Posts Tagged: Talis

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16
Dec 25

What We Built While Everything Was Being Taken Apart

News has emerged that, after divesting the Talis product suite to Kortext, Sage Publishing has let the Lean Library product suite go in a management buyout. It will be interesting to see what direction the Lean Library product suite takes from here. This means that Technology from Sage is no more.

You can read the press release and draw your own conclusions about how “deeply” Sage believed in lean library.

This marks the end of several months of upheaval and the beginning of more uncertainty as people are laid off right before Christmas. Many are angry and hurt by how the process was handled. My own observed experience showed that communication swung between poor and nonexistent, fuelled by a legalistically cautious “say nothing” mindset. I can only assume that this wasn’t unique to my situation. Maybe I’ll unpack some of the lessons in a future post. For now, it’s still too raw to be fully objective.

Instead, I want to highlight some of the things that we did as individuals who worked together collaboratively. Three different companies were put together to form Technology from Sage. They each brought a need to streamline process and communications. To understand each other. To understand the market they operated in.

None of the things we achieved happened without people on the ground using their knowledge, expertise, experience and enthusiasm to bring good ideas to the table. There were the inevitable frustrations when good ideas were not listened to, but despite the odds I think we achieved some remarkable things.

Speaking from my own perspective, the Operations Team were the interface between all the different teams and the customers. We (Laura Unwin and I) made it our business to find out what is happening. To ask the ‘why’ question as often as possible and many times when it wasn’t comfortable. We established clear communication lines with the Product Team, Technical Teams, Sales Teams, Marketing Team and Leadership Team.

We fought for visibility of process so that the endless check-in update style meetings could be dispensed with in favour of specific places that people could go and look to get the information they needed when they needed it and without having to wait for next week’s meeting.

We brought three different support systems together into one so that the whole team could see exactly what tickets were coming in and how they could be dealt with. We set it up so that everyone could own all tickets regardless of product, meaning that there was always someone who could see the new tickets coming in, or the old tickets that had sprung back into life, and take appropriate action.

We documented everything. Every process had decision trees written out so that they could be reviewed by those for whom it was new, or tweaked for those who saw an opportunity to make something more efficient. The goal was to understand why we did something and never do anything just because that was the way we had always done it. And we certainly never wanted to enter the same data in multiple systems in order to try and keep teams on track.

We championed transparency. We could see exactly which stories the developers were working on. We could see which product briefs the Product team were building out. We could comment on anything, supplying examples of customer behaviours to help a member of the Product Team get into the detail on a new feature, finding specific records that the development teams could use to build tests around, finding customers that the marketing teams could use as exemplars. We supported the teams around us by understanding what it is they needed, when they needed it, and how to get it to them.

We built our people up. We encouraged them into new skill areas. We spent time with them on difficult problems. We helped them to have a voice. We encouraged them to champion the customer and to ask difficult questions. We backed them up. We helped the business see our team as a source of truth.

Now we’ve watched that hard work unravel due to what felt like an abrupt shift in direction from the parent company, which only months earlier had described its commitment as a long-term one. We were apparently “the future”. Trust in the message and those delivering it evaporated when one day in September we sat in an all hands meeting being told how great the summer has been and championing the successes of the teams. The very next afternoon we were told that the end was less than a month away, and we now should plan to tear it all apart. A stark contrast. To split teams. To extract systems. To face an uncertain future.

It has been hard, and will still be so. But I am so very proud of the people we worked with on the ground. The people who came together during the worst of times with care and compassion for each other. The people who faced what felt like the bureaucratic impersonality of HR when dismissals came with no prior communication or indication that they were imminent. The people who stood by their principles. The people who were left behind with an uncertain future and who now look for other roles.

We bear the impact of decisions in which we had no say. That impact may take time to fully settle, but I hope that as we move into new roles and organisations, these experiences will shape our character. I hope we will carry forward the lessons we’ve learned, using our influence and position to act with greater empathy, clarity, and effectiveness than we were able to in the past.

