I was in a very sunny Wolverhampton on Tuesday to interview Simon Weare, development director at PCS Publishing, for a sponsored content piece in the next issue of InPublishing magazine.
You’ll be able to read the full article in late-March, but I thought I would share a few titbits with you now.
Whenever I do an interview, I look for insights about publishing’s future: what could we all be doing better. Listening to Simon, I came away with five tips on how publishers should organise their operations to best effect:
- Streamline your workflows. In challenging times, you can’t afford to waste time on duplicated or inefficient processes. Audit your workflows and cut out the unnecessary stuff.
- Set your content free. Every item of content (the component parts, not the pages themselves) needs to be stored in such a way that it can be easily retrieved, repurposed and republished through whichever multi-media channel is the flavour of the moment. The future belongs to the nimble.
- Create a single customer view. The SCV is not new, yet many publishers still soldier on with only a partial picture of their customers’ activities. This means wasted time in marketing planning and poor decision making.
- Get in the cloud. It’s a simple concept. In effect, you are just using someone else’s computer. Why waste resource on hardware and infrastructure costs when you don’t need to?
- Explore the potential for shared services. Publishers have been sharing some services for years but we can extend it further. We should be open to radical thinking to allow us to concentrate resources on where it matters most.
Few would argue with any of that. The challenge is to find a quiet moment, away from the daily firefight, to strategise and make sensible long-term plans for the business.
