1. The Seven Pitfalls
of Not Being
Ready for Digital
Transformation
Making Information Pay
May 6, 2010
David R. Guenette
Senior Analyst
The Gilbane Group, a Division of Outsell, Inc.

2. About the Gilbane Group
• Acquired by Outsell, Inc. in February 2010
• Long-time boutique analyst and consulting
firm focused on content management
technology
• Practice areas include publishing, social
media, search, and XML
• Research has tended to be qualitative, such as
case studies and best practices
• Consulting has included long-term
engagements with major publishers and
associations

3. About our Research
• Digital Magazine and Newspaper Editions - Growth,
Trends, and Best Practices (2009)
• Collaboration and Social Media (2009)
• Beyond the eBook- Trends in Digital Book Publishing
(2009)
• Social Publishing with Drupal: Building Success with
Content and Community (2010)
• A Blueprint for Book Publishing Transformation: Seven
Essential Processes to Re-Invent Publishing (2010)
• One of three eBook studies planned for this year

4. “Blueprint” Study
• BISG is a research sponsor,
partnering with The Gilbane Group
• Six vendor sponsors support the
research
• Publication date: June 2010
• Freely distributed

5. What are the seven essential
processes?
1. Planning
2. Editorial and production
3. Rights and Royalties
4. Manufacturing
5. Promotion and marketing
6. Sales and licensing
7. Distribution and fulfillment

6. These processes are recursive,
complex…
…and often not integrated

7. Many publishers are not “digital
ready”
•Too caught up in legacy product
models
•Not agile enough to respond to new
opportunities
•Too busy bailing to navigate well

8. What happens if you are not
“digital ready”?
•Based on our current research
•Interviews and case studies
•And client engagements

9. Planning…
• Print-centric planning model
Doesn’t accurately or flexibly allow for digital
products, their cost, or their revenue
• Mindset of “digital-after-the-fact”
Blinds the publisher to significant digital
opportunities, including digital-only products

10. Digital transformation in planning…
• Business intelligence becomes a key editorial
planning tool
• Developing new content products from more
efficient and granular content management
expands product range and number
• Early meta-data capture supports the
development of interoperating and
transactional processes for publishers
• Will require systems and business analyst-
type roles

11. Editorial and production …
Content not optimized for digital
delivery:
• Not “chunked” for easier product derivatives
• Trapped in proprietary and opaque file
formats
• Content is overly expensive to produce in
newer digital formats

12. Digital transformation in editorial and
production …
• XML-First (theory) and XML-Early (the realistic
probability) requires more taxonomy and DTD-
type/schema content structure analysis efforts
within editorial roles
• Copy-editing functions will grow more
important as meta-data and structural tagging
implementers and QA front-liners

13. Rights and royalties …
Content not optimized for digital:
• Overly complex and time-consuming work to
track, manage R&R, especially with backlist
• Hard to calculate and support newer digital
business models
• Barriers to new business models, even as
there is an urgent need to launch and test
new business models

14. Digital transformation in rights and
royalties …
• Contracts must change to conform to a wide range
of alternative editions
• Contracts must include chunk-based remuneration
conventions
• Integrate rights and royalty metadata with content
• Require system integration specialists to work with
R&R processes
• “Product Manager” roles needed

15. Manufacturing process…
Non-optimized manufacturing processes:
• Overly costly and complex steps to produce
different formats, outputs, and custom
products
• Challenges in fully adopting digital printing,
on-demand printing, and other alternatives
• An inability to properly manage and curate
digital assets

16. Digital transformation in manufacturing…
• Significantly supports the use of digital printing
• Digital asset distribution platforms and/or
services will increasingly drive automated
distribution to print vendors and out into the
supply chain
• Improved automation will depend on the
success of ERP and EDI systems integration
within title information management platforms
• It remains unclear whether existing TIM
platform vendors will take the lead

17. Promotion and marketing process…
Non-optimized promotion and marketing
processes:
• Overly complex and time-consuming steps in
using and sharing title information and for
distributing all types of promotion and marketing
material to all relevant supply chain partners
• Inability to readily support critical social media
outlets for product promotion or to easily expand
discoverability
• Inability to properly control and manage
marketing assets

18. Digital transformation in promotion and
marketing …
• Digital asset management platforms will become more
common
• Pertinent metadata and relevant title content information is
captured earlier in the publishing processes
• Customer relationship management (CRM), supply chain
management (SCM), and syndication-based distribution of
marketing information will reduce marketing staff but
require greater technology skill sets
• Social media and communities will require book publishers
to retrain marketers as social community managers, who
will need to interact with planning process-level product
managers

19. Sales and licensing process…
Non-optimized sales and licensing
process:
• Inability to generate custom publishing
products
• Inability to automate sales and management
of subsidiary rights
• Higher costs and complexity in trying to
expand sales channels, including direct sales
through ecommerce

20. Digital transformation in sales and
licensing…
• Supports title “discoverabilty” and automation of CRM
systems with ecommerce platforms and direct sales
• Requires tight integration with promotions and
marketing process
• Significant changes in sales models, however, must
wait upon the integration of the various publishing
processes, largely through the application of XML-
early repositories and adequate business metadata
• Pressures on brick and mortar book stores—and print
itself—will greatly increase
.

21. Distribution and fulfillment processes…
Non-optimized sales and licensing
process:
• Cumbersome and expensive one-off
mechanisms to pull and push content across
an expanding number of supply chains
• Inability to automate transactional and
distribution processes for digital products

22. Digital transformation in distribution and
fulfillment…
• Book publishers will have to build up expertise for
ERP and EDI process integration, as the content and
titles themselves carry the intelligent meta-data to take
automation to its next level
• Warehouse and fulfillment costs will be better
constrained, and digital printing will prove to be a key
element of these savings, through the use of DADs,
just-in-inventory, returns reductions, and lower
transportation and shipping costs, to name a few cost
reduction areas

23. Digital Transformation and the Points
of No Return
• Book Publishers: Start with what you know
• Digital Publishing Technology and Service
Vendors: Start with what your customer—the
book publisher—knows
• Plus ca change…Non!… The more digital
publishing processes interoperate, the less
publishing stays the same
• See what the innovators are doing
• Pilot, test, measure
• It’s not all or nothing

24. And Take the Blueprint Survey!
10-minute survey seeks to gain detailed
information about what is really happening
among the full spectrum of book publishers
related to ebook and digital publishing efforts,
and the "pain points" and barriers encountered
http://Publishing.questionpro.com

25. David R. Guenette
The Gilbane Group, a Division of Outsell, Inc.
Cambridge, MA
david@gilbane.com
www.gilbane.com/xml
www.twitter.com/billtrippe
617-497-9443, ext 219