Content production & Property rights

"The two main meanings of the word content have a strong relationship. That what is contained, and the feeling of satisfaction. The content must make us feel content "

With the rise of digital media the terms content management was introduced. Companies bought expensive so called content management systems. What is the reason behind this and which content is meant. At first simple internet sites where build. They were basically information hierarchical systems were you could zoom in on information by clicking. But there were complicating factors. Multi lingual sites for instance or rapid updates of the site by multiple personnel. Who was responsible for the content. The communications department or marketing / sales or even the ICT department, multiple sources so to speak. It's hard to manage the content production and maintenance and at the same time manage flawless publication or distribution.

Complex content management systems were introduced to manage these complex situations. As internet activity exploded and new media were added even media independency of content became an issue.

Con"tent (? ∨ ?; 277), n.; usually in pl., Contents.
1. That which is contained; the thing or things held by a receptacle or included within specified limits; as, the contents of a cask or bale or of a room; the contents of a book.
I shall prove these writings . . . authentic, and the contents true, and worthy of a divine original. Grew.
Con*tent" (?), v. t. [F. contenter, LL. contentare, fr. L. contentus, p.p. See

Content, a.]
1. To satisfy the desires of; to make easy in any situation; to appease or quiet; to gratify; to please.
Websters Dictionary, 1913

Content production

Usually content is produced by professionals. The copywriters, photographers, interviewers, journalists, artists and so on. They earn a living from it so intellectual property rights and content ownership is a big issue.

Digital media have made it possible for every individual to generate his or hers own content. The Digital camera is accessible for every individual. Anyone can make digital videos and show them to the world. This happens more and more. Meanwhile we are used to see events reported by mobile phone, made by accidental bystanders. I personally saw the 9/11 incident on the internet – I was in Amsterdam at the time - only 20 minutes after it happened.

The production of content is no longer the professional’s primate. Consumers are just as good a source. This applies to broadcast media but even more so to modern enterprise customer portals. Where experiences and information are exchanged. The fact remains that content intake and content distribution requires standards on a technical, but also on an editorial level.

Content intake portals will come alive over the next decade the content generated will be matched by smart matching protocols and semantically distributed to the appropriate channels and communities.

I see three types of content being produced and distributed
1. Editorial content generated by professionals (TV, Radio, Newspapers etc)
2. Open Source content generated by the blogging society (rapidly becoming the worlds most important source of information when disclosed properly)
3. Consumer driven content facilitated by companies that value their customer’s opinion and use it to their own advantage.

Content intake

The fact that every individual can generate content and publish it is an entirely new concept. The availability if huge amounts of content requires standardized content intake mechanisms. Portal technology has everything to create content intake portals. Available anytime, anywhere with the appropriate machines. A digital camera with UMTS connection for instance. The portal could even supply templates in which form, colour and shape are prescribed in order to prepare content in advance for media independent distribution.

Mind you content intake applies to all portals where multiple individuals create content. The 200 web masters that manage the content of your intranet, the customers that asks you questions and even the professional content intake in the publishing industry.

Content distribution

The infrastructure for content distribution is complete anyone in the world is able to connect to the infrastructure and is free to choose the preferred device (paper, screen, audio) to receive the required information. I stated earlier that every medium has its own characteristics. It’s very likely that you’ll stop reading an article on your computer screen when it takes you longer than 5 minutes, but you can read a book for hours.

The content generated must therefore be stored in such a form that it can be distributed automatically to the desired device.

Property Rights

New initiatives like web 2.0 give us a different angle. Users create their own content. And with that they are less willing to pay for it. Recent surveys pointed out that consumers are not willing to pay for information like news or entertainment. The discussion about property rights and copyright protection will continue until we find new ways to link creators of information to consumers of information other than through royalty constructions. Only recently Microsoft changed its opinion on copyright protection. Imagine the most powerful copyrights defender gives up the battle. What’s the rationale behind this. Competition? Better use my illegal software than someone else’s?

We have seen some interesting initiatives to change the income model. The first was David Bowie who issued stocks via the Internet. Effectively he sold all his royalty rights on his music and lyrics in one go. He reportedly cashed $ 54 million.

Free bonus download offers that are only accessible through a specific key available on an artists original CD.

There will be a lot of experimenting in this area until a dominant business model arises.

Independent content management

I see independent content engines in the future that hold all functions from intake through storage to distribution. They will act as an information exchange where content and commercial information is

Mixed is the best desirable fashion. I predict a strong future for the news agencies that have the vision to start acting like an information exchange, or can the webvertising agencies form themselves into digital information agencies. Time will tell.

Open source content creation

Many community environments are active in which content is created by contribution of individuals. Entertaining environments like You tube are well known, but when you realize that individuals are in the process of creating the largest knowledge base on the planet by writing blogs on all kinds of topics. Estimates show approximately 75 million blogs exist today. Wikipedia (Wiki = fast) is gathering knowledge with the speed of light ( it started I 1996). This illustrates the force of customer involvement

Meanwhile companies are building and maintaining their enterprise portals and web logs. They try to facilitate their customers by giving them an information platform to communicate on.

Companies should treat their internal process as they treat their external digital relationships. Eat what you sell. Every company a portal and an editorial staff.

Content and knowledge management is every companies biggest challenge

Summary

Means : The global IP network facilitates everything. Companies will see that there is no need to build their own infrastructure and networks anymore, but outsource their entire infrastructure. It is what Sun Microsystems said years ago. “The network is - and will remain – the computer”.

Message : Content has only value in the proper context so the context is in fact the message and content merely a driver to come back frequently. Communities drive the context trend

Media : The web will become ( if it is not already) the most important information source for mankind.

Stategic Life Cycle Management

“For every door that closes, ten other doors open. Just choose the right one”.

With the introduction of electricity, it took another 60 years to overtake the energy market. The introduction of hydraulics in the market of draglines generated a far more drastic effect. It took less than 20 years and all traditional dragline producers were no longer in existence. This happened to a lot of technologies. The type writer, hard disks, Photo cameras. The traditional players have a focus on their own “traditional” market and its needs.

Back in 1996 we tried to find an answer to large ICT investments. Since innovations followed each other in rapid succession it was hard to keep up with all changes in the market. Release management of software, doubling processor speed every 18 months, 40 percent of the software acquired was never used and shelved. It was time for a decision making framework.

We called it Strategic Life Cycle Management and studied many cases to find a similar development for all the cases we studied.

Many publications on life cycles I read I leave unreferenced but it comes down to a fairly simple mechanism that gives handles for strategy development, investment decisions and above all interpretation of the state of a company, it’s competition and the market it operates in.

life cy·cle (plural life cy·cles)
noun

Definition:

1. stages of development of living organism: the series of changes of form and activity that a living organism undergoes from its beginning through its development to sexual maturitythe life cycle of the snail
2. all stages of development: the complete process of change and development during somebody's lifetime or during the useful life of something such as an organization, institution, or manufactured product

Life cycle positions

A life cycle starts when a new technology or technique is introduced that replaces an old one like electricity replacing steam energy. The life cycle ends in the same fashion. The technology is been replaced by something radically different. Like the hard disk and the flash memory.

The introduction of a new technology triggers end of life innovation in the old technology, trying to fight off the inevitable. In this stage there is the fight for the customer and the primary driver is improvement off technology. Innovation goes in little steps that follow each other rapidly. Look for instance at mobile digital devices and their development over the past fifteen years. The old technology recedes and becomes oblivious.

There are many new players exploring the new possibilities. This stage ends when a dominant design emerges. Many players will merge into larger few companies and a shake out takes place leaving only the companies with the best accepted technology

In the second stage competition is not about technology but about functionality or image. Innovation takes larger steps and is about ease of use or consumer identification (fashion or emotion). Marketing is the main driver and there are fewer competitors. Extensive market research drives the developments and the output is a best of breed product. A second shake out takes place and only a few dominant players remain.

