From the Hart

Moving On

I have some big news to share: On March 1, I’ll be leaving my role at Factiva to join Dow Jones as Executive Vice President Dow Jones and President, Dow Jones Enterprise Media Group.  Dow Jones, as you know, is one of Factiva’s parents.  Please see the respective press releases from Factiva and Dow Jones. 

I’ve been with Factiva since its inception, and I have been CEO since January 2000.  In that time, Factiva has enjoyed continued success and the Factiva team has truly had a lot of fun.  Through strong customer relationships and continuous innovation we have been able to build award winning products and a strong financial position with year-on-year revenue and operating income growth.

While leaving day-to-day involvement with this great team was a difficult decision, it was made easier by the fact that as part of my new role at Dow Jones, I also become Chair of Factiva’s board, so I am privileged to remain involved in Factiva’s future success.  Further, I’m confident that I’m leaving Factiva as strong as it has ever been.  The company will be in the extremely capable hands of Claude Green, who has been Deputy CEO from the beginning and will become the Interim CEO on March 1.  He will remain in this position until the Board has appointed my successor.

I’m so grateful to all of you who have made Factiva so successful.  We have wonderful, loyal customers, excellent partners and such talented employees.  Without any one of these elements, Factiva would not be leading the market today.  To all of you, I want to say thank you so much for the support that you’ve given me over the years.  I will miss working with you, but I will enjoy keeping track of all your achievements in my new role. 

For now, I will not be posting as frequently as I step into my new role but will post periodically as I find new things that will be of interest to colleagues and friends in the information industry.

Enterprise, Group and Individual Customization – We’re getting there!

I have been in Europe the past couple of weeks and having spent some time with customers, I am pleased to say that a great deal of progress is being made towards the “holy grail” of delivering information based on who I am, what I do and the specific information I need to do my job.

Meetings with clients in the B2B world often focus on how to help salespeople/relationship managers become more productive through better implementation of technologies designed to manage information overload.

It was great to meet with a client and see a practical implementation of a sales portal that delivered broad information about the industry in which this company competes, complimented by information specific to the industry sector this salesperson was focused on and finally a custom view of information built around the salesperson’s client list!!

We have been talking about this for a number of years, knowing the technology was available, it was simply a matter of time before it would be built into an application – and now it has.

An example of one of Factiva’s concepts of integrating information and customizing it to the individual user’s needs is the screen shot on this page – designed to illustrate how information can and should be presented to individuals based on who they are, what they do and what information they need to do their job.                                       

Also included are a couple of examples of how the custom taxonomy might be set up for this sample executive recruiting company.

The good news; we are moving from concept to reality!

   

Blogs are Business

We all knew the blogosphere was a part of our lives when friends sent us links to their “new baby blog,” “getting married blog” and other personal milestone blogs. 

We also knew that blogs were becoming part of business news and information as we began to monitor blogs as part daily routine - similar to the way we check e-mail, most of us have set up a feedreader to help us keep up with our favorite blogs.

And as proof that blogs are part of business life… 

As some of you know, Factiva prepared a Business Terms index (click on first small thumbnail) for The Financial Times Deutschland throughout 2005. We saw the term “blog” rise from 9th out of the 45 words we were tracking in January across the German media, and move to number 1 by the end of 2005. As the article points out, the term “blogs” was the most widely mentioned business term in December above terms like Risk Management, Crisis Management, Corporate Governance, Turnaround, ERP and Wikipedia.

This was the German press.  When applying the Business Terms Index across all of Factiva’s sources, the term “blog” moved from number 4 in January to number 1 in December 2005.

Overall in 2005, the term “blog” ranked second out of a list of 45 business terms.

A frequently used business term and a growth phenomenon, blogs are a source of business news and information, and an increasingly important part of our personal, group and enterprise information collections. Blogherald estimates that there currently are over 100+ million blogs. CNet News.com estimates that the number of blogs is doubling every 5 months at the rate of roughly one blog a second.