is, going in, we're trying to-- in projects or key decisions, we're trying to agree on [INAUDIBLE] and who's making the decision. And some decisions are consensus, but what we're trying to do, is to really get to smaller groups making consensus, smaller teams, where we don't have as many folks. Because everybody can't be involved in everything, and the irony is when you have a reluctance to let other folks make decisions because of a lack of experience.
ANN MICHAEL: What happens, is they never get that experience if you don't actually hand it over, but maintain your position as their coach or you maintain a "consultant" role, let's say, within the RACID process. Does that make sense?
WILL: Yes, it does. Thank you. John, how does OUP approach decision making and stakeholder participation?
JOHN CAMPBELL: It's very similar, I couldn't agree with Ann more, actually, is that you've got a framework that we've had historically, which has been the sort of ivory tower, handing down the grand direction. It doesn't work at all. The speed of change is just too fast, as we've said. And a lot of this has been around the empowerment of staff because actually, this got exacerbated during the pandemic.
JOHN CAMPBELL: I think that feeling that people are becoming more disconnected from the corporate entity. And this coincided with us really embedding a lot of the core product methodologies into OUP, as a whole. And a lot of that comes with areas of expertise that have the delegated authority for decision making in their space. We are going to be depending upon the groups looking at future SEO strategies, whatever the particular area of specialism is, to be telling us where we're going.
JOHN CAMPBELL: And I think that combination of empowering individual area, but actually, also, targeting them with the roadmap they have to be sharing. The stories they have to be convincing yourself in terms of the direction. Yes, we're all working under the overall umbrella of our main corporate strategies and goals, but the actual individual pieces just doesn't work with that. Micromanagement, and as you say, and in terms of the senior team being omnipresent, we've sort of flipped that around.
JOHN CAMPBELL: And so there's a lot more sharing information upwards and allowing local teams to feel much more empowered about their area of delegation. I think that's just something is going to grow because we have to build those specialisms. The types of people you are bringing in, particularly coming out of the tech sector, have got drive and expertise. They don't expect to be suppressed in a traditional corporate structure.
JOHN CAMPBELL: And everybody, as the old product methodologies say, you are in love with the problem, and you've got to deliver a solution to it. And it's actually, it's been a real change for us, and it's transforming the business.
WILL: Well, we had a private call a few weeks ago. And one of the things we spent a bit of time talking about, was how COVID and the shift to remote working was such a drastic change in how we do our jobs and how we maintain relationships with our peers, how we onboard new employees or get used to new technologies that it may make change easier or may make it easier for organizations to move faster.
WILL: Joanne, do you have any thoughts around that?
JOANNE SHEPPARD: Yeah, so for those that don't know what the Holtzbrinck Publishing Group is, we are the majority shareholder of Springer Nature. We own Digital Science, and we also own MacMillan Publisher, which are three very, very different businesses, and we are a highly decentralized organization. And if we had been having this panel, maybe three years ago, I probably would have said something about the early adopter model, and then you've got the people in the middle, and then you've got the laggards.
JOANNE SHEPPARD: And we're all laggards, in some way. And we just have to respect where people are accepting and embracing new technologies and new ways of doing things. And I fundamentally think that has probably changed because we all had to go through so much change in the past couple of years, particularly in the information industry, where many groups-- there was so much information coming out, particularly in the areas of science, that folks that I would have called laggards, have now been so thoroughly primed around the speed and the level of change that we are going through, that I think everything is going to be accelerated and be a lot smoother than we may be thinking it will be.
JOANNE SHEPPARD: People have become quite adept at adapting to change right now. I was going to build upon some of the points that were also made. As technology is moving faster and faster, decentralized-decision making, and only having the core folks that have that expertise being able to really enact and be empowered to make a decision, is going to be absolutely critical because things are getting more and more specialized.
JOANNE SHEPPARD: And it's going to be harder and harder for people that don't have that foundational knowledge to be able to make the right decision. And if you look at which social platform is in versus which social platform is out, and which social platform is in that you've never heard of, and you need to get a decision made around it, you've got to go to the right people.
ANN MICHAEL: Well I'll like to chime in on that. So Joanne, I think that is a really a great point, and one of the things that I've been thinking a lot about too, is the idea of consent-decision making. So I think if you combine distributed with the idea of what would it hurt if we tried this? What's the ramifications? Are they big or they small? And then also, keep in mind that whatever the small team is, it needs to be cross-functional, so that a group that isn't, maybe, unaware of impacts that are occurring somewhere else, has the opportunity to do that, and the steps are small, then you really are mitigating risk a whole lot.
ANN MICHAEL: You're getting the right brains involved. They're taking a small step, and you're evaluating it on what would be the worst that could happen. And if it's not the business falling apart, people dying, or the building burning down then try it.
JOHN CAMPBELL: Yeah, I tend to agree with that. I think it's about the speed of action, which we've all said, but it's about being much more likely to be right the first time. Because of the speed, choices you make they've got to be very good ones. And I know we've all, in the sort of product methodology, it's about fading fast and everything else, and actually, on the tech side, it's really about making the smartest choices as quickly as you can.
JOHN CAMPBELL: And so relying upon empowered specialisms, hiring in the right skills is just ever more important to meet that speed. And then the product folks following using those capabilities, they can still be fading fast, iterating in the methodologies that work, but those core underpinning capabilities, you've got to make some very good choices, and you need the right people to do that.
WILL: So in looking at the participants list, we have almost nearly 90 folks joining us today, and they're from a variety of sized organizations, big and small, some more traditional publishers with kind of the same products that may have been around for a while. And I imagine what we're talking about in terms of decentralized-decision making, more participative structure may sound a bit scary. So as technology and organizational leaders, any practical tips on where to start?
WILL: How do you ease into more stakeholder participation, or a less command and control way of making decisions?
ANN MICHAEL: So I would say at the beginning of all this, is probably, and I hate this because it's a very hierarchically-oriented concept, but is delegation. The beginning of this whole cascade, could be simply learning how to be better at delegation. What are the decisions that you personally really feel you need to make and why? Why do you feel you need to make them? And who are you going to consult when you make that decision? Are the people you're going to consult actually more knowledgeable about the situation than you are?
ANN MICHAEL: So what exactly are you contributing? And really starting to take that honest assessment of that, and then also, really, just looking, especially in a small organization, you don't have the staff to have everybody do everything. So if you're not thinking about that, you can't really optimize your reach. You can't get the-- what is it they say, punch heavier than your weight or whatever.
ANN MICHAEL: You can't do that if there are bottlenecks, especially if they are unnatural or unnecessary. And then the second part is, if you're evaluating things and you really feel that you as a leader need to be involved in these decisions, then I would really question why? And if there are fundamental skills that are lacking in the organization, that's your real problem.
ANN MICHAEL: And it's never going to fix itself if you continue. So it's in concept, I think the root of it in our hierarchical structures thinking about delegation, and then it's think about it as delegation on steroids, almost until the point where the word delegation kind of disappears. Yeah, I was just looking Adam, there's a thing up there. But are you talking about delegation?
ANN MICHAEL: It looks like empowerment. Yeah, well, Will was asking how to get started if you're in this kind of command and control hierarchical structure. And I was just thinking that the concept of delegation might be a way for folks that are very used to command and control to start thinking about that. I also recently read something about empowerment, where the author didn't even like that word because it was command and control at its core.
ANN MICHAEL: Like I have to give power. The reality is, you already have power. We just have to let you be able to use it. I know that's a nitpicky thing, but I just thought that was funny.
WILL: We got in a really great question. And I think each one of our panelists may have a perspective on this, how does an organization balance one, empowering specialists to make decisions with two, the increasing degree to which systems and processes are integrated and interdependent? How do you build structures that ensure blind corners are illuminated, which is typically something senior leadership and generalists may be doing now?
JOANNE SHEPPARD: I could actually recommend a book called Open Strategy which follows a step-by-step process of how you involve a, the experts in a particular subject area and then b, use the whole organization to develop your strategy in a transparent way because also ultimate command and control is to hand over the strategy and say, OK, now you go execute. Or we had all the smart people in a room secretly coming up with this thing, and now, go do it.
JOANNE SHEPPARD: And starting from the very beginning of getting some involvement in the strategic process itself, a, can definitely help illuminate some of those blind corners that you may not be seeing right away because it'll bring that feedback loop in incredibly early. And on the topic of increasing dependency and processes which are integrated. Those processes and those systems are also going to have to be able to pivot quickly and be flexible, and that's almost becoming the definition of the types of processes and systems that are being rolled out now.
JOANNE SHEPPARD: If you think about something like Google, where it's heavily modular, but you don't have to use every component of it. Those are the things that are going to be successful in the future.
WILL: John or Ann, any thoughts from your perspective?
JOHN CAMPBELL: I think from a technology perspective because obviously, within the larger organizations we have our pure tech directorship within OUP, as well as then the product spheres that sort of orbit and interact with them. And a lot of the thinking from the architectural perspective, just given, as Alison says, the heavily integrated nature of the research landscape, particularly, is just where you can keep some of that flexibility and control in the types of tools you're using.
JOHN CAMPBELL: And so that your core architecture is something that is extensible that you can swap in and out. We've talked a lot in the past about the kind of best-of-breed tools providing a particular capability because the definition of that, is the point it ceases to be the best of breed. You've thrown it out, and you put something else in. And you have to be able to do that. And so for, particularly for an organization like OUP, that is a heavily-mission driven organization sitting on a lot of key content that we need to make sure is out there, we have to make the right technology choices and be as fast a follower as possible from the major shifts happening in the industry.
JOHN CAMPBELL: And to do that, you have the confidence of a core architecture that you can truly do that. And so that's our main challenge back to our technology colleagues, is give us that outward-facing, fundamental architecture, so that we can be making the right choices swapping horses fast, bringing in particular requests that might be for a particular society partner that meets a specific need, but generally, we're providing the best thing fast for everybody.
JOHN CAMPBELL: And that's, as it sounds, a much bigger challenge than-- which then you would expect because of course, that's not the nature of getting a technology, investing in it, embedding it, and then relying on it every day, and really not want to touch it too much. So the challenge there is one to stay nimble from the bottom upwards.
ANN MICHAEL: Well, the only thing I would add there, which actually I didn't realize because I had it covered up, will echo one of the chat comments from Dave, is that the question was about a specialist making a decision. And I think that one thing to consider, is that depending on this decision, it's still collaborative. So Dave is talking about these three rings, but the reality is, that if we want to make a decision and it impacts editors, so it may be around a process or technology, there's going to be, hopefully, a small group of people that will make that decision, but it doesn't have to be the executive team.
ANN MICHAEL: And it may not even have to be the senior management team. And it might be only if they for some reason or having an issue making a decision that they might involve other folks. So there's a collaborative nature to it. And there's a spirit of inquiry. It's not simply, well, I get to make this decision, so there we go. It's the idea of, wait, who does this impact?
ANN MICHAEL: Let me consult with people to make sure I'm thinking of everybody it impacts. Now, let me really weigh everything here and talk to the folks that are involved.
WILL: I think it's with a spirit of inquiry and trust, to be honest.
ANN MICHAEL: Yeah.
WILL: So there was one other question that came in, and I think this touched on a point that you made earlier. Howard asks, how do you balance decision making and resource management? And that struck me about your comment about many versus the right person or people.
ANN MICHAEL: Yeah, no, that's a great question. And actually, there's another thing to think about, too, which is how do you manage including everybody, and making fast decisions. So you have to look at both sides of the coin. Resource management, if people are the key decision makers in a smaller realm of decisions, you're going to be able to-- things that they know really well, things that they don't have to learn about to be an informed decision maker on, that's going to give you the foundation you need, but another part of resource management, too, Howard, I was just thinking about this, I was writing it on my notes, is it's also about figuring out what not to do.
ANN MICHAEL: So I think a lot of the resource management issues that I've seen, are not necessarily around having people involved in too many decisions, but having organizations do things that maybe they shouldn't do themselves anymore. So when I was at [INAUDIBLE],, I remember we were talking about looking at our workflows and we were like, OK, I want to know what should we do? What should someone else do?
ANN MICHAEL: And what should no one ever do, at all? And maybe in the someone else category, is what could we or someone else automate. And I think that from my experience, and I've worked with more than 100 societies, it's usually the case that there are things that people have decided or value add, and they're holding on to and sometimes they're not. And the resource issue has really helped when they realize, yes, you still have to manage partners, so that you don't get to cut 100% of resource.
ANN MICHAEL: But it's also about focus, not just about resource. You get to focus on the more important things.
WILL: Really great point. So let's shift gears and move on to our next topic. I think something every product, or strategy, or technology leader in our space has to do, is balance investment in legacy products and technology or in content creation, against new and potentially disruptive ones. And in our preview discussion, we talked a bit about open science and time and attention invested there, DeSci, or decentralized science, which is related, moving past content to new products or data and insights and service provision, and how a lot of our organizations need to upskill and transform marketing and our marketing technology.
WILL: Joanne, you brought some really great perspective around open science and DeSci and how you're thinking about that. Would you like to start us off?
JOANNE SHEPPARD: Yeah, sure, so I'm of the very strong opinion that if you do not disrupt yourself, the disruptions are happening anyway. And you really want to make sure you have a seat at the table. So even if you're not going to be leading a particular disruption, you want to be able to have some influence. And so in STM, where I work, we have been in the middle of what I've been calling the digital transformation that I think will never end.
JOANNE SHEPPARD: We're just going to have to keep evolving and evolving. So your digital transformation didn't happen on a day. It is a way of thinking about how your company operates. So if you think about how we went through this open-access transition that we are still in the middle of. And what is nipping at the heels of open access, is open science and going even more in the direction of openness, and the decentralized science movement.
JOANNE SHEPPARD: When I'm done talking, I'll get in the chat. And I can send a link to an article for folks who don't know what it is, but it is fundamentally looking to disrupt publishers and almost eliminate the article and come up with new artifacts of what is considered science. I was chatting with somebody about this, earlier today, and he was saying, what is the article? That's a construct of the way we used to work.
JOANNE SHEPPARD: He's like, why do we still have page numbers online? What is the way that we're thinking about this? So I strongly advise folks to really think through what are the disruptive factors, and even if you have to figure out how to transition your legacy business, and you have to keep it going while you are doing that, really looking at the different factors out there and taking them quite seriously, is what keeps you in business.
WILL: Hmm and just so our participants aren't too alarmed. Joanne , do you have a sense of time scale? If you had to make a bet when d-science or open science would transform SDM publishing, is that a five-year horizon, a 10-year horizon? I constantly remind myself, that open access and discussions of disrupting our industry, really didn't take hold until 2006. And here we are 16 years later.
JOANNE SHEPPARD: So I think it is at least a 5-year horizon, but it is going to be something that a lot of people are starting to engage with. I think it's generational. And I think it's the same sentiment of frustration that people had about who's capturing the economic value of scientific outputs. And so again, and that will probably be a transitional state to something else. So we'll go through this, and then we'll go through the next thing.
ANN MICHAEL: You know, Joanne--
JOANNE SHEPPARD: I'm sorry, yeah.
ANN MICHAEL: I just want to underline what you're saying. One of the things I think is really neat is, Will sent me the link to that article. And then I sent that link on to several other folks. And I think we really need to be careful because the first reaction, honestly, every single person I sent it to had was, I don't understand their objectives. This is never going to work. And I think it's really hard, but we need to look at something like this and say, what are they trying to do?
ANN MICHAEL: Why are they trying to do it? What is in here that could be built upon? So maybe this exact plan isn't what happened, but are there clues or ideas or things in here that are valuable and can be applied in another way? And so I'm not saying we should all be blindly like, oh, my gosh, this is the future, exactly like this, but I think our industry has this habit of throwing out the baby with the bathwater, sometimes.
JOANNE SHEPPARD: No, I completely agree with that. And I would look not only at the disruption, but what opportunities are in it for us? So, as an example, if open access is making things more transactional, and we're not, in perpetuity, able to generate revenue from the content. And if the content itself is becoming something where the locus of value is maybe what can be data mined from it.
JOANNE SHEPPARD: If we look at what happened with the COVID vaccine, a lot of that early hypothetical work was done through data mining. Google DeepMind does a lot of that stuff. So what are the opportunities for us? What can we build on top of, not only our content but maybe someone else's content, that keeps us in the game. Several marketplaces are already forming around this.
JOANNE SHEPPARD: So what tools and services and things could we build that, again, keep us in the conversation? Because at the heart of it, all of this, again, in my particular little world, we're trying to advance science. And so is there a way that everybody can win? Don't eliminate publishers, but maybe the role of publishers changes a bit.
JOHN CAMPBELL: It was a very interesting article, actually, and touched on so many things. And I'd like to get a little bit into thinking about how all those different types of access to content could actually work out for a publishing model. But what really struck me from it was, it's an inevitable reaction, perhaps, to the trends that we all have in our sector, which is around more consolidation, closed-loop systems, a feeling that you're being sort of shepherded down a particular route, or you're locked into particular workflows and things like that.
JOHN CAMPBELL: And lots of good reasons and excellent efficiencies and so on that have come out of taking those kind of steps. But I think it does also lead to a reaction, which is a loss of control. And that's a very valid question back to, particularly, the larger commercial players, but not only. It does mean that for the not-for-profit sector, you've got to really think about the type of story you're telling about where you are using certain parts of a workflow or starting to get more involved with the day to day of the publishing accountabilities and the authoring accountabilities.
JOHN CAMPBELL: But that you're doing such a way that you weren't saying, but we have choices here. And if you don't think this is quite the right tool or part of workflow, then we will change it, or there are other ways to do this. So I think there are, as well as how we actually look at to stay in the game, I think there is also something about the positioning of whether or not the commercial side of our business is gone.
JOHN CAMPBELL: Just thinking a little bit about where we can start to keep that value and change. A lot of things that have made publishing publishing for years, but sort of opening it up to different types of interactions. We've got good examples within OUP but not only, is actually some of the shifts that's taken place in some of our languages area. And I think that's something that everyone will know now that the Oxford English Dictionary and the great print dictionary legacy, which that is not the world now.
JOHN CAMPBELL: But that was something that was enshrining a certain way of working, of mediating content, of working with authors, of funneling that particular researcher type down a particular route. And actually over the course of not very many years. That has completely flipped on its head to being about access to core data, natural language processing being a dominant part of the interactions. So that's business to business, but that's also with research projects.
JOHN CAMPBELL: And that's something that's over the course of, again, not many years, has gone from a majority print revenue through to that being 15% of the business. And now that same self-disrupted area, is about building partnerships to expose more content. It's now driving look-up up on Bing, on Google, on Kindle. It's something that if we'd stayed in the old way not disrupted ourselves, that sort of sea change wouldn't have happened.