This starts the last stage of production innovation where price is the main driver. There is fierce competition and players will do anything to out smart the competition. The will automate production, reshuffle distribution. Organise market dominance etc.

At the end of this stage something new will happen. A replacing technology will arise forcing the remaining companies to do a last effort to keep up. Make or buy. Companies that are still financially healthy will buy new initiatives. Others will try to adopt the new technology and learn how to use it them selves. Both strategies hold dangers.

Buy and incorporate successful initiatives in the standing organisation often leads to a slow down in the necessary rapid innovation process.

Adoption of the new technology within the company often leads to a clash of cultures and political battlefield, resulting in the same slow down of innovation. Only companies with pockets deep enough to make a few mistakes will survive and participate in the life cycle that starts all over again

To find out where and what a company is, extensive analyses of its current status and products is necessary, as is a vision to the companies future. The gap this shows will be the framework for change and innovation. This can be as simple as the replacement of workstations for a large company. Replace now or wait another year. But it can be as complex a situation like the magazine publisher that is confronted with decreasing revenues I described in the publishing dilemma.

Summary

Means : The traditional value chain processes will largely remain monolithic systems as designed in the last decades. Changing them to an online environment would simply be too costly. Instead these systems will be circumvented by new interactive systems that facilitate e-commerce and customer service processes based on portal technology. Eventually the monolithic systems will be replaced by more network type solutions one step at a time.

Value chains

“The value of a company is the sum of all its customers, because at the end of the day they establish value by creating revenue, creating profit. Their involvement creates a reversed value chain”

It was Michal E. Porter – now a Harvard professor on strategy and competition – who introduced the idea of the value chain into business thinking.

The chain consists of a series of activities that create and build value. They culminate in the total value delivered by an organization. The organization is split into 'primary activities' and 'support activities.'
Primary Activities
· Inbound Logistics
· Operations
· Outbound Logistics,
· Marketing and Sales
· Service
Support Activities
· Procurement
· Technology
· Human Resource Management (HRM)
· Firm Infrastructure.

This of course is a company’s internal view. The introduction of companies ICT functionality outside the companies boundaries, stretched the idea of value chain to “chain integration” between companies. Thus creating integrated B2B or B2C value chains for the entire production chain better known as the supply chain. Or supply chain management. Production is a one-way-street, but with fully integrated processes information flows both ways.

The introduction of personal and trusted devices into the life of individuals stretches the value chain even further. Now the end of the chain (final delivery) can be included. Here something revolutionary happens. These trusted devices can talk back. The individual can react on the delivery immediately and add value in response.

The traditional production and value chain becomes a two way street, allowing customers to influence the addition of value and with that influence the process!!

Strong examples are off course YouTube where all content is created by its users. And there are many more in all types off industry like gaming, entertainment, finance, services etc.

The basic value chain theorem states that ‘margin’ is the created added value. This implies that a company’s main objective is profit. What is meant here is the difference between the total of sales income and the total of cost related. When customers start to add value by creating content or creating trusted relationships with other customers this may in the end result in increasing profit (or less cost of sales).

Two-way value chain

The traditional value chain can be seen as a fixed sequence of activities repeating itself in a predefined rhythm. The process can be planned in such a way that value output can be predicted based on productivity – effort = operating profit. This requires a strong regime because every hiccup in the production process leads to loss off value. This paradigm applies to production processes. Service processes are treated in the same fashion in many publications. Value chain thinking is very dominant.

In the digital world there are reasons to discuss the value chain approach. When customers can affect business processes they become less predictable resulting unpredictable forecasts. The processes are no longer standardized nor can the sequence or rhythm be influenced by the company itself, other than creating artificial thresholds. IVR (interactive Voice Response) Systems are companies’ favourites to manage down the unpredictability of input and effort instead of facilitating customers who take the effort of contacting them with a service that helps both customer and company.

