Mirko Minnich Keynote at the Luxid 5.0 Launch

I attended the launch of Luxid 5.0 from Temis yesterday in New York City, atop the trendy Hudson Hotel, in a ivy-gilded tent as suitable for a wedding as a product launch, with a view of the Hudson River, and conveniently adjacent to a fashion event put on by Level 99 Jeans.

Mirko Minnich, SVP and CTO at Elsevier Health Sciences gave the keynote address, which I thought I'd cover in this post. In a crisp suit with a pastel tie, Mirko, who speaks with a light German accent, talked about enrichment and publishing.

He started with a humorous anecdote about his cholesterol becoming elevated precisely at his fortieth birthday and the challenge presented by trying to use a 700-page tome on cholesterol to answer his basic questions: what is this, how bad is it, what do I do next, how does this compare, etc.

Mirko then presented a model for how business value delivered over the web has evolved over time:

• Level 1: the website model, where people simply experienced the content. He called this the SVP model, short for search, view, and print.

• Level 2: the audience model, where you build a cross-enterprise platform that serves people on both sides. For example, in medicine, using common infrastructure to serve the needs of patients, physicians, and payers on the one hand and researchers, students, and nurses on the other.

• Level 3: the roles model: where you build "role-based, in-context, process-driven applications." This means, in effect, building applications that know who you are, what you're trying to do, where you are in the process of doing it, and then providing appropriate content to help you do it. (I couldn't agree more with this vision. See, for example, here, one of my many posts on task- and role-aware content applications.)
  

He talked about what it takes to deliver such Level 3 applications.

• Increased relevancy and useability
• Strong core features
• Web 2.0 expectations
• New content
• Increased precision, ranking, and recall
  

Mirko argued that publishers were "sitting on huge assets" which, given the ambient noise and his slight accent, I first misheard as something else, chuckling at the potential double entendre. (I've added a post tentatively entitled "Publishers: Sitting on Their Large Assets" to my to-do list for this blog.)

But seriously, I took Mirko's point and it wasn't the only time I heard talk of "improving the return on content assets" during my week in New York City. The fact is, most publishers have huge collections of valuable content and there are nearly innumerable ways to get value from it with a combination of imagination, re-use, re-purposing, and customer-centered -- as opposed to content-centered -- design.

Mirko said the way forward was to:

• Build the infrastructure for change. (Here again, I agree wholeheartedly and, word from our sponsor: we at Mark Logic believe that MarkLogic Server should be the XML centerpiece of such an infrastructure.)
• Create a solid content base (or, as I like to say, contentbase).
• Optimize the organization.
• Migrate to a user-centric focus.

Mirko said that people needed to move away from a "content is king" mentality and towards putting the user at the center of development. (Again, I agree. See here for one of my riffs on contextual design.)

He then closed the loop back to his original cholesterol story, painting a vision for how to distill and present just what needed from the 700-page cholesterol tome, giving me the idea to include an EPM-style goals management system to the process. After all, if you discover that you should be eating 3 servings of vegetables per day, then why not go the next step and start tracking progress towards that goal?

Overall, I agreed with Mirko's vision and I enjoyed his speech.

The only part that I get stuck on is pricing (which Mirko didn't discuss). People are used to paying $25 for hardback and $125 for a textbook. While everyone likes to complain about information overload, will people really pay more for less? Or, as the flawed beings that we are, will we irrationally persist in paying $50 for something that buries us in information instead of ideally $75 for just the bits we need (paying a premium for the time savings) or at least perhaps $10 for just the bits we need (thinking that we're not using the whole book, just a bit of it).

I know there's a demand elasticity question in there as well (i.e., will revenue be maximized selling fewer $75 things or >7.5x more $10 things). But, overall, I don't know.

My hunch is it's a generational thing and that over time it will become natural to pay a premium for less, more-relevant information rather than more, less-relevant information. I think it will happen. The question is when and what to do about it in the meantime.