JOHN CAMPBELL: And then that collaboration in research projects that could help build on it. And then on you go. And perhaps, in that way, you start to get back some of that goodwill. That some of the DeSci movement is kicking against. So the lack of that goodwill and that desire to build bridges and get more collaborative. So I think there is a bit of a win-win here, but I totally agree, Joanne, it is about disrupting ourselves first, but with perhaps, keeping some of that mission perspective.
JOANNE SHEPPARD: Completely agree.
WILL: Really great point. There's a great question-- sorry, Ann, did you want to say something more?
ANN MICHAEL: Oh, no, no, I was just my neighbor's landscaper finally stopped, so I put [INAUDIBLE].. [LAUGHS]
WILL: The question that came in. In all this talk about disruption, how would you help legacy staff? People professionally trained, say in manuscript and article management, retrain for new business models. How do we keep publishers from making staff redundant? And kind of a related point, if traditional metrics that we've been using have become obsolete, what are the new metrics that are needed to understand and gauge disruption?
WILL: And I think we touched on this a bit in terms of marketing and how open access and other things have shifted the need for new approaches for marketing managers, marketing systems, whole new classes of technology. But would anyone like to venture an answer or a start of an answer?
ANN MICHAEL: Well, the first thing I would say is, get used to it. Transition is messy. And it's going to stay messy. And I think, as Joanne pointed out, we're always going to be in some state of transition somewhere. So I think the first thing, is to take a deep breath, find your center, and understand that it's progress, not perfection. So what's going to happen?
ANN MICHAEL: We're going to have a blend of metrics. We're going to have a core business that runs one way. We're going to try to be learning something else. It's going to be hard. People are going to get frustrated. By the same token, I think that we really need to help people to understand that we don't try to change for change's sake. We're trying to make sure that whatever our organization is, that it has a viable, vibrant position in a future that's still forming.
ANN MICHAEL: So this isn't an answer to how do you do x, y, and z, But. I think the first thing you need to do, is to have folks understand why it's important. And ironically, the redundancies are going to occur if people can't start to look at things differently, look at their jobs differently and start to incorporate different elements. It's not a done deal. We talk about this at AIP all the time about things we want to do, things we don't want to do.
ANN MICHAEL: And one of the things is, there are things that we would like to not do, not to get rid of the staff, but to free them to work on things that we believe are actually more value added to the customer and to the ecosystem. So I'll let someone else, maybe, come with a more specific answer, but I think that's the first step. The first step is, this is really messy, progress over perfection, I am not going to come into work and know exactly what I'm going to do every day.
ANN MICHAEL: I'm going to have to figure some of this stuff out. And there's going to be a period where I'm going to have to make my brain work on two different levels at the same time.
JOHN CAMPBELL: Yeah, I think we absolutely have that obligation to really grow the smart people we've hired. And in the past, we've hired smart people to do jobs that now we'd look at as legacy, but they are the same smart people, who actually we need to retrain and are retraining into data roles, being able to work in that sort of heart of MarTech, where actually, for most publishers, you've really got to do that because you can't afford to bring in the people who are also being taken by a Microsoft.
JOHN CAMPBELL: And those are the kind of jobs they're looking at. And so it's actually relying-- looking back at the skill set you have that were solid, analytical skills, for example, working through the older ways of publishing. They are adapting really fast and really well if you bought into the reasons for doing that. And the reasons for doing that if you're sitting on a, fundamentally, on a dissemination mission, for example, is I get more eyes on this.
JOHN CAMPBELL: I get more recognition from this. I get more impact from this type of activity now. It's more for more. And it does mean that we, therefore, have to be really doubling down on the training budgets and on the investment in people, but actually, it's completely critical because otherwise, we'll see that drain of people who are smart and could have adapted, but we didn't give them that inspiration to do so.
JOHN CAMPBELL: And then you're doubly hit by the salary levels now being expressed for pure tech people being the purview of a very small elite of companies. And so this is a step that has to be taken, and that's certainly something that we're focusing on.
WILL: That's really a great point, John.
JOANNE SHEPPARD: Going back to the distributed-decision making, one of the things that, as organizations, we're going to have to get a lot better at, is sometimes, it's the more junior person who's going to be training the more senior person because that's where the expertise lies. So being very, very open minded about how peer-to-peer or not peer-to-peer information is shared. I think that getting those types of exchanges and that kind of movement will facilitate this, combined with all of the other things that John and Ann said.
WILL: OK, I'm just going to exert some moderator privilege to make, I think, an important point, which is mentorships are incredibly valuable. And I was very fortunate to have bosses and organizations that valued that. And the other good is, this is a very collaborative and participative industry. And I started out doing desktop publishing for ad pages in medical journals, and it is kind of relationships with folks that are say, on this panel, that have helped me learn a lot more.
WILL: So I encourage folks to get out and connect, go to things like SSP, reach out to folks on LinkedIn because by and large, this is a helpful community. Great question in the chat from Howard. No one today, or the article that Joanne put in the chat, mentions academic institutions. Do they need to be disrupted for some of these changes to happen?
WILL:
JOHN CAMPBELL: I guess I should answer that. So put in an answer for that, given that the press is part of a very large academic institution. And one of the things, I think, that we're really seeing from the University side, is that they are shaking their own tree, significantly. I think it's a lot of the leadership around disruption, the way in which collaborative research is generated, the mandates that are put around it are things that, very often, we're needing to respond to.
JOHN CAMPBELL: And so I think, this may not be the case across the board, but I do see some of that leadership there that perhaps is not as apparent as it might be, but I thought that's just one aspect of that.
JOANNE SHEPPARD: I'd say two things on that point. One, going back to the COVID rate of change. As an American, but I live in the UK, I, of course, had to take the SAT if I wanted to go to college. And a number of universities, throughout COVID, just said, oh you know what, we thought we needed that. And it turns out that we don't. And then the change just very quickly happened. And now the SAT is, potentially, at risk.
JOANNE SHEPPARD: So I think they are open to disrupting themselves. And more and more, tenured, academic positions are not the end goal of a particular scientist, and more and more, they're going to the private sector. So I think we may see some changes there first, and then academia may follow.
WILL: Maybe a general question or comment which is, as we think about the evolution of open access in our market and transformational deals, in particular, the library has still remained the enabler and the focal point. And I don't know that that changes with open or decentralized science, either.
JOANNE SHEPPARD: | would agree with that. The library has so many functions beyond just curation. At MIT, it's been billed as the safe space for everyone. The place that you can go to relax. Carnegie Mellon has been very forward thinking about how they use their library so providing tools and access of the facilitators of distance learning. So the libraries are doing a lot to reinvent what they mean.
WILL: So there were a lot of topics that we prepared for, but I'm actually just going to skip ahead to one on horizon scanning, so we can save some time for general Q&A from the audience. One of the things that struck me in our preparation call, is Joanne and John an Ann all come from very different-sized organizations, very different backgrounds, and are very different roles, but all of us, engage in some form of horizon scanning, bringing in information to help them make decisions and help them lead their organizations.
WILL: And I was hoping we could just take a few minutes and talk about how you and your organization goes about horizon scanning because I think, as we've all talked about today, the pace of change isn't going to slow down. And I think that requires all of us in this industry to be looking forward. Who would like to start?
WILL:
JOANNE SHEPPARD: I can kick off. So I would say that while during the COVID when everybody was home, it was difficult to connect with some folks in some ways. But in other ways, it became an incredible leveler. And as you were saying, well, this is such a helpful industry, and it is so highly collaborative, that reaching out to a leading expert on a particular topic, where I needed to do some horizon scanning, got much, much easier, and so getting access to leading thinkers I found to be pretty successful.
JOANNE SHEPPARD: An example that we had to work through was, what is the return to the office look like? What does the future of work look like? And I was able to put together a small internal panel that we could just ask some people that are doing pretty deep thinking about this to just give us the benefit of their wisdom. And then using the horizon scanning that we're getting in as the way that we can start to think about scenario planning.
JOANNE SHEPPARD: So we don't just do or react to what we're hearing about, what we're seeing, but we use it as a data point to inform our thinking.
ANN MICHAEL: I and implicit in what you're saying, Joanne, and I agree with this 100%, is that, for me, the most significant aspect of horizon scanning is interacting with other humans. And for me, as an extrovert, it's usually some action like this, or in person at conferences, which I missed horribly and can't wait to go to SSP, small plug. But then there's also what comes from that is, we talk, and you send me a link to this.
ANN MICHAEL: And then I send it out to some other folks. I know at AIP, we've really decided that we really want to be a little bit more deliberate in that. And I do think that it is not unheard of that in the past, a lot of the organizations within this industry have been a little insular, especially some of the not for profits, the societies. And I do think that's changing.
ANN MICHAEL: One of the other things that I also think is changing around that, which is related but not exactly on point to your question, is the idea of partnering with other societies and other organizations. So I think there is an openness that Joanne is mentioning from experts, [INAUDIBLE] even ones that you might even be competitive with, to interact and contemplate and think about things.
ANN MICHAEL: And I always think that multiple brains are far better than one.
WILL: John, [INAUDIBLE].
JOHN CAMPBELL: Sorry, Will, go on, unless you want to spin that slightly. No, so I think one of the things that we've seen as a challenge, is that I totally agree with increasingly looking at a wider range of sources than perhaps we have even in the past with doing horizon scanning. One of the big risks of that, and I can think of any number of sci-fi films, but they're failing me right now, where someone gets sort of touched on the forehead to see all of space and time and what they're really missing.