It is necessary to scale the means behind processes to the maximum effort needed. Like the mobile network that must process all calls and SMS messages during the first hours of the New Year. Or what would happen to a banks payment system when all customers decided to submit their payments at exactly 8.00 pm? These processes actually behave like a network. Replicating relations and processes time and time again.

Change in management approach

Business processes that serve external digital relationships need to be managed differently. Processes are offered to customers in the context of business- or consumer portals. The whole complex of technology, media and content, business process etc must be managed integrally.
The days of the ICT dominated projects are over. Portal creation is a multi disciplinary activity, requiring different management styles and methods. Discussions of ownership and other issues related to change in processes needs to be the responsibility of the highest officer in rank. When processes are behaving like networks, the way they are managed will probably be by a network type of organization.

Responsibility and hierarchy become less important than contribution. Authority within a project team will be based on contributed value. Projects become more complex and more political. This endangers the possible project output.

Strong strategy frame works must be defined to keep all energy within the project targeted at the creation of value.

Companies ask frequently for PRINCE II certified management. The people responsible have to realize that these methods come from an ICT dominated age. In these multi discipline environments I’d rather only use the strategy and decision making frameworks provided.

Old and new

Many new initiatives in the digital world use a technology called web2.0. Not really a technology, but a set of web functions allowing individuals to create their own environment. They can manage their own information in the internet’s information overflow and share their profile, information and favourites with other individuals, thus creating a so-called “social network”.

The profiles created are used to target information that fits these profiles. Imagine what this does for marketers. Examples are for instance Google Adsense. The semantic (contextual) approach of information delivers a new range off communication possibilities mainly based on the content provided by the users.

These companies appear invisible to the outside world. They use digital strategies like e-mail cascades or blog buzzing, becoming popular in the internet community. They only become known when they succeed and then it’s too late to compete. These types of community initiatives cover almost every topic. Dating, gaming, finance, networking, sharing, info, news, etc.

Look at social or business networks like Hyves, XING or LinkedIn. You’ll see that just one single facility bring people together in a favourite environment. People are loyal.

Traditional companies have not yet discovered the impact of web2.0 type of solutions in their customer relationships. They are still using CRM and flat internet solutions. Although all of the Fortune 1000 use portal technology to service their customers only few succeed in creating a value added environment for their customers. Most end up with a costly internet site.

Companies should build customer portals that create value for all stakeholders instead of scaring IVR solutions that hold the mechanism of creating income by delivering pour quality and or service.
This shows that there is more than an outbound value chain. The inbound value chain will become more important as use of digital relationship platforms grows.

Some companies are already valued by the number of their customers. Mobile phone operators for instance. They have a business model that links customers and profit 1-on-1.

The reversed value chain consists of a different type of process. The first is facilitating the consumer / customer. Make life easy or entertaining in the digital environment. Second is content generation. Customers should be able to add content concerning the company or its products and services. They should be able to share experience and, in that capacity, act as either the vigilant consumer when service fails, or the companies ambassador when they are enthusiastic about it. Don’t forget to privilege or compensate them.

Customers should be able to contact other customers building a strong network. Customer’s interests can be dealt with in this manner. Proactive companies will deal with these challenges. The trusted relationship will win in the end.

Companies should facilitate the federation of its customers. They should not be afraid of customer power, but find ways to use it to their advantage. In the digital world knowledge is readily available and so is competition.

Summary

Means : A reversed value chain dealing with interactive customer contacts requires flexible process support and connectivity to primary processes and data structures. New multi disciplinary organisations and governance structures are required. Companies that are able to tune their organisation and infrastructure to the needs of tomorrow will profit from these new possibilities.

Message : Companies will aim at customer involvement, strengthening their marketing message. The trusted third party recommendation is invaluable and trusted digital media will become the prime instrument to achieve trusted digital relationships.

Media : Companies will start using web2.0 portal technology to facilitate customer participation for both PC and mobile devices, maybe even digital TV.