I was talking to another publisher yesterday and it again struck me just how difficult it is, particularly for established publishers, to address the differences between IT and the Business.

We ended up discussing a presentation that we had from a group of Reed Business CIO's a number of years ago where the presentation was based on the thesis that CIO's were undervalued. This was taken from some Gartner research where they evaluated the relative perceived values of various board members, with the CIO/CTO coming only just about HR Directors at the bottom of the scale.

The entire discussion started out around how to change that perception and get the business to realise that IT in general and CTO's specifically add significant value. However, in thinking it through, we actually came to the conclusion that in publishing, if our business did not understand enough about web publishing to take control of web development, then we would have serious issues, as our products are now all IT based. The interesting and somewhat surprising conclusion was that if we got it right, the role of the CIO/CTO should diminish.

So that brings me back to one of my key beliefs, that technical teams should be fundamentally part of the business and led by business people who understand enough about IT to be able to drive the teams forward. The team needs to be fully involved in the product development and understand the business drivers from the beginning so that they can keep product development ahead of business requirements.

Too often, you see development teams that are interested in the purity of the code, the immediate task in hand or indeed see it as just a job. In effect, the business comes up with the requirements, and the developers just have to deliver on those without really understanding or contributing to the business objectives.

RBI and RB Search has made great progress in this area with Product Development teams using Agile methodology working across business and IT, but we still often split the functions apart.

RB Search and Zibb has an exceptionally passionate team which it is a privilege to be a part of, but the thing that truly makes teams such as this such high performers is their full involvement and commitment to the product/business. Empowering the team to take the lead, to innovate and test ideas has enabled RB Search to power over 130 websites while constantly evolving new products. This would be impossible if the concept of IT and the Business existed within RB Search. Every member adds value and can see the effect of their contribution on the site(s) and the business.

So, to come back to the start, publishing has moved a long way in the last 500 odd years since Caxton, but really did not move very far for the first 485 years, and even the following 10 years was not a significant shift, but now it is really starting to move with User Generated Content turning what used to be a one way street into a discussion. Innovations such as blogs, wikis, search and widgets are all changing the very dynamics of publishing. In order to succeed in this new world, we need to be innovative, agile and aggressive and we cannot see IT and the business as different, in media and publishing, they are one and the same.