JOHN CAMPBELL: And it's just overwhelming. And that ability to be segmenting the activities properly, horizon scanning is all about that balance of who's looking at the sort of incremental, and then the areas where you're differentiating between. Then the whole column of-- then there's sort of horizons of everything, which might become real or not. And being able to-- we're trying to segment those activities a little bit more, so that you don't have that either, just sort of overwhelmed and seeing too many features, and you never actually make that call.
JOHN CAMPBELL: Or just doing a bit too much about investing in the near. And so we're trying to separate out those activities and the people who are doing it, but then bringing that back into our standard annual planning exercises. And it's at the end of the day, it has been about opening more and wider sources because it's not just about the disruptors that might have been adjacent to publishing.
JOHN CAMPBELL: It's actually now, from every conceivable area. And so that's just meant a change in structure in terms of how we do it.
WILL: Great, so we'll open it up to the audience for general Q&A. You can submit your question in the chat or use the Q&A interface, excuse me, need more coffee this morning. And while giving the audience a few moments to type their questions, I just wanted to ask this group, one or two-word answer. What class of technology or new technology is exciting the most right now?
WILL: What should we all go immediately Google once we leave this panel.
JOANNE SHEPPARD: Web3.
ANN MICHAEL: Well, I always have a problem with this because fundamentally, I do not define myself as a technologist. As a matter of fact, I've taken great strides, as anyone at AIP publishing who might be on this webinar would attest to, to get the word "technology" out of our org chart. And so I tend to look at this from a different perspective. Although, I kind of would agree with Joanne. That article that she sent and the idea of DAOs and all these other things I think that I just have to learn more about that because I don't know what the there is there, but I have a feeling there's something in there.
ANN MICHAEL: [LAUGHS]
WILL: John? It was an unfair question. I'll just own up to that now.
JOHN CAMPBELL: Well, of course it's a massively unfair question, but I think--
ANN MICHAEL: Does that make Will, massively unfair?
JOHN CAMPBELL: I think we can all agree on that. But under that Web3 banner, I think it hides underneath it some of the biggest sort of commercial disruptors right now because I think, OUP's been somebody who's been, not just OUP, I don't mean to just speak with examples there, has been traditionally conservative in terms of the uses of data, for example, in terms of very strict opt-in rules and so on. And so perhaps, isn't as exposed to a more fundamental society shift towards greater control of privacy and direction and IP ownership.
JOHN CAMPBELL: Because not so much of the commercial activity is based upon that aggressive mining of personal information and the commercial revenues that come from that. But that is still the lifeblood of many of the key players and parties in publishing. And so I think that I would agree that is definitely the largest coming wave.
ANN MICHAEL: Yeah, I was augmenting my answer in the chat there. If I think about what I'm actually looking at and real interested in, is what we can do as far as data and building it out in AI to try to help us to find new insights, be more efficient, so that we can free up resources and things of that nature. I feel like we're just starting to scratch that.
WILL: Great so I'll turn to the chat and the Q&A question from the chat. How about creating tools for better collaboration in academia as a new business for publishers? That seems to be almost a cyclical thing in our industry, come to think of it. Joanne, or Ann, any thoughts?
JOANNE SHEPPARD: I completely agree. Well, Digital Science is invested in Overleaf, which is a collaborative writing tool. And particularly during COVID, our biggest challenge was figuring out how to manage the pace of growth. So I completely agree with that. You see more SCA going in a bit of this direction, as well. So things that are capitalizing on this sort of decentralized collaboration, are going really well in academia.
JOANNE SHEPPARD:
ANN MICHAEL: I don't think I have anything to add to that. It's a great idea. No, absolutely, yes.
WILL: I think the only bit I'll add is kind of hard learned experience that you have to think really carefully about the user, their workflows and friction, and to get an academic or a researcher to change a part of their workflow or their collaboration technology, you have to create a really good product.
JOANNE SHEPPARD: Yes.
WILL: A really good product.
ANN MICHAEL: Compelling reason, a very compelling reason.
WILL: Ann, this question goes back, I think, to our conversation at the start of the webinar, which is, wondering how companies can handle, say a lower-level employee, who has some idea of a decision that needs to be made who can argue for it, but there's always seems to be a higher-level person in a different department pushing back on it because they don't see the lower-level person as having expertise or authority?
WILL: Any advice for this question writer or a lower-level, less-experienced person who finds themselves in those circumstance?
ANN MICHAEL: Well, and it's really a shame because I think that happens all the time. And that actually is very much a result of a command and control environment, where value is somehow attributed to humans based on their position in hierarchy. And it's really unfortunate. What I would say, for that person, and years ago, having been in that position, is you need to find advocates. So I think, what you need to do, is you need to think about, first of all, your message.
ANN MICHAEL: Are you presenting your ideas in a way that is digestible and understandable and compelling to whomever it is you're talking with? And then the second thing is, who else can you enlist to help you shape your message and tap the right shoulders, even if it means having to kind of venture up, even sideways, up the hierarchy to find someone that can help you? And again, I just go back to the fact that that really is one of the reasons why I'm such a strong believer in progressive organizations and restructuring because we have all of these smart people and these organizations.
ANN MICHAEL: Yet, we rely way too much on the brains of a half a dozen or a dozen. And it's not because, in my opinion, that other folks in the organization don't have really great ideas. It's that they really don't have any way to be heard in a substantive way. So, yeah, I would say build a coalition.
JOHN CAMPBELL: Just one thing to get under the wire. I don't know what the methodology you're talking about, earlier, and, Ann. I can't remember what the acronym was, but the equivalent for that very transparent, level decision making version of a RACI, we use a methodology called RAPID. And the great thing about it is, if that visibility of where those decisions happen, the leveling off at the flattening off of the landscape to be able to facilitate that way of working, and the collaborative way in which you arrive at that sort of rapid of that decision-making process, because you do have designee, who is ultimately the decision maker.
JOHN CAMPBELL: They can be from anywhere. And that's the one thing I've seen that where you've talked about having a sort of where collectively for years we've talked about having flatter corporate structures. That's actually made it much more real. So I would definitely point people in that direction.
WILL: And that was right at the wire. So to end. Many thanks to Joanne, and John, and Ann for joining our panel today. Again, when you leave this webinar, there will be a survey. Please take it and give us some feedback. And then our next webinar in the series will cover educational technology trends on siloing and digitizing professional education.
WILL: We hope to see you there. So thanks very much, everyone, for participating. And we hope you found this valuable.
JOANNE SHEPPARD: Bye, everybody.
Segment:0 .
WILL: So we're going to have a loose roundtable discussion today of a series of issues around technology and organizational culture, around how to design organizations and decision making and participation frameworks to enact change. We'll talk about the tensions of managing our publishing and technology business in today's market. And how do we think about our legacy products and potentially new ones. How do we make bets on new technologies, even if they may disrupt our current business?
WILL: And then we'll talk a little bit about worldlier and potentially scarier things. Things such as GDPR, privacy, and the changing technology and policy regulations for digital publishing and [AUDIO OUT] So just to start, I think a common thread of all of these roundtables that I've hosted in the past three years, has been understanding technology and how to apply it is one thing, choosing the technology is another, but rallying your organization to implement a new technology to change their processes, to change their framework for making decisions about what technology can do or how your business can adapt, is another.
WILL: So I thought we could talk a little bit about how our tech leaders joining us today think about shaping organizational culture and changing decision making processes to make transformation more successful. Ann, I think you suggested this topic, would you like to start us off?
ANN MICHAEL: Sure, well I think that just at a very basic level, when you look at the pace of change that's occurring in the world now and honestly it has been for quite some time, and you look at our classic structures for decision making and information sharing, they're just not fast enough. They're not effective enough. They're not optimized. They're optimized for known tasks that occur in a known order, and so I think a lot of organizations, and we're no exception at AIP publishing, are thinking about distributed-decision making and either dispensing with a hierarchy, or if you're all not that all that radical, finding a hybrid model that tempers the hierarchical historical types of decision making with decision making that is really happening where and when in the organization that needs to happen.
ANN MICHAEL: And honestly, for some of the executive team, get the hell out of the way, which it sounds threatening, but it actually is not. And I've worked with organizations too that I have this weird 16 years as a consultant and now at AIP, so I've seen a lot of different organizations. And some have interpreted distributed-decision making as, oh, well, I don't want to make these petty decisions, so let someone else do it.
ANN MICHAEL: And that is not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about meaningful decisions that can be made by other folks in the organization, wherever they are, the ones that are closest to the problem, but to do that, you have to prepare folks for that. They have to have the information they need. They have to be clear about objectives and goals. So people can make decisions and make really good ones when they have the foundational knowledge, exposure, communication that they need, and the organization is clear about its purpose and its direction.
WILL: That's really interesting. And one of the things that I was thinking about, there seems to be this tension in a more participative model, which is, I think you just flagged that folks have to have the foundational knowledge. They have to have a shared understanding of objective and outcomes. Doesn't that put a lot of weight at the front of the process? I guess what I'm saying is, do you see when you've had participative frameworks, does it actually end up being faster or result in a better decision?
ANN MICHAEL: What do you mean by participative? Are you talking about consensus or are you talking about something else?
WILL: No, I thinking about your participant framework, where many stakeholders within an organization are involved, and it's folks at multiple levels of the organization.
