David Bercovici, Project Manager, Strategic Publishing Operations, Hachette Book Group

MM: There are things that we’ve seen as a function of having researched creative users since 1991. The creative user, whether they’re a Mac or PC user, basically thinks of him or herself as a “craftsperson” first. They’ve invested a tremendous amount of care and concern and time into developing his or her craft. That is how to take an idea through an iterative process and bring it to full realization or fuller realization.

In many respects, that sense of tradecraft and mastery of his or her toolset becomes a filter that repels anything that’s not directly related to his or her craft. Oftentimes, the fastest and most direct way of introducing new ways of working or changes in workflow among tradecraft professionals entails, “Look at this.” It’s a sort of watch-do.

It’s almost like watching kids learn to dance. You can’t read about it. You can’t talk about it. You just have to do it.

So then what we’ve found in terms of change management programs that entail lots of creative people — it really almost has a Sadie Hawkins Dance vibe to it. That is to say you expose them to new behaviors. New ways of working. Not as a top-down managerial fiat or mandate, but as a peer sharing with other peers, “Look what I’m doing, here.”

That’s also one of the other aspects of an academy of peers. You get this peer-led learning process of common tools in a shared context. That’s what we’ve found to be the most-effective way of instituting a significant organic change with a minimum of disruption.

DB: That makes sense.

MM: One of the things I’d like to shift to here, David, is — as you did this bottom-up user requirement in advance of either upgrading the Artesia system or deploying the new system, which you subsequently decided on North Plains… At some point, you began to correlate those user needs. User-feature requirements and/or workflow issues… with larger business requirements.

You inasmuch said that — that there’s a shift going on in the book industry. Both in terms of its business model and the nature of the market. Then, how we align our workflows and creative processes to these new economic realities.

Could you give us a quick survey of some of the changes you’ve seen in the book industry, per se? And maybe even address things like social media and social networks becoming part of the bookmaking or authoring bookmaking process?

DB: Sure. When you mentioned business goals, I guess there was one step in our decision-making process I forgot to mention. We took the feedback we got from our super-users, and then we presented that to our senior management — which included representatives of managers from all of our various departments.

We basically put it all in front of them and said, “What should we be focusing on?” This is before we even started any kind of vendor selection. This was just purely, “Here’s what people are asking for. What should we focus on?”

We are fortunate to have senior management in place who are very much behind technology projects — recognizing how important having best in class capabilities is to the functioning of the company. Basically, they told us, “If you’re telling us that making this system easier to use and making ways for people to get content in there more quickly or more easily and making it easier for people to search for content — if that’s important — then let’s just do it.” If the content’s not in there consistently or people can’t find it, then what’s really the point of the system?

They were behind it. We didn’t really have to twist a lot of arms. That then served as the kickoff of our vendor selection, where we said, ” Let’s go and examine what’s out there.”

In terms of the book industry — to answer your question — certainly when we first started with our Artesia system, we were already thinking in terms of electronic content — at the time — e-books were emerging and people were expecting them to explode. We had an e-publishing program of sorts, where we set up a program online for soliciting manuscripts and establishing discussion forums. But I don’t think the technology was quite ready to support that sort of interaction yet.

We were very early adopters of that sort of thing. But it took some time I think for a lot of that type of online content to shake out. Now there are a couple of new e-readers out there. Sony has their new reader. And of course, Amazon has their Kindle product. So we are very much focused on making the supply chain that supports those products as easy as possible.

We are behind and have committed to the e-pub format for e-books. The idea is that we’re able to produce one industry-standard version of an e-book that can then be repurposed for reading on any device.

As far as social media and social networks go, we are about to launch our new corporate website. There is going to be — I believe — some focus in there on giving people more ways to find out where we’re having a publicity event such as readings or book signings.

Also with our digital warehouse project, known as OpenBook™— which I mentioned earlier — where we are posting up portions of our content on the web. We have the option for people to use a widget that’s basically a piece of code that would allow them to post a snippet or a link to that snippet on a MySpace page or their own blog or wherever they like.

If someone says that they like the new James Patterson book, for example, they can say, “Hey. I just read this great excerpt from the new James Patterson book. Go check it out.” Someone can post that on their blog, and it’ll have a little cover image or something like that from the digital warehouse. This actually combines social interaction and digital content.

We’re certainly trying to get more into the viral marketing aspect of our books, to build some word of- mouth, there. That’s perhaps a bit outside of the DAM, but certainly as efficient as we can make the process of getting the content up there, the better off we’ll be.

MM: I had a conversation with Steve Sauder, the CTO of North Plains. I was asking him what were some of the new things — innovative things — he’s seen his users do. He mentioned the fact that the telescope product always had this yellow sticky note capability. You could attach a yellow sticky note to an asset to tag it with unstructured content.

He said, “Really, now, we’re beginning to think about using a wiki or a forum discussion board-like approach for users to comment, to tag, to put a story around the assets. Using that textual data that users put in. The story or the back-story. Using that to enrich the search function.

So, now social media blog forum discussion threads — using social media has a new class of metadata. One: for putting an asset or a class of assets into context. And, two: to facilitate their retrieval by more sophisticated search functions, as you’ve described.

Does that make sense to you? If so, could you expand on that idea in terms of how it might play out in your particular business?

DB: Yes. We haven’t looked into that North Plains function too much. I can see, though, the value of that type of interaction, as in the YouTube model. From what I’ve been told, they use a similar concept. Rather than trying to force people to “tag” a particular video clip when you do a search, it’s really searching the comments people make on the video clips. There’s this recognition that the people who are making the comments are the ones that in effect are inadvertently tagging the video.

MM: There’s actually a term they use to describe that. They speak of it as a “folksonomy.”

DB: Right. Yes. That makes sense.

So for us, I can certainly see that publishers who are doing a lot of repurposing of assets… Let’s say an educational publisher or someone who’s publishing cookbooks or something like that… where they say, “Okay. I want to find a picture of a bird or a picture of General Custer, or something like that.” I can certainly see how that sort of thing would be valuable. People just within the network are putting in comments and you’re able to search that sort of thing to identify assets that might meet your conceptual search criteria. This also alleviates some of the burden for tagging assets with metadata upfront.

That does make a lot of sense. For us, just within Hachette Book Group, we don’t do too much educational and reference kind of publishing where this sort of thing can have a major impact. I think it may have more limited use for us. We have talked about it somewhat, because we do do some collections like short stories and poems. We also do some cookbooks and things of that nature.

So there is the potential to have that sort of reuse down the road. I have seen the notes function in North Plains. The project we’ve undertaken has had a pretty rapid timeline. So we haven’t gone too much into that sort of advanced workflow. But it is something that I think once everyone’s gotten their hands dirty with the new system and there’s a comfort level with it, I think we will have to circle back and start looking at the more advanced function that we might want to utilize for the workflow here.

We also don’t necessarily consider the DAM as the best tool for this sort of feature where people are sharing ideas and feedback. There are other tools like SharePoint that are more well equipped and that can be integrated with DAM so that people are using one portal for finding content and sharing ideas.