The Information Provider Top 5 – in 5 Minutes!

Last December I signed up for the STM Association’s Innovations Seminar Flash Talk. It is one of the toughest presentation challenges out there: 20 slides with an auto advance feature showing each slide for 15 seconds. Designed to break up the usual 45 minute format of a conference, flash talks have the added benefit of terrifying perfectly capable public speakers and giving the audience something to cheer for as we, the speakers, try to stay on track, get our message across, and beat the inexorably advancing timer. After I tweeted about how I was looking forward to the talk, Brian Bishop, ex-Springer entrepreneur, tweeted back “I will be there to heckle your Flash talk, no worries.” That’s the spirit!

At MarkLogic, we’ve been working with customers in the information industries for over a decade and have been a big part of the industry’s transformation. Moving from publishing single purpose, single form products (example: a book) to an information provider delivering critical information to customers when and where they need it (e.g., Royal Society of Chemistry’s publishing platform) requires new approaches to both the business and the technology. We’ve seen a big impact among our customers as they have moved to Enterprise NoSQL. The combination of search and database allowed them to simplify the architecture and bring new flexibility to product creation by simply creating views of data instead of entirely new infrastructure for each new product. With the addition of semantics, we are now seeing our customer tackle categorization, metadata and how content is related. These approaches let organizations tailor content delivery to different industries and uses. For instance, allowing research materials to be used in education contexts or finding commonality between data sets across disciplines like Biochemisty and Neuroscience. These are some of the hardest challenges in the industry and our customers are leveraging new capabilities to meet them.

Not to shirk a challenge, I decided to tackle all of THAT in my 5 minute challenge. Luckily I get to work with great people like MarkLogic’s Chief Content Officer Diane Burley. Diane and I came up with a top 5 challenges for information providers. We covered this in our official listicle a couple of weeks before the conference and using that I was able to create my talk, cover an entire industries challenges, and highlight new solutions including explaining what we mean by semantics – all in under 5 minutes.

Just to give you some idea of the scope, here are the …

Top 5 Challenges:

1. Getting data in fast isn’t the problem – its getting insights OUT faster
2. Data is complex – but users want complexity hidden
3. Not everyone has permissions to access all the data
4. Repurpose, repurpose, repurpose
5. Once you attract them – you must be reliable

Next Tuesday, Diane and I will be doing a reprise of the flash talk – timer and tension included! We’ll cover the background of what’s happening in the industry and how we came up with the list. Then, live on the webinar, I will take the flash talk challenge and do 20 slides in 5 minutes.

All you have to do is show up!

Title: Top 5 Publishing Problems Solved — in 5 Min!

Date: Tuesday, January 20, 2015

Time: 10:00am ET / 9:00am CT / 7:00am PT / 3:00pm UK Time

Registration:https://www.progress.com/events

See you there,

Matt