ANN MICHAEL: OK, so first of all, I'd like to talk about the word "many." So and that's why I started thinking about consensus. I think historically, especially in societies, and any of you who've dealt with society-decision making, it's not uncommon to find that 15 people will be in a room to make a decision. So that isn't what I'm talking about. I'm also talking about trust. That you have fewer people and the right people making decisions, and people are not threatened by that.
ANN MICHAEL: That the lines are blurried. That really, what you do, is you organize around a purpose. So one thing, for example, to be more concrete, at AIP publishing, we are relying a lot, not only on the traditional RACI structure, so Responsible Accountable Consulted and Informs, but also, we're using this organization called [INAUDIBLE] and they've added on a D for Decision making, which is both the mode and the people that make the decision.
ANN MICHAEL: And so what we've found is, going in, we're trying to-- in projects or key decisions, we're trying to agree on [INAUDIBLE] and who's making the decision. And some decisions are consensus, but what we're trying to do, is to really get to smaller groups making consensus, smaller teams, where we don't have as many folks. Because everybody can't be involved in everything, and the irony is when you have a reluctance to let other folks make decisions because of a lack of experience.
ANN MICHAEL: What happens, is they never get that experience if you don't actually hand it over, but maintain your position as their coach or you maintain a "consultant" role, let's say, within the RACID process. Does that make sense?
WILL: Yes, it does. Thank you. John, how does OUP approach decision making and stakeholder participation?
JOHN CAMPBELL: It's very similar, I couldn't agree with Ann more, actually, is that you've got a framework that we've had historically, which has been the sort of ivory tower, handing down the grand direction. It doesn't work at all. The speed of change is just too fast, as we've said. And a lot of this has been around the empowerment of staff because actually, this got exacerbated during the pandemic.
JOHN CAMPBELL: I think that feeling that people are becoming more disconnected from the corporate entity. And this coincided with us really embedding a lot of the core product methodologies into OUP, as a whole. And a lot of that comes with areas of expertise that have the delegated authority for decision making in their space. We are going to be depending upon the groups looking at future SEO strategies, whatever the particular area of specialism is, to be telling us where we're going.
JOHN CAMPBELL: And I think that combination of empowering individual area, but actually, also, targeting them with the roadmap they have to be sharing. The stories they have to be convincing yourself in terms of the direction. Yes, we're all working under the overall umbrella of our main corporate strategies and goals, but the actual individual pieces just doesn't work with that. Micromanagement, and as you say, and in terms of the senior team being omnipresent, we've sort of flipped that around.
JOHN CAMPBELL: And so there's a lot more sharing information upwards and allowing local teams to feel much more empowered about their area of delegation. I think that's just something is going to grow because we have to build those specialisms. The types of people you are bringing in, particularly coming out of the tech sector, have got drive and expertise. They don't expect to be suppressed in a traditional corporate structure.
JOHN CAMPBELL: And everybody, as the old product methodologies say, you are in love with the problem, and you've got to deliver a solution to it. And it's actually, it's been a real change for us, and it's transforming the business.
WILL: Well, we had a private call a few weeks ago. And one of the things we spent a bit of time talking about, was how COVID and the shift to remote working was such a drastic change in how we do our jobs and how we maintain relationships with our peers, how we onboard new employees or get used to new technologies that it may make change easier or may make it easier for organizations to move faster.
WILL: Joanne, do you have any thoughts around that?
JOANNE SHEPPARD: Yeah, so for those that don't know what the Holtzbrinck Publishing Group is, we are the majority shareholder of Springer Nature. We own Digital Science, and we also own MacMillan Publisher, which are three very, very different businesses, and we are a highly decentralized organization. And if we had been having this panel, maybe three years ago, I probably would have said something about the early adopter model, and then you've got the people in the middle, and then you've got the laggards.
JOANNE SHEPPARD: And we're all laggards, in some way. And we just have to respect where people are accepting and embracing new technologies and new ways of doing things. And I fundamentally think that has probably changed because we all had to go through so much change in the past couple of years, particularly in the information industry, where many groups-- there was so much information coming out, particularly in the areas of science, that folks that I would have called laggards, have now been so thoroughly primed around the speed and the level of change that we are going through, that I think everything is going to be accelerated and be a lot smoother than we may be thinking it will be.
JOANNE SHEPPARD: People have become quite adept at adapting to change right now. I was going to build upon some of the points that were also made. As technology is moving faster and faster, decentralized-decision making, and only having the core folks that have that expertise being able to really enact and be empowered to make a decision, is going to be absolutely critical because things are getting more and more specialized.
JOANNE SHEPPARD: And it's going to be harder and harder for people that don't have that foundational knowledge to be able to make the right decision. And if you look at which social platform is in versus which social platform is out, and which social platform is in that you've never heard of, and you need to get a decision made around it, you've got to go to the right people.
ANN MICHAEL: Well I'll like to chime in on that. So Joanne, I think that is a really a great point, and one of the things that I've been thinking a lot about too, is the idea of consent-decision making. So I think if you combine distributed with the idea of what would it hurt if we tried this? What's the ramifications? Are they big or they small? And then also, keep in mind that whatever the small team is, it needs to be cross-functional, so that a group that isn't, maybe, unaware of impacts that are occurring somewhere else, has the opportunity to do that, and the steps are small, then you really are mitigating risk a whole lot.
ANN MICHAEL: You're getting the right brains involved. They're taking a small step, and you're evaluating it on what would be the worst that could happen. And if it's not the business falling apart, people dying, or the building burning down then try it.
JOHN CAMPBELL: Yeah, I tend to agree with that. I think it's about the speed of action, which we've all said, but it's about being much more likely to be right the first time. Because of the speed, choices you make they've got to be very good ones. And I know we've all, in the sort of product methodology, it's about fading fast and everything else, and actually, on the tech side, it's really about making the smartest choices as quickly as you can.
JOHN CAMPBELL: And so relying upon empowered specialisms, hiring in the right skills is just ever more important to meet that speed. And then the product folks following using those capabilities, they can still be fading fast, iterating in the methodologies that work, but those core underpinning capabilities, you've got to make some very good choices, and you need the right people to do that.
WILL: So in looking at the participants list, we have almost nearly 90 folks joining us today, and they're from a variety of sized organizations, big and small, some more traditional publishers with kind of the same products that may have been around for a while. And I imagine what we're talking about in terms of decentralized-decision making, more participative structure may sound a bit scary. So as technology and organizational leaders, any practical tips on where to start?
WILL: How do you ease into more stakeholder participation, or a less command and control way of making decisions?
ANN MICHAEL: So I would say at the beginning of all this, is probably, and I hate this because it's a very hierarchically-oriented concept, but is delegation. The beginning of this whole cascade, could be simply learning how to be better at delegation. What are the decisions that you personally really feel you need to make and why? Why do you feel you need to make them? And who are you going to consult when you make that decision? Are the people you're going to consult actually more knowledgeable about the situation than you are?
ANN MICHAEL: So what exactly are you contributing? And really starting to take that honest assessment of that, and then also, really, just looking, especially in a small organization, you don't have the staff to have everybody do everything. So if you're not thinking about that, you can't really optimize your reach. You can't get the-- what is it they say, punch heavier than your weight or whatever.
ANN MICHAEL: You can't do that if there are bottlenecks, especially if they are unnatural or unnecessary. And then the second part is, if you're evaluating things and you really feel that you as a leader need to be involved in these decisions, then I would really question why? And if there are fundamental skills that are lacking in the organization, that's your real problem.
ANN MICHAEL: And it's never going to fix itself if you continue. So it's in concept, I think the root of it in our hierarchical structures thinking about delegation, and then it's think about it as delegation on steroids, almost until the point where the word delegation kind of disappears. Yeah, I was just looking Adam, there's a thing up there. But are you talking about delegation?
ANN MICHAEL: It looks like empowerment. Yeah, well, Will was asking how to get started if you're in this kind of command and control hierarchical structure. And I was just thinking that the concept of delegation might be a way for folks that are very used to command and control to start thinking about that. I also recently read something about empowerment, where the author didn't even like that word because it was command and control at its core.
ANN MICHAEL: Like I have to give power. The reality is, you already have power. We just have to let you be able to use it. I know that's a nitpicky thing, but I just thought that was funny.
WILL: We got in a really great question. And I think each one of our panelists may have a perspective on this, how does an organization balance one, empowering specialists to make decisions with two, the increasing degree to which systems and processes are integrated and interdependent? How do you build structures that ensure blind corners are illuminated, which is typically something senior leadership and generalists may be doing now?
JOANNE SHEPPARD: I could actually recommend a book called Open Strategy which follows a step-by-step process of how you involve a, the experts in a particular subject area and then b, use the whole organization to develop your strategy in a transparent way because also ultimate command and control is to hand over the strategy and say, OK, now you go execute. Or we had all the smart people in a room secretly coming up with this thing, and now, go do it.
JOANNE SHEPPARD: And starting from the very beginning of getting some involvement in the strategic process itself, a, can definitely help illuminate some of those blind corners that you may not be seeing right away because it'll bring that feedback loop in incredibly early. And on the topic of increasing dependency and processes which are integrated. Those processes and those systems are also going to have to be able to pivot quickly and be flexible, and that's almost becoming the definition of the types of processes and systems that are being rolled out now.
JOANNE SHEPPARD: If you think about something like Google, where it's heavily modular, but you don't have to use every component of it. Those are the things that are going to be successful in the future.
