Publishing in the Knowledge Economy - DTI Home Page

Publishing in the knowledge economy
Issues for competitiveness
publisher interviewed stated that “the use of the
Internet for direct marketing has made my
business much cheaper to run”.
The responses to our questionnaire in the
areas of e-commerce and ICT illustrate clearly
that the vast majority of respondents have a
website and a clear majority have a site that
delivers content rather than being purely for
information purposes.
As far as enabling technologies for
production, distribution, advertising and
customer relationship management are
concerned, the picture is more patchy, but a
clear majority have an intranet and a majority
have or intend to deploy in the near future, fully
digital workflow, content management and
customer relationship management systems.
Slightly less than half have, or intend to deploy
in the near future, XML for media-independent
storage and data interchange. Publishers who
are already using content across a number of
platforms and channels – mainly
academic/STM/reference, B2B magazine and
directory publishers, major business information
database producers and a few newspapers
have moved furthest in the direction of
sophisticated metadata-driven content stores.
Responses to our questionnaire on
expectations for the potential of different
opportunities over three years also show that
most publishers see the use of e-business
technologies as extremely important (see
SWOT section in Part 1). They see them as a
means of creating new products and services
and as a way of optimising both editorial and
production processes and ordering, sales and
marketing processes.
There are extremely important initiatives
occurring across the board in the use of
e-commerce within the supply chain, including:
• The automated returns process and
initiatives to automate invoicing and payment
in the book supply chain
• Electronic advertisement trading trials are
underway in the magazine sector, and
movement towards Sales-Based
Replenishment
• Newspapers are moving rapidly towards
electronic advertisement acceptance and
there are some that have implemented
electronic trading of advertising. Some are
deploying sophisticated multi-channel
CRM systems.
Much more detailed analysis of the application
of ICT to transactions within the value chains of
publishing companies is contained in a parallel
Pira International Ecommerce Impact
Assessment Report on the publishing sector.
15.7.2 Challenges
Many publishers, both large and small, struggle
with the complexities of adopting new
technology. These difficulties are both at the
strategic and technical level. This is partly
related to the skill shortages identified earlier,
but it also relates to the lack of confidence felt
by senior and middle managers in their ability
to assess in detail the business case for
technological projects. One senior manager
stated: “We have well tested methods for taking
decisions on whether or not to publish new
titles; but when it comes to taking decisions
about implementing technology there is a lack
of sound methodologies for assessing the costbenefit
of each proposed project.”
There is a lack of standards in most areas
of technology adoption, making it difficult to
integrate systems effectively. Many of the
standardisation projects within the book and
magazine industries are making progress, but
these take time.
Action point
6 Sector-specific/common technology awareness
forums and other methods to communicate best
practice to be devised on key technology
opportunities aimed at both strategic and
technical levels and audiences.
7 Recognising that it is not the role of government
to mandate standards, it should use its
influence as far as possible to support open
standards for content provision on all existing
and new platforms.
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