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5
Jul 12

Too early, too slowly

You’ll have heard the news. Talis Systems is being wound down. The considerable investment that Talis have made in fostering the vision of the web of data has resulted in notable successes with notable organisations such as the BBC, the Ordnance Survey and the British Library. I’m proud to have been a part of the word-class consulting team that helped to get these organisations to a point where they could see the benefits of and join the web of data vision. However, the commercial realities of a small organisation working in a market that is growing at too slow a rate meant that we could not sustain the required level of investment.

For the last year and a half I have been talking to organisations about how they use data and how they want to take steps to make that data more openly available. This is worthy stuff, but for most organisations this is also experimental stuff. Some were more wiling to go for the ride than others, but even those organisations baulked at changing everything all at once.

And that’s not surprising.

I’ve written before about how graph thinking and open world assumptions make you approach a project in different ways. Some organisations are not ready to do that.  They feel that the change to a more open approach challenges their existing revenue streams.  Yet they don’t see that the people who currently pay for data in its existing form will continue to do so for some time because they too are resistant to change. However, there will come a time when those customers will also feel they need to change the way they do things. If you want to protect your current revenue stream you have got to explore some new opportunities so that you are ready when your existing customers move to a new technology.

But still, as employees working in an uncertain climate, not everyone is willing to risk their own standing within an organisation. Especially when you look outside that organisation and you see unemployment, recruitment freezes and belt tightening.

Which brings me to the factor in winding Talis Systems down which couldn’t be foreseen, and that is one of pure timing. A general attitude of wariness has emerged as a result of the current economic climate; the Queen’s jubilee and a longer royal wedding holiday pushed spending decisions into the following months; a typically apathetic month is usually expected in August when everyone is on holiday and a decision freeze for the Olympic games all served to make people put off purchasing decisions, especially where those decisions related to experimental projects. We can’t afford for everyone to wait until September to decide to do something.

This indecision is one of the indicators of a slow moving market that is not ready for commercial exploitation by a small business.

So we were too early. We had a vision for easy data flow into and out of organisations, where everyone can find what they need in the form that they need it through the use of linked data and APIs, and where those data streams could be monetized and data layers could add value to your datasets. But for many, the vision simply seems to be more of a dream. The difference between a dream and a vision is that a dream is more fantastical, while a vision is a practical goal. I think we had the vision, but others saw it as a dream, something unobtainable, something floating around within the cloud computing, big data, semantic web and linked data marketing spiel.

Other organisations besides Talis, sharing similar visions, have all had to change the way they present themselves as they realise that the market is simply not ready for something so new.

I have had the privilege over the last few years to work with many very smart people, both within Talis and within the organisations who engaged us as consultants and providers of a service around their data. I wish we could have gone on for longer, but sensible business decisions are made and have to be stuck to.

I look forward to sharing with you what I’m going to do next.

As a footnote: I should point out that Talis Education Ltd are still going strong with the Talis Aspire reading list management tool which is used by around 25% of UK universities and by similar organisations internationally. This is where Talis Group investment will be focused.

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8
Oct 10

Remove the dust sheets

It’s high time I removed the dust sheets from this blog and tried to discipline myself to actually write something.  To be honest I think I should try to stop thinking in sentences of 140 characters or less.  Twitter has probably clouded my ability to think thoughts longer than a text box with a countdown.

So, change is afoot again. If there is one thing that Talis (my employer) isn’t, it’s static.  The Talis strapline ‘Shared Innovation’ is exactly what we do on a daily basis.  I am currently shifting my role from a purely library focus, dealing with library customers in the library world to dealing with anyone who wants to work with semantically formed data published on the web of data.

How is this different from libraries?  Well, to some extent it is no different.  We are talking about standardising the publishing of data in machine readable form, whereas Library’s deal with information published and catalogued in a fairly standard human readable way.  One of the reasons that it is so easy to find things in a library (no really!) is because there are standard ways to represent, through classification, where the main topic of a book sits, and therefore which books it should be next to on the shelf.

Thus it is with Linked Data and the semantic web, except here the field is so new that we are still evolving the ways to say things about things, and ways to find what other people are saying about things. I plan to explore some of this stuff in later posts.

So, over the coming months, in my consultancy role, I will be getting the opportunity to meet other people who are getting started with the idea of linked data, and sharing with you some of the first steps experiences that I too have been through.

Now, how many of those sentences are longer than 140 characters?