Carl Hixson, VP, Digital Asset Management, McGraw-Hill Education

Recently, Michael Moon spent some time with Carl Hixson of McGraw-Hill Education (MHE), discussing the publishing technologies that MHE employs and taking a look at the current state and new trends in DAM for the publishing industry. The Journal of Digital Asset Management first published this interview in Volume Four, Issue 1 - click MORE for additional interviews and articles about the publishing supply chain.

MM: I’m here with Carl Hixson, VP Digital Asset Management at McGraw-Hill Education.

Carl, can you provide us with a summary of your background in terms of your particular background in DAM as starting point to this discussion?

CH: Sure, Michael.

I started out in the industry approximately 15–20 years ago, in the digital imaging space with Getty Images. Back when Getty was in the process of acquiring content and digitizing that content to evolve into what is now known as the Getty online environment. A wonderful opportunity to be really at the forefront of where I think digital technology, imaging and content converge.

I was with Getty Images for about five years. Following my time in Getty, I joined HBO (a Time Warner organization), and was there for close to seven years as their Executive Director of digital asset management. While at HBO, my team successfully designed, implemented and ultimately supported what’s known as their Digital Library. A wonderful experience, as well.

Both of these engagements enabled us to develop digital content management and ultimately enterprise content management systems for the media and entertainment space during the emergence of these technologies. My team at HBO developed a system that managed digital asset types that included rich media (photos/audio/video/animations), electronic documents, XML and web content.

We subsequently started to distribute content from those repositories to customer-facing environments like the HBO.com website and various other distribution channels.

A little over two years ago I joined the McGraw-Hill organization as Vice President, Digital Asset Management. My primary focus is to enable McGraw-Hill’s digital transformation, and to develop systems that facilitate enterprise content management, custom publishing and an increased global presence.

McGraw-Hill has offices located in over 20 different countries. It’s very much of a global operation. The transition from analog to digital content creation is something that McGraw-Hill has really embraced. My highly skilled team at MH is tasked with the assignment of developing the systems and distribution vehicles that will form the foundation of our digital platform.

In addition to that, we’re also implementing a digital publishing toolset, which enables our content creators to start developing content in digital form. By tagging content during the development process we create digital masters of our products, as well as XML representations of that content.

The digital masters of both rich media and what we call “dynamic content” are subsequently fed into our asset-management repositories. Then we can do some very creative things — like develop custom publishing environments. The fulfillment of multi-channel distribution to various mediums is also attainable as a result of effectively creating dynamic content. Certainly content-repurposing comes to life, here. These achievements are possible at McGraw-Hill, even more so than my previous engagements, because of the sheer magnitude and richness of our content. The potential is unlimited.

So we are well along our developmental strategy and our implementation roadmap. Our digital asset library is in full production. Both the rich media and dynamic content repositories are both online and rapidly growing. We’re just satisfying the Library’s capacity for content by feeding to them both, as rapidly as we can.

This digital strategy is inline with McGraw-Hill’s dedication to becoming more of a digital organization, and being able to leverage more of the global marketplace. Being intimately involved with the emergence and development of digital technology is both fascinating and rewarding.

MM: Would you spend a moment just describing some of the technology elements or piece parts of your content factory?

CH: We have what I like to call a best-of-breed architecture in place. It’s very modular. We have partnered with several technology providers to develop our digital architecture. We have some compelling search technology in place to provide rapid retrieval of our digital content.

We obviously have very massive Oracle databases running on the back end, and we’re using a lot of creative front-end elements, like Flex and Flash from Adobe and XQuery, to present an environment that provides a broad range of functionality, and remains seamless to the end user.

MM: And publishing technologies or tools?

CH: Basically, our publishing technology — I’ll reference back to the digital publishing toolset — is largely focused around Adobe CS and K4. McGraw-Hill made the decision to migrate away from Quark QPS and standardize on the Adobe toolset several years ago.

MM: Do you have a specialized XML database?

CH: We have customized our Digital Asset Library instance to also function as our XML repository. As a result of strategic vendor partnerships, and internal application development, we try to tailor technology to provide us with optimal solutions (based on business requirements). Quite often we take a bit of technology and introduce our own layer of customizations, to bring us the rest of the way there. We take it as far as we can “out of the box.” Then we introduce our development layer, in terms of customization, to really enable us to facilitate a solution based on what our particular business requirements dictate.

This is what I refer to as our “best of breed” approach.

MM: Do you work with a particular systems integration firm to do those customizations? Or do you do those internally?

CH: Fortunately, I have an internal team here of developers and DBAs and project managers and analysts that enable us to do most of our customizations. We develop most of our customizations in-house, and partner with systems integrators when necessary.

MM: Carl, if you would, can you put this into the larger context of a reprise or summarization of the state of publishing and media today? Specifically, the trend towards shifting to more of a digital business, and some of the implications of that — in terms of the care and feeding of the business.

CH: I think the publishing industry — more so than any that I’ve been involved with in my career so far — is now in the process of aggressively adopting this whole digital transition. I think the publishing industry stands to realize many benefits from the digital transformation, and McGraw-Hill is a premium example of an organization that will certainly benefit.

For 100 years, McGraw-Hill has been producing products (using traditional methods) very successfully, but has been very print-centric. Now with this whole paradigm shift embracing digital and becoming more of a digital organization, MH is realizing that digital is no longer a business luxury. It’s a necessity. An end-to-end digital transition is going to be required. It’s going to be vital for McGraw-Hill and other publishers to continually develop a digital awareness, in order to maintain competitive in the social networking age. Additionally, I think McGraw-Hill will realize new potential revenue-generating opportunities, and ultimately more channels of which to deliver our vast resources of quality content.

The delivery format is not just print, any more. Print has now become one of several delivery options. A button that you push among other buttons out there that say, Okay, how would you like your content delivered? How would you like your content transformed? What shape, what size? What format would you like it in? The end users of today demand variety and dynamic choices with regard to the acquisition of content.

In the digital model, print is becoming one of many fulfillment options. When you’re talking about digital distribution, the same content that produced the printed book should be able to be distributed out to the web, to a PDA device, to an e-book reader, et cetera — to a (future) device that hasn’t even been developed yet.

By us positioning ourselves in the way that we are, and managing our content and creating content in the manner that we are (tagging the content and producing XML), it enables us to store that content in a neutral format that lends itself truly to multichannel distribution. I think that shift is being realized now, even more so in the publishing industry than media and entertainment.

When I was with HBO, I always felt like we were the early adopters with regard to ECM technology. For a large part, the pioneers. That was exciting. It enabled us to do a lot of R&D and harnessing of emerging technologies. Now I’m seeing that the publishing industry is no longer laying back. With the emergence of Web 2.0 and user-generated content, publishers realize that they have to play in the digital space to remain competitive.

It’s very interesting to see how the publishing industry truly stands to benefit from this digital evolution.

MM: One of the things we’ve seen in a number of organizations — even the scale of McGraw-Hill — has been what you referred to as a paradigm shift. I sometimes think of it as a mindset. In terms of how we create publications. Or how we create material.

As you alluded to in your previous remarks, print used to be the primary destination. Therefore, everything kind of got optimized. The workflow of production activities and so on. Management optimized to driving it to a print page.

Now it seems to me in the mindset, it’s driving it to a database.