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.

It has taken me a great deal of time to think about what I should post as my first entry to this blog, not because I do not have anything interesting to say (hopefully!), but more because there is so much that we could cover. This is one of the most significant challenges with working in Search, and even more so when you include semantics in search, there is so much to talk about and so much to do.

For a relatively small team like RB Search, the opportunities are almost endless, so prioritisation, as with deciding what to write about in this initial blog becomes increasingly difficult.

At the recent Google Zeitgeist event, I was fascinated to hear when asked what was his biggest concern, Sergey Brin respond that it was Opportunity Cost. I doubt very much if that would be the main concern of the leaders of many of the global top 5000 companies, maybe it should, as then companies may be a little more innovative.

Obviously in a much smaller way, this does reflect the core challenges for RB Search, in that there is so much that you can do, it is the things that you don’t get to do that worry you most….what opportunity have we missed?

It is an old metaphor, but it is very much like being in the sweet shop, although in this case the sweet shop is the size of a supermarket and you are being challenged to do the supermarket sweep, but to do it strategically, picking the most valuable items as fast you can and getting to the registers before the business model evolves again…sometimes even evolving the business model yourselves, just to disrupt the other shoppers.

All of this makes search great fun, as well as extraordinarily challenging. You need a team that is entirely focused, but exceptionally adaptable as you quickly migrate models, content types, semantics and products.

The Opportunity Costs of search are massive, even if you are Google, as there is so much you cannot do even when you are delivering a huge array of new products. Just some of the things that you need to think about and that I intend to cover in greater detail in later posts are:

· Zibb On Demand – syndicating search services across a global enterprise
· Pushing Search – using search to push content
· Industries – which should you cover and what makes them special to the users
· Semantics – taxonomies, ontologies, folksonomies and how these can help users get to an answer
· Content Types – thinking about search in a different way
· UI – evolving away from simple results
· Tools – which tools and why
· Crawlers & Data – variants for different purposes
· Relevance model – making them relevant
· Coupling – or not….ensuring you loosely couple systems
· Widgets – the next revolution, driven by search
· Team – brilliant people driving innovation and some very strange conversations
· And more as it occurs to me!

Now that I have got off to a start and got through my Opportunity challenge around this blog, I can hopefully start to talk more about the different elements of search and B2B mentioned above that make the difference.

So we've had this little Zibb experiment running for well over a year now and you haven't heard a word from us. In today's Web-2.0-it's-all-about-conversation-world, you have to ask "What were we thinking???" Well, to be honest, we were a little busy and kept putting the conversation off. Now after all this time, the impact of talking about the goals could be a bit like the sound of a tree falling in the forest when no one is there to hear it; but we'll bash on regardless.

Over the coming months we'll try to make up for the silent treatment we've given everyone by talking about Zibb.com, B2B and vertical search, taxonomies, ontologies, tagging, user interfaces, spam, entity recognition, advertising, and search in general. We'll share feedback users have given us, point out interesting developments in the search and publishing industries, and we'll offer unsolicited opinions. We won't tackle it with any structure and we won't constrain ourselves to any particular topics. Oh, and hopefully we won't just talk about ourselves.

We're going to let different team members contribute, we're going to be as open, honest and transparent as possible, and we're committed to the conversation. We don't take ourselves too seriously so please speak freely. We do take our business and our users seriously, so again, please speak VERY freely. Use the comments section on this blog as well as our feedback forms to ask any questions about the site, the team, the ideas, etc and we'll do our best to come clean.

Now we'll all go off to debate whether this is indeed the worst-first post EVER on any blog. I am sure to take a few hits from the team on this one...