DIALOG - A FORWARD LOOK Notes For An Address Given at ONLINE '83 Chicago, Illinois October 10, 1983 by R. K, Summit
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A.
INTRODUCTION
I am pleased to have the opportunity to go over with you some of the new product and service directions we are pursuing at DIALOG. First I will review what has been happening to us as a company since our spinoff in 1981, and detail our current corporate relationship. Second, I would like to describe our corporate mission as we see it, and indicate directions in which we will be moving over the next 1-3 years. B.
CORPORATE DEVELOPMENT
In early 1981 spinoff planning was undertaken in earnest. My management and I had long felt it desirable that DIALOG operate outside of the government contracting environment of Lockheed Missiles & Space Company. With the spinoff which occurred in June of 1981, we incorporated previously "borrowed" functions of finance, contracting, administration, human resources, and legal. We were established as a separate and fully accountable profit center. In August 1981 Lockheed decided to evaluate divestiture of DIALOG. - We have been approached over the years with expressions of interest. - Lockheed decided to get out of the commercial airline business with enormous write-offs, some of which the sale of DIALOG could offset if it could be effected in 1981. - It wasn't clear at that time that information services was a line of business that made sense within the corporation. In early 1982 it became clear that divestiture would not be accomplished in 1981. Continue divestiture initiatives? Remove DIALOG from marketplace? Later in 1982 the decision was made not only to continue DIALOG within Lockheed, but to establish an Information Systems Group which would include DIALOG and two other recently spunoff companies - CADAM and DATAPLAN. -1-
Information Systems Group was formally established in early 1983. As part of a general corporate reorganization, the companies remain intact as separate organizations, but report to a group president. Establishment of Information Systems Group was important for several reasons: -
Formal acknowledgment by Lockheed management that information systems and services are an important part of its future business.
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Assurance of continuity of service. Provision of formal machinery and resources for growth and development.
I can report to you with confidence that: DIALOG is no longer on the market. - We receive full top-down support* from Royr Anderson, Chairman, through Larry Kitchen, President and CEO, and Dick Taylor, Group President to me as President of DIALOG. For the first time in DIALOG'S history we have the machinery in place to operate effectively within a commercial marketplace. C.
MISSION
To lead into our look at the future, let me read to you DIALOG'S Statement of Mission: To develop and provide services which utilize the information storage, manipulation, and communications capabilities of computer and telecommunications technologies in the provision of increasingly effective access, presentation and dissemination of civilization's recorded knowledge. Basically the statement says that we will utilize computer and communication technology to provide access to recorded knowledge, and to add further value by reformatting and/or reprocessing it in useful ways. Implied within the statement is that we also assume responsibility for informing people of the benefits of such services and training them how to best utilize these services. To digress for a moment - you may note that profit is not part of the mission statement. This is not to say we do not intend to be -2-
profitable - we do. Rather, I look at profit as a constraint as opposed to a goal. if you offer a useful service which is properly priced, you should be able to recover your costs, and provide a return to your stockholders; otherwise you go out of business. Service is the substance of the activity; profit in a competitive environment is a measure of the success of the venture. Along these lines, it has been our policy to price as low as possible. This is to attract the maximum possible usