LATENT VALUE and PERCEIVED VALUE.

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Author: Wiggins, Richard1

Another Expert Opinion

Jill O'Neill raises an important question: What constitutes value in the online world of 2006 and beyond? What delivers information that precisely meets the needs of the online searcher? And in terms of the information industry, what will people pay for, either through advertising, directly through a one-time payment, or via their company's subscriptions to high-quality databases?

Consider the distinction between latent value and perceived value. An old tale describes a company whose complicated machinery has broken down. The company hires the only local expert to fix the problem. He arrives on site, surveys the situation, and calmly takes out a screwdriver. He turns a set screw one quarter turn. They fire up the machine. It hums along happily, restored to perfect performance.

He presents a bill for $1,000 to the plant manager, who protests, "C'mon -- this is not right -- you spent 2 minutes and you want $1,000?"

The wise mechanic supplies an itemized bill: "$0.02 for turning the set screw. Knowing what screw to adjust, and how: $999.98."

O'Neill asks us to ponder how in today's online world whether the masses can assess and appreciate the value provided by online services. I think her disappointment with a DVD that lacked adequate expected content misses the point. Traditional commercial database vendors don't fail to provide the high-quality content customers need. To the contrary, they provide "the good stuff" -- content that's been vetted and categorized and polished for search and delivery.

What they don't provide is Google-like search capacity to sift through the good stuff, pulling the best of the good stuff to the top of the hit list, and letting users consume -- and conveniently pay for -- the very best stuff on a given topic.

We need to carefully define the "purchaser" in the disconnect that O'Neill describes "between provider and purchaser." Return to 1980, when the "purchaser" was supported by an information professional who knew which databases to search and how to search them. The information professional did a reference interview with the internal customer. The often-cumbersome details of searching complexity were hidden to the customer. All the scientist or engineer knew at the end of the process was that they had a stack of paper with the best research and information on the topic.

Fast-forward to 2006, a world where that researcher bypasses the helpful intermediary, does some Google searches on his or her own, living with what's encountered. This is extremely dangerous. We don't want bridges built or vaccines developed based on what's freely available on the Internet.

This is the challenge that the information industry faces: How do you take the good stuff, and present it to important specialized audiences -- the designer of the next bridge, the scientist working on the avian flu vaccine, the social scientist studying how best to prevent the spread of malaria using a Gates Foundation grant?

We must distinguish between the thousands of information professionals -- mostly librarians -- who did important specialized searches in 1980, versus the millions of people who search Google and other popular search engines in 2006. We can try to persuade the bridge designers, the vaccine makers, and the malaria specialists to go back to relying on their librarian intermediaries. Or the information industry can figure out how to make the good stuff as available and as relevant as a Google search.

As a professional database vendor, you may already offer the very best information in a subject area. But convenience of access, ease of search, and, as O'Neill points out, relevance of results are key to determining whether your target audience will consume your "good stuff" -- or whether they'll settle for what's easier to find.

Consider the example of Google Earth. This remarkable tool lets you start with a space view of the Earth and zoom into a specific city, a neighborhood, or even your house. Google Earth was pioneered by a company called Keyhole Systems, which Google snatched up when they saw the value in this amazing interface to, literally, a world of information.

But you know what? That data was available for decades. Google Earth merely packages data available from NASA, from U.S. weather satellites, and from a variety of commercial sources. Microsoft famously offered the exact same information in its service called TeraServer.com starting a number of years ago.

But TeraServer's goal was to prove that Microsoft server platforms could serve terabytes of content. Its goal was never to be useful. Thus it only attracted attention from geeks and from people who wanted aerial photos of their houses.

Google Earth is actually useful. It combines landscape imagery from a variety of sources into a single seamless interface, letting you zoom as if flying with Peter Pan from hundreds of miles above to a close view of a location or a building. The only limitation is the resolution of available imagery. When covering a firefight in Iraq, CNN relies on Google Earth for context. People who lost homes in Katrina were able to see before-and-after photos of their own houses from their remote places of refuge. Microsoft's TeraServer was little-noted and will not be long remembered. Google Earth -- based on the exact same data sets -- has changed our view of the planet.

So it isn't about whether the DVD has the "value-added" content you seek -- or ought to seek. It's whether the content is presented in a way that is easy to navigate, highly useful, and compelling. The "value-add" already exists. Traditional database vendors must learn new concepts of value: accessibility, simple interfaces, highly efficient and relevant searching, and compelling presentation.

Some companies "get this." Google is one of them. Google Scholar and Google Book Search demonstrate vividly that Google understands the importance of capturing "the good stuff" and presenting it in a way that millions of users in a disintermediated world will discover and use to good purposes.

The question is, does the traditional commercial database industry get it as well?

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By Richard Wiggins, Senior Information Technologist, Michigan State University