WILL: John or Ann, any thoughts from your perspective?
JOHN CAMPBELL: I think from a technology perspective because obviously, within the larger organizations we have our pure tech directorship within OUP, as well as then the product spheres that sort of orbit and interact with them. And a lot of the thinking from the architectural perspective, just given, as Alison says, the heavily integrated nature of the research landscape, particularly, is just where you can keep some of that flexibility and control in the types of tools you're using.
JOHN CAMPBELL: And so that your core architecture is something that is extensible that you can swap in and out. We've talked a lot in the past about the kind of best-of-breed tools providing a particular capability because the definition of that, is the point it ceases to be the best of breed. You've thrown it out, and you put something else in. And you have to be able to do that. And so for, particularly for an organization like OUP, that is a heavily-mission driven organization sitting on a lot of key content that we need to make sure is out there, we have to make the right technology choices and be as fast a follower as possible from the major shifts happening in the industry.
JOHN CAMPBELL: And to do that, you have the confidence of a core architecture that you can truly do that. And so that's our main challenge back to our technology colleagues, is give us that outward-facing, fundamental architecture, so that we can be making the right choices swapping horses fast, bringing in particular requests that might be for a particular society partner that meets a specific need, but generally, we're providing the best thing fast for everybody.
JOHN CAMPBELL: And that's, as it sounds, a much bigger challenge than-- which then you would expect because of course, that's not the nature of getting a technology, investing in it, embedding it, and then relying on it every day, and really not want to touch it too much. So the challenge there is one to stay nimble from the bottom upwards.
ANN MICHAEL: Well, the only thing I would add there, which actually I didn't realize because I had it covered up, will echo one of the chat comments from Dave, is that the question was about a specialist making a decision. And I think that one thing to consider, is that depending on this decision, it's still collaborative. So Dave is talking about these three rings, but the reality is, that if we want to make a decision and it impacts editors, so it may be around a process or technology, there's going to be, hopefully, a small group of people that will make that decision, but it doesn't have to be the executive team.
ANN MICHAEL: And it may not even have to be the senior management team. And it might be only if they for some reason or having an issue making a decision that they might involve other folks. So there's a collaborative nature to it. And there's a spirit of inquiry. It's not simply, well, I get to make this decision, so there we go. It's the idea of, wait, who does this impact?
ANN MICHAEL: Let me consult with people to make sure I'm thinking of everybody it impacts. Now, let me really weigh everything here and talk to the folks that are involved.
WILL: I think it's with a spirit of inquiry and trust, to be honest.
ANN MICHAEL: Yeah.
WILL: So there was one other question that came in, and I think this touched on a point that you made earlier. Howard asks, how do you balance decision making and resource management? And that struck me about your comment about many versus the right person or people.
ANN MICHAEL: Yeah, no, that's a great question. And actually, there's another thing to think about, too, which is how do you manage including everybody, and making fast decisions. So you have to look at both sides of the coin. Resource management, if people are the key decision makers in a smaller realm of decisions, you're going to be able to-- things that they know really well, things that they don't have to learn about to be an informed decision maker on, that's going to give you the foundation you need, but another part of resource management, too, Howard, I was just thinking about this, I was writing it on my notes, is it's also about figuring out what not to do.
ANN MICHAEL: So I think a lot of the resource management issues that I've seen, are not necessarily around having people involved in too many decisions, but having organizations do things that maybe they shouldn't do themselves anymore. So when I was at [INAUDIBLE],, I remember we were talking about looking at our workflows and we were like, OK, I want to know what should we do? What should someone else do?
ANN MICHAEL: And what should no one ever do, at all? And maybe in the someone else category, is what could we or someone else automate. And I think that from my experience, and I've worked with more than 100 societies, it's usually the case that there are things that people have decided or value add, and they're holding on to and sometimes they're not. And the resource issue has really helped when they realize, yes, you still have to manage partners, so that you don't get to cut 100% of resource.
ANN MICHAEL: But it's also about focus, not just about resource. You get to focus on the more important things.
WILL: Really great point. So let's shift gears and move on to our next topic. I think something every product, or strategy, or technology leader in our space has to do, is balance investment in legacy products and technology or in content creation, against new and potentially disruptive ones. And in our preview discussion, we talked a bit about open science and time and attention invested there, DeSci, or decentralized science, which is related, moving past content to new products or data and insights and service provision, and how a lot of our organizations need to upskill and transform marketing and our marketing technology.
WILL: Joanne, you brought some really great perspective around open science and DeSci and how you're thinking about that. Would you like to start us off?
JOANNE SHEPPARD: Yeah, sure, so I'm of the very strong opinion that if you do not disrupt yourself, the disruptions are happening anyway. And you really want to make sure you have a seat at the table. So even if you're not going to be leading a particular disruption, you want to be able to have some influence. And so in STM, where I work, we have been in the middle of what I've been calling the digital transformation that I think will never end.
JOANNE SHEPPARD: We're just going to have to keep evolving and evolving. So your digital transformation didn't happen on a day. It is a way of thinking about how your company operates. So if you think about how we went through this open-access transition that we are still in the middle of. And what is nipping at the heels of open access, is open science and going even more in the direction of openness, and the decentralized science movement.
JOANNE SHEPPARD: When I'm done talking, I'll get in the chat. And I can send a link to an article for folks who don't know what it is, but it is fundamentally looking to disrupt publishers and almost eliminate the article and come up with new artifacts of what is considered science. I was chatting with somebody about this, earlier today, and he was saying, what is the article? That's a construct of the way we used to work.
JOANNE SHEPPARD: He's like, why do we still have page numbers online? What is the way that we're thinking about this? So I strongly advise folks to really think through what are the disruptive factors, and even if you have to figure out how to transition your legacy business, and you have to keep it going while you are doing that, really looking at the different factors out there and taking them quite seriously, is what keeps you in business.
WILL: Hmm and just so our participants aren't too alarmed. Joanne , do you have a sense of time scale? If you had to make a bet when d-science or open science would transform SDM publishing, is that a five-year horizon, a 10-year horizon? I constantly remind myself, that open access and discussions of disrupting our industry, really didn't take hold until 2006. And here we are 16 years later.
JOANNE SHEPPARD: So I think it is at least a 5-year horizon, but it is going to be something that a lot of people are starting to engage with. I think it's generational. And I think it's the same sentiment of frustration that people had about who's capturing the economic value of scientific outputs. And so again, and that will probably be a transitional state to something else. So we'll go through this, and then we'll go through the next thing.
ANN MICHAEL: You know, Joanne--
JOANNE SHEPPARD: I'm sorry, yeah.
ANN MICHAEL: I just want to underline what you're saying. One of the things I think is really neat is, Will sent me the link to that article. And then I sent that link on to several other folks. And I think we really need to be careful because the first reaction, honestly, every single person I sent it to had was, I don't understand their objectives. This is never going to work. And I think it's really hard, but we need to look at something like this and say, what are they trying to do?
ANN MICHAEL: Why are they trying to do it? What is in here that could be built upon? So maybe this exact plan isn't what happened, but are there clues or ideas or things in here that are valuable and can be applied in another way? And so I'm not saying we should all be blindly like, oh, my gosh, this is the future, exactly like this, but I think our industry has this habit of throwing out the baby with the bathwater, sometimes.
JOANNE SHEPPARD: No, I completely agree with that. And I would look not only at the disruption, but what opportunities are in it for us? So, as an example, if open access is making things more transactional, and we're not, in perpetuity, able to generate revenue from the content. And if the content itself is becoming something where the locus of value is maybe what can be data mined from it.
JOANNE SHEPPARD: If we look at what happened with the COVID vaccine, a lot of that early hypothetical work was done through data mining. Google DeepMind does a lot of that stuff. So what are the opportunities for us? What can we build on top of, not only our content but maybe someone else's content, that keeps us in the game. Several marketplaces are already forming around this.
JOANNE SHEPPARD: So what tools and services and things could we build that, again, keep us in the conversation? Because at the heart of it, all of this, again, in my particular little world, we're trying to advance science. And so is there a way that everybody can win? Don't eliminate publishers, but maybe the role of publishers changes a bit.
JOHN CAMPBELL: It was a very interesting article, actually, and touched on so many things. And I'd like to get a little bit into thinking about how all those different types of access to content could actually work out for a publishing model. But what really struck me from it was, it's an inevitable reaction, perhaps, to the trends that we all have in our sector, which is around more consolidation, closed-loop systems, a feeling that you're being sort of shepherded down a particular route, or you're locked into particular workflows and things like that.
JOHN CAMPBELL: And lots of good reasons and excellent efficiencies and so on that have come out of taking those kind of steps. But I think it does also lead to a reaction, which is a loss of control. And that's a very valid question back to, particularly, the larger commercial players, but not only. It does mean that for the not-for-profit sector, you've got to really think about the type of story you're telling about where you are using certain parts of a workflow or starting to get more involved with the day to day of the publishing accountabilities and the authoring accountabilities.
JOHN CAMPBELL: But that you're doing such a way that you weren't saying, but we have choices here. And if you don't think this is quite the right tool or part of workflow, then we will change it, or there are other ways to do this. So I think there are, as well as how we actually look at to stay in the game, I think there is also something about the positioning of whether or not the commercial side of our business is gone.
JOHN CAMPBELL: Just thinking a little bit about where we can start to keep that value and change. A lot of things that have made publishing publishing for years, but sort of opening it up to different types of interactions. We've got good examples within OUP but not only, is actually some of the shifts that's taken place in some of our languages area. And I think that's something that everyone will know now that the Oxford English Dictionary and the great print dictionary legacy, which that is not the world now.
JOHN CAMPBELL: But that was something that was enshrining a certain way of working, of mediating content, of working with authors, of funneling that particular researcher type down a particular route. And actually over the course of not very many years. That has completely flipped on its head to being about access to core data, natural language processing being a dominant part of the interactions. So that's business to business, but that's also with research projects.
JOHN CAMPBELL: And that's something that's over the course of, again, not many years, has gone from a majority print revenue through to that being 15% of the business. And now that same self-disrupted area, is about building partnerships to expose more content. It's now driving look-up up on Bing, on Google, on Kindle. It's something that if we'd stayed in the old way not disrupted ourselves, that sort of sea change wouldn't have happened.
JOHN CAMPBELL: And then that collaboration in research projects that could help build on it. And then on you go. And perhaps, in that way, you start to get back some of that goodwill. That some of the DeSci movement is kicking against. So the lack of that goodwill and that desire to build bridges and get more collaborative. So I think there is a bit of a win-win here, but I totally agree, Joanne, it is about disrupting ourselves first, but with perhaps, keeping some of that mission perspective.
JOANNE SHEPPARD: Completely agree.
WILL: Really great point. There's a great question-- sorry, Ann, did you want to say something more?
ANN MICHAEL: Oh, no, no, I was just my neighbor's landscaper finally stopped, so I put [INAUDIBLE].. [LAUGHS]
WILL: The question that came in. In all this talk about disruption, how would you help legacy staff? People professionally trained, say in manuscript and article management, retrain for new business models. How do we keep publishers from making staff redundant? And kind of a related point, if traditional metrics that we've been using have become obsolete, what are the new metrics that are needed to understand and gauge disruption?
WILL: And I think we touched on this a bit in terms of marketing and how open access and other things have shifted the need for new approaches for marketing managers, marketing systems, whole new classes of technology. But would anyone like to venture an answer or a start of an answer?
ANN MICHAEL: Well, the first thing I would say is, get used to it. Transition is messy. And it's going to stay messy. And I think, as Joanne pointed out, we're always going to be in some state of transition somewhere. So I think the first thing, is to take a deep breath, find your center, and understand that it's progress, not perfection. So what's going to happen?
ANN MICHAEL: We're going to have a blend of metrics. We're going to have a core business that runs one way. We're going to try to be learning something else. It's going to be hard. People are going to get frustrated. By the same token, I think that we really need to help people to understand that we don't try to change for change's sake. We're trying to make sure that whatever our organization is, that it has a viable, vibrant position in a future that's still forming.
ANN MICHAEL: So this isn't an answer to how do you do x, y, and z, But. I think the first thing you need to do, is to have folks understand why it's important. And ironically, the redundancies are going to occur if people can't start to look at things differently, look at their jobs differently and start to incorporate different elements. It's not a done deal. We talk about this at AIP all the time about things we want to do, things we don't want to do.
ANN MICHAEL: And one of the things is, there are things that we would like to not do, not to get rid of the staff, but to free them to work on things that we believe are actually more value added to the customer and to the ecosystem. So I'll let someone else, maybe, come with a more specific answer, but I think that's the first step. The first step is, this is really messy, progress over perfection, I am not going to come into work and know exactly what I'm going to do every day.
ANN MICHAEL: I'm going to have to figure some of this stuff out. And there's going to be a period where I'm going to have to make my brain work on two different levels at the same time.
JOHN CAMPBELL: Yeah, I think we absolutely have that obligation to really grow the smart people we've hired. And in the past, we've hired smart people to do jobs that now we'd look at as legacy, but they are the same smart people, who actually we need to retrain and are retraining into data roles, being able to work in that sort of heart of MarTech, where actually, for most publishers, you've really got to do that because you can't afford to bring in the people who are also being taken by a Microsoft.
JOHN CAMPBELL: And those are the kind of jobs they're looking at. And so it's actually relying-- looking back at the skill set you have that were solid, analytical skills, for example, working through the older ways of publishing. They are adapting really fast and really well if you bought into the reasons for doing that. And the reasons for doing that if you're sitting on a, fundamentally, on a dissemination mission, for example, is I get more eyes on this.
JOHN CAMPBELL: I get more recognition from this. I get more impact from this type of activity now. It's more for more. And it does mean that we, therefore, have to be really doubling down on the training budgets and on the investment in people, but actually, it's completely critical because otherwise, we'll see that drain of people who are smart and could have adapted, but we didn't give them that inspiration to do so.
JOHN CAMPBELL: And then you're doubly hit by the salary levels now being expressed for pure tech people being the purview of a very small elite of companies. And so this is a step that has to be taken, and that's certainly something that we're focusing on.
WILL: That's really a great point, John.
JOANNE SHEPPARD: Going back to the distributed-decision making, one of the things that, as organizations, we're going to have to get a lot better at, is sometimes, it's the more junior person who's going to be training the more senior person because that's where the expertise lies. So being very, very open minded about how peer-to-peer or not peer-to-peer information is shared. I think that getting those types of exchanges and that kind of movement will facilitate this, combined with all of the other things that John and Ann said.
WILL: OK, I'm just going to exert some moderator privilege to make, I think, an important point, which is mentorships are incredibly valuable. And I was very fortunate to have bosses and organizations that valued that. And the other good is, this is a very collaborative and participative industry. And I started out doing desktop publishing for ad pages in medical journals, and it is kind of relationships with folks that are say, on this panel, that have helped me learn a lot more.
WILL: So I encourage folks to get out and connect, go to things like SSP, reach out to folks on LinkedIn because by and large, this is a helpful community. Great question in the chat from Howard. No one today, or the article that Joanne put in the chat, mentions academic institutions. Do they need to be disrupted for some of these changes to happen?
WILL:
JOHN CAMPBELL: I guess I should answer that. So put in an answer for that, given that the press is part of a very large academic institution. And one of the things, I think, that we're really seeing from the University side, is that they are shaking their own tree, significantly. I think it's a lot of the leadership around disruption, the way in which collaborative research is generated, the mandates that are put around it are things that, very often, we're needing to respond to.
JOHN CAMPBELL: And so I think, this may not be the case across the board, but I do see some of that leadership there that perhaps is not as apparent as it might be, but I thought that's just one aspect of that.
JOANNE SHEPPARD: I'd say two things on that point. One, going back to the COVID rate of change. As an American, but I live in the UK, I, of course, had to take the SAT if I wanted to go to college. And a number of universities, throughout COVID, just said, oh you know what, we thought we needed that. And it turns out that we don't. And then the change just very quickly happened. And now the SAT is, potentially, at risk.
JOANNE SHEPPARD: So I think they are open to disrupting themselves. And more and more, tenured, academic positions are not the end goal of a particular scientist, and more and more, they're going to the private sector. So I think we may see some changes there first, and then academia may follow.
WILL: Maybe a general question or comment which is, as we think about the evolution of open access in our market and transformational deals, in particular, the library has still remained the enabler and the focal point. And I don't know that that changes with open or decentralized science, either.
JOANNE SHEPPARD: | would agree with that. The library has so many functions beyond just curation. At MIT, it's been billed as the safe space for everyone. The place that you can go to relax. Carnegie Mellon has been very forward thinking about how they use their library so providing tools and access of the facilitators of distance learning. So the libraries are doing a lot to reinvent what they mean.
WILL: So there were a lot of topics that we prepared for, but I'm actually just going to skip ahead to one on horizon scanning, so we can save some time for general Q&A from the audience. One of the things that struck me in our preparation call, is Joanne and John an Ann all come from very different-sized organizations, very different backgrounds, and are very different roles, but all of us, engage in some form of horizon scanning, bringing in information to help them make decisions and help them lead their organizations.
WILL: And I was hoping we could just take a few minutes and talk about how you and your organization goes about horizon scanning because I think, as we've all talked about today, the pace of change isn't going to slow down. And I think that requires all of us in this industry to be looking forward. Who would like to start?
WILL:
JOANNE SHEPPARD: I can kick off. So I would say that while during the COVID when everybody was home, it was difficult to connect with some folks in some ways. But in other ways, it became an incredible leveler. And as you were saying, well, this is such a helpful industry, and it is so highly collaborative, that reaching out to a leading expert on a particular topic, where I needed to do some horizon scanning, got much, much easier, and so getting access to leading thinkers I found to be pretty successful.
JOANNE SHEPPARD: An example that we had to work through was, what is the return to the office look like? What does the future of work look like? And I was able to put together a small internal panel that we could just ask some people that are doing pretty deep thinking about this to just give us the benefit of their wisdom. And then using the horizon scanning that we're getting in as the way that we can start to think about scenario planning.
JOANNE SHEPPARD: So we don't just do or react to what we're hearing about, what we're seeing, but we use it as a data point to inform our thinking.
ANN MICHAEL: I and implicit in what you're saying, Joanne, and I agree with this 100%, is that, for me, the most significant aspect of horizon scanning is interacting with other humans. And for me, as an extrovert, it's usually some action like this, or in person at conferences, which I missed horribly and can't wait to go to SSP, small plug. But then there's also what comes from that is, we talk, and you send me a link to this.
ANN MICHAEL: And then I send it out to some other folks. I know at AIP, we've really decided that we really want to be a little bit more deliberate in that. And I do think that it is not unheard of that in the past, a lot of the organizations within this industry have been a little insular, especially some of the not for profits, the societies. And I do think that's changing.
