Where Do You Get Information?

Where Do You Get Information?

I like the push notices of email to tell me that there is new information posted somewhere. But the last email telling me about Tim Sowell’s latest post was sad. He’s stopping his run of thought leadership (truly) pieces at Operations Evolution. Sowell is a Schneider Electric Fellow and VP of System Strategy at Schneider Electric in the Common Architecture team in R&D.

This post will be my final one in this blog, as forum does not seem to be working as it once did, and we exploring new approaches to getting thought leadership out. Thank you for your interest if you feel like we should continue in some form, please post a comment.

Here’s his lead paragraph. Discover the rest of his thinking on the site.

In today’s “flat world” of demand-driven supply, the need for agility is only going to move faster in the next 10 years. This is driving leading companies to transform their operational landscape in systems, assets and culture in a shift to “smart work.” Agility transforms their thinking from a process-centric to a product and production focus, which requires a dynamic, agile work environment between assets/machines, applications and people. Aligned decisions and actions across a multi-site product value/supply chain is crucial, and  requires the ongoing push of a combination of automated (embedded) wisdom and augmented Intelligence (human wisdom).

Manufacturing / production companies have accumulated tremendous amounts of data over the past decades. Mostly they do nothing with that data. People like Sowell and Stan DeVries have been making sense of all the applications that can help customers succeed in this new technological reality of actually using the data well.

Media thoughts

It’s hard work maintaining a blog–especially when it’s not your main job. I know. I’ve done this for 13 years.

But the problem for thinkers and companies is–how do you get your information out?

It used to be you could use trade press. But shrinking ad budgets and demand for shorter pieces on the Web (at least that is current thinking in many places) have changed the way companies are relating to traditional publications. If you want to get out your whole message, you need to write it yourself. With the Web and search, you can write it and then try to get links.

I’ve linked to most of Sowell’s posts. Obviously not enough of you have clicked and gone to the site. On the other hand, I think there are inflated ideas of the amount of readers. A typical magazine Website in our industry may get upwards of 75,000 views a month. Or a couple may approach 100,000. Certainly not the millions that get publicized in the general technology press.

But if you drill down, a typical article may only get a few hundred views.

The way my site is constructed, when you visit you see several posts. I’m not really selling “eyeballs”. But depending upon the tool you consult, there are several thousand who at least see the headline if you don’t actually read it all. Since my site has few distractions–just a couple of ads and a few other pieces of information–the writing is emphasized.

So, I don’t know Sowell’s traffic (he’s on Blogspot, not the best platform) and I don’t know Schneider’s expectations. But the traffic was not sufficient.

The other company blogs I follow are informative, but they have changed over time to less blog and more PR-type writing. This one was different. I’ll miss the weekly read.

Media Landscape For Engineers

Media Landscape For Engineers

My new boss was chatting with me in his office. He turned to a shelf with notebooks and pulled one off the shelf. Opening it to a tab, he removed a section and told me to copy it and start my own notebook.

The contents were articles clipped and copied from trade press, B2B, magazines. He had given me a new position as program manager in product development. These were articles on project management and program management. This was my introduction to the trade press.

I subscribed and read a variety of publications over the course of the next 20 years collecting useful articles. Some of the magazines were quick reads. Articles were by people whose titles were “marketing manager” with the contents reflecting that point of view. Some were written by engineers or other practitioners with useful information.

When I became a trade press editor at Control Engineering in 1998, the media landscape was unchanged. It consisted of magazines delivered by the US Postal Service on a more or less regular basis.

Wow, but do we have so many ways of getting information these days. There remains the inevitable tension within the trade press of writing what advertisers want to see in print versus focusing on useful information for readers. Information availability moved rapidly from print to Web to email to Twitter to LInkedIn and Facebook.

Advantages and deficiencies

Web–I always had trouble “bookmarking” Websites to return to and read. Or to develop a regular system to go to my Websites to read what was new. It was usually impossible to see what was new, anyway. On the other hand, the Web is a great place to store large amounts of information whether for media companies or for technology suppliers. What I have always desired is a push notification telling me not only that something changed, but also directing me to what changed.

Pop-up ads and enticements, pop-overs, cluttered pages, proliferation of ads all serve to destroy my motivation to go to media Websites to read articles. The race to create as much ad revenue as possible has reached the point for me that I hate to visit to try to read an article.

You also have to beware the “listicle” article. Many devices are designed to get you to click–top 10, view three ways, here are 6 things you didn’t know about. Sometimes they even make you click each one individually. Know why? The publisher needs to improve page views and therefore ad impressions. I have mostly quit getting suckered in.

What I will do is go to an “advertiser” site for a good technical or business white paper or other such information. Today you are more likely to get the kind of information there that I used to copy into my notebook. Oh, and today, my notebook is Evernote.

Twitter–Initially a great conversation tool, now there is so much noise that I seldom look at the stream. The tools I used to sort through the flood often were killed by Twitter. This killed much of my enthusiasm. I still Tweet. Some people actually find them.

Email–Believe it or not, emails remain the best way of notifying people with reasons to visit a Website or otherwise send information. Maybe someday there will be a ubiquitous chat app (Messenger or Snapchat or Slack?) that would take the place of email–but wouldn’t it just be another form of email? In the meantime, it’s not email but the misuse of email that is annoying.

General media–I’m seeing many more articles in Forbes, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and other such general media publications that once would be seen only in trade press. Coverage of the Internet of Things, for instance, may be stronger there, as well as coverage of safety and security.

The Future

For the curious, check out the recent Notifications Summit put on by a couple of technology luminaries John Borthwick of Betaworks and Steve Gillmor who is a long-time reporter and analyst of technology. Many hours of video were recorded. They were great presentations and conversations about the developing technologies and uses of notifications.

Start with John Borthwick.

Or go to TechCrunch and search for Steve Gillmor.

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