Who is the publisher? When the enterprise becomes a publisher
Jinfo Blog

By Robin Neidorf

Abstract

At the conclusion of this year's FreePint Research: Enterprise Market for Mobile Content 2012, I make the case for today's (and tomorrow's) enterprise organisations to rethink themselves as aggregators and publishers, even more than licensors and acquirers of content...

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At the conclusion of this year's FreePint Research: Enterprise Market for Mobile Content 2012, I make the case for today's (and tomorrow's) enterprise organisations to rethink themselves as aggregators and publishers, even more than licensors and acquirers of content:

"...organisations must, increasingly, see themselves as publishers of mobile content. Any enterprise serious about untethering workers from their desks and put robust content in front of them on demand  needs to reframe its thinking as that of a supplier of aggregated content from various sources, both internal and external."

In fact, the enterprise has been a publisher since it created its first website, intranet or portal. But most organisations don't plan their content deployment as strategically as a publisher ought to. Despite advances in federated search and resource discovery, they still struggle with getting users to the right information in the right format, breaking down content siloes and measuring both usage and value of content.

These challenges are table-stakes for publishers: If you can't figure them out, you have no business model.

These challenges should be table-stakes for a strategic enterprise: If you can't figure them out, your information investment is losing value rather than creating business outcomes.

Because mobility creates new complexity in content deployment (technology, security, authentication, internal/external information silos, etc.), the same difficulties that have plagued desktop deployment are intensified. Mobile content deployment puts into sharp focus the benefits organisations can gain by revising their thinking to consider themselves publishers:

• All content – internal and external – can be treated as a single dataset. True, this will be a diverse dataset that requires a great deal of management to “normalise” it, but a single dataset is the only way to unsilo the content and make sure that the right pieces work together.
• Controlled access and security can be managed internally. Publishers need to consider how to deliver content to the right subscribers in the right format. Enterprises do too. When enterprises consider themselves publishers, they take greater ownership for resolving the challenges of controlled access and security.
• Desktop content – and discovery – improve even as mobile content delivery improves. Siloed content remains a challenge in the desktop environment, and discovery and usage of resources are priorities for many organisations today. Enterprises that consider their information deployment strategy as publishers can learn from other publishers about how to guide users to the right content in the right format for the task at hand, whether they are working from the office or off the smartphone screen.
• Content development, acquisition and licensing get more strategic. An enterprise that considers itself a publisher must take a more strategic approach to thinking about what content is necessary and how to develop, acquire or license is. This represents enormous opportunity to create a holistic strategy around information and content within the enterprise.

Want to take a closer look at these benefits? Contact me for consultation, brainstorming and knowledge-sharing. 

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