ANN MICHAEL: One of the other things that I also think is changing around that, which is related but not exactly on point to your question, is the idea of partnering with other societies and other organizations. So I think there is an openness that Joanne is mentioning from experts, [INAUDIBLE] even ones that you might even be competitive with, to interact and contemplate and think about things.
ANN MICHAEL: And I always think that multiple brains are far better than one.
WILL: John, [INAUDIBLE].
JOHN CAMPBELL: Sorry, Will, go on, unless you want to spin that slightly. No, so I think one of the things that we've seen as a challenge, is that I totally agree with increasingly looking at a wider range of sources than perhaps we have even in the past with doing horizon scanning. One of the big risks of that, and I can think of any number of sci-fi films, but they're failing me right now, where someone gets sort of touched on the forehead to see all of space and time and what they're really missing.
JOHN CAMPBELL: And it's just overwhelming. And that ability to be segmenting the activities properly, horizon scanning is all about that balance of who's looking at the sort of incremental, and then the areas where you're differentiating between. Then the whole column of-- then there's sort of horizons of everything, which might become real or not. And being able to-- we're trying to segment those activities a little bit more, so that you don't have that either, just sort of overwhelmed and seeing too many features, and you never actually make that call.
JOHN CAMPBELL: Or just doing a bit too much about investing in the near. And so we're trying to separate out those activities and the people who are doing it, but then bringing that back into our standard annual planning exercises. And it's at the end of the day, it has been about opening more and wider sources because it's not just about the disruptors that might have been adjacent to publishing.
JOHN CAMPBELL: It's actually now, from every conceivable area. And so that's just meant a change in structure in terms of how we do it.
WILL: Great, so we'll open it up to the audience for general Q&A. You can submit your question in the chat or use the Q&A interface, excuse me, need more coffee this morning. And while giving the audience a few moments to type their questions, I just wanted to ask this group, one or two-word answer. What class of technology or new technology is exciting the most right now?
WILL: What should we all go immediately Google once we leave this panel.
JOANNE SHEPPARD: Web3.
ANN MICHAEL: Well, I always have a problem with this because fundamentally, I do not define myself as a technologist. As a matter of fact, I've taken great strides, as anyone at AIP publishing who might be on this webinar would attest to, to get the word "technology" out of our org chart. And so I tend to look at this from a different perspective. Although, I kind of would agree with Joanne. That article that she sent and the idea of DAOs and all these other things I think that I just have to learn more about that because I don't know what the there is there, but I have a feeling there's something in there.
ANN MICHAEL: [LAUGHS]
WILL: John? It was an unfair question. I'll just own up to that now.
JOHN CAMPBELL: Well, of course it's a massively unfair question, but I think--
ANN MICHAEL: Does that make Will, massively unfair?
JOHN CAMPBELL: I think we can all agree on that. But under that Web3 banner, I think it hides underneath it some of the biggest sort of commercial disruptors right now because I think, OUP's been somebody who's been, not just OUP, I don't mean to just speak with examples there, has been traditionally conservative in terms of the uses of data, for example, in terms of very strict opt-in rules and so on. And so perhaps, isn't as exposed to a more fundamental society shift towards greater control of privacy and direction and IP ownership.
JOHN CAMPBELL: Because not so much of the commercial activity is based upon that aggressive mining of personal information and the commercial revenues that come from that. But that is still the lifeblood of many of the key players and parties in publishing. And so I think that I would agree that is definitely the largest coming wave.
ANN MICHAEL: Yeah, I was augmenting my answer in the chat there. If I think about what I'm actually looking at and real interested in, is what we can do as far as data and building it out in AI to try to help us to find new insights, be more efficient, so that we can free up resources and things of that nature. I feel like we're just starting to scratch that.
WILL: Great so I'll turn to the chat and the Q&A question from the chat. How about creating tools for better collaboration in academia as a new business for publishers? That seems to be almost a cyclical thing in our industry, come to think of it. Joanne, or Ann, any thoughts?
JOANNE SHEPPARD: I completely agree. Well, Digital Science is invested in Overleaf, which is a collaborative writing tool. And particularly during COVID, our biggest challenge was figuring out how to manage the pace of growth. So I completely agree with that. You see more SCA going in a bit of this direction, as well. So things that are capitalizing on this sort of decentralized collaboration, are going really well in academia.
JOANNE SHEPPARD:
ANN MICHAEL: I don't think I have anything to add to that. It's a great idea. No, absolutely, yes.
WILL: I think the only bit I'll add is kind of hard learned experience that you have to think really carefully about the user, their workflows and friction, and to get an academic or a researcher to change a part of their workflow or their collaboration technology, you have to create a really good product.
JOANNE SHEPPARD: Yes.
WILL: A really good product.
ANN MICHAEL: Compelling reason, a very compelling reason.
WILL: Ann, this question goes back, I think, to our conversation at the start of the webinar, which is, wondering how companies can handle, say a lower-level employee, who has some idea of a decision that needs to be made who can argue for it, but there's always seems to be a higher-level person in a different department pushing back on it because they don't see the lower-level person as having expertise or authority?
WILL: Any advice for this question writer or a lower-level, less-experienced person who finds themselves in those circumstance?
ANN MICHAEL: Well, and it's really a shame because I think that happens all the time. And that actually is very much a result of a command and control environment, where value is somehow attributed to humans based on their position in hierarchy. And it's really unfortunate. What I would say, for that person, and years ago, having been in that position, is you need to find advocates. So I think, what you need to do, is you need to think about, first of all, your message.
ANN MICHAEL: Are you presenting your ideas in a way that is digestible and understandable and compelling to whomever it is you're talking with? And then the second thing is, who else can you enlist to help you shape your message and tap the right shoulders, even if it means having to kind of venture up, even sideways, up the hierarchy to find someone that can help you? And again, I just go back to the fact that that really is one of the reasons why I'm such a strong believer in progressive organizations and restructuring because we have all of these smart people and these organizations.
ANN MICHAEL: Yet, we rely way too much on the brains of a half a dozen or a dozen. And it's not because, in my opinion, that other folks in the organization don't have really great ideas. It's that they really don't have any way to be heard in a substantive way. So, yeah, I would say build a coalition.
JOHN CAMPBELL: Just one thing to get under the wire. I don't know what the methodology you're talking about, earlier, and, Ann. I can't remember what the acronym was, but the equivalent for that very transparent, level decision making version of a RACI, we use a methodology called RAPID. And the great thing about it is, if that visibility of where those decisions happen, the leveling off at the flattening off of the landscape to be able to facilitate that way of working, and the collaborative way in which you arrive at that sort of rapid of that decision-making process, because you do have designee, who is ultimately the decision maker.
JOHN CAMPBELL: They can be from anywhere. And that's the one thing I've seen that where you've talked about having a sort of where collectively for years we've talked about having flatter corporate structures. That's actually made it much more real. So I would definitely point people in that direction.
WILL: And that was right at the wire. So to end. Many thanks to Joanne, and John, and Ann for joining our panel today. Again, when you leave this webinar, there will be a survey. Please take it and give us some feedback. And then our next webinar in the series will cover educational technology trends on siloing and digitizing professional education.
WILL: We hope to see you there. So thanks very much, everyone, for participating. And we hope you found this valuable.
JOANNE SHEPPARD: Bye, everybody.
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Form Title Accessibility and Keyboard Shortcuts
The cadmore media player is a professional video and audio player experience designed to deliver media as well as relevant transcript, segmentation, and metadata. On the screen is a traditional html video player with buttons such as play, pause, forward, captioning, language and play speed selection and more. Adjacent to the video player are generally tabs, one of which shows a scrolling transcript of the video and the other shows any segmentation of the media, sometimes referred to as chapters. At the top of the video is a menu bar containing an Explore button and Tools button. The Explore button allows you to dig deeper into the video by opening up an explore dialog which contains tabs for a visual navigation of the video using thumbnails, an about tab which contains rich metadata about the media, a segments tab which contains further information about the video, and a related tab which contains links to other media related to this media. The tools button opens a menu with options for sharing the media on social media, creating bookmarking links, creating embed codes for your website, generating citations, and more.
Keyboard Shortcuts
Keyboard shortcuts only work while you are in forms mode. By entering forms mode, you will be able to quickly access portions of the media player with single key commands.
Spacebar: Play/Pause Toggle
I: Info Menu,
O: Tools Menu
T: Transcript Tab,
S: Segments Tab
F: Forward 15,
R: Rewind 15
L: Languages,
P: Playspeed
M: Mute Toggle,
V: Volume Bar
N: Video Only Toggle,
B: Full Screen Toggle
C: Captions Toggle
Escape: Closes dialogs and menus / Exits Player
Z: Next Transcript Chapter
X: Previous Transcript Chapter
Q: Next Transcript Paragraph
W: Previous Transcript Paragraph
Entire Media
Segment(s)
Custom Clip
Start At:
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Embed Size
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You Size - Responsive
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We Size - Responsive
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Picture Overlay Popup
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400 x 225
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512 x 288
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400 x 700
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768 x 1024
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1024 x 512
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1280 x 608
Form Title Cite
No citation provided.
Info
Segments
Related
Thumbnails
Exit Clip Mode
You have requested to see a portion of the video outside of the clip.
Click OK to switch to the full video or click if you would like to stay inside the clip. You can always go back to the clip with Tools and Clip Mode