A couple of weeks ago Kevin Robert, CEO of Wolters Kluwer Tax and Accounting, was out from the US as part of the business planning process and spoke to all of the Sydney-based staff at the IntelliConnect launch.  It was a rare treat to hear about Wolters Kluwer strategy in person and from the highest levels.

Jessica has already blogged about Kevin’s presentation and specifically about the concept of “dynamic connectivity”.  My take on this is that it is a new paradigm based on solutions rather than products.  Each new offering should be a “methodology for success” that comprehensively facilitates their work, rather than a collection of features that may or may not be the answer to their underlying needs.

I found the whole thing quite interesting because it tied into something I read the other day.  The BRW article “Mind Games” (based on an HBR article “Reinventing your business model”) observes that the success of the Ipod was not the design of the ipod itself.  Instead it was the provision of a total package of solutions via the Ipod, ITunes and the ITunes store that revolutionised the mp3 player market.  For Apple it was a “ground-breaking business model that combined hardware, software and service”. 

For CCH the solution package could be defined as the seamless integration of content, functionality, access and service.  Don’t quote me on that, it’s my imperfect interpretation of what Kevin was saying.  What elements do you think CCH needs to cover to really answer your needs?

When I got to work on Monday a very glossy, silver Wolters Kluwer brochure had been left in everyone’s in-tray. Its title was Customer Focus.

Nancy McKinstry, CEO and Chairman of Wolters Kluwer, wrote the opening message. She outlines how the valuable partnership that we have with our customers enables us to deliver our promises of serving professionals with superior information and software solutions.

The brochure tells the stories of some successful customer-Wolters Kluwer partnerships. There are some really nice examples of collaboration. The General Manager of CT TyMetrix (a Wolters Kluwer e-billing and matter management business in the US) and an insurance company VP meet regularly and this constant relationship enables them to anticipate trends. An Italian pharmaceutical company has an active partnership policy and the product and marketing managers work with Wolters Kluwer to test innovative creativity. Both want to be first in the market and so they work together to achieve this.

We get to partner with many of our customers as they are also our authors and consultants. We worked closely with many savvy knowledge managers to ensure we had our new online platform Intelliconnect right. We really see the benefits of collaborating with customers and assume our customers do too but it would be good to hear more about what customers think about collaboration: do they feel it’s worthwhile?

Power is shifting from the producers to the consumers but do CCH customers feel more empowered? To a certain extent customers want to partner with their provider to get a better service but many customers also just expect the provider to deliver the right solutions without the customer having to tell them how to get there. Customers are not on the company payroll after all. Read Linda Moore’s blog post on the furore that developed at the “New Think for Old Publishers” panel held at the South By Southwest Interactive Conference to understand why publishers cannot expect their customers to come up with all the new ideas.

There is no doubt that CCH has to partner with customers to serve them better but I think we also have to intuitively understand their needs as people often don’t know what they want until they get it.

At our internal launch of the new online platform Intelliconnect last Friday, the CEO of Wolters Kluwer Tax & Accounting division, Kevin Robert, told us that “tool is a four letter word”.  Creating cool little tools to aid our customers in their work has been surpassed by a much more sophisticated concept: dynamic connectivity.

Sounds good but what does it actually mean? Well it’s all about knowing what comes next in a process and then streamlining that process. If we understand the relationships between the tasks in a workflow, between different departments, between a firm and its clients, between CCH and our customers then we will create a genuine solution. The aim of dynamic connectivity is to break down the barrier of conscious use ie you use something so automatically you don’t even think about it – like driving a car. You don’t think of your car as a tool to get you from A to B; you just get in and drive it. Likewise, Kevin Robert was outlining our goal of creating solutions that our customers don’t even have to think about using. It’s all about flow v. function.

As New Business Initiatives Director this is of course very interesting to me. Dynamic connectivity is not going to happen overnight so I will be working on initiatives that drive us towards it. First up we will be increasing the level of enhancements made to our online services and I’ll blog about them as we progress so watch this space.

Last week was possibly the most exciting week at CCH Australia since I started working here as part of the Knowledge Services team.  It was the staff launch of IntelliConnect, our new research platform which will be rolling out to customers across the Asia Pacific in the next few months. 

For those of you who haven’t heard about IntelliConnect yet, it is a worldwide initiative of Wolters Kluwer to develop a new way of hosting and searching all of our CCH content.  It was launched in the US in April and Asia Pacific is next off the rank. 

Up until now, I would say that the way publishers presented legal and accounting information online was pretty close to the way they presented it in print.  There was no exploration of how the online medium could fundamentally change the way you accessed that information.  IntelliConnect is all about exploring that new digital paradigm.

For fellow librarians familiar with databases in the arts and sciences, I would say think of Proquest or EBSCO and how powerful they are to use for research - then translate that to the legal and accounting environment.  It is so easy to modify and narrow your search, or flick individual results into a document tray while you keep searching, or email yourself the full text of a set of results to work through at leisure.  

IntelliConnect is the biggest single initiative to come out of Wolters Kluwer Asia Pacific in the 2 years I’ve been here, and it’s creating a fantastic buzz around the company.  You’ll probably hear plenty more about it from me, I’m a sucker for effective research solutions!

CCHatter is a blog with multiple authors from CCH Australia who will:

• share new business initiatives
• voice opinions
• debate current issues
• ask questions
• provide company, industry and product news

We want to use CCHatter to engage with our customers and the online community and to provide a window into the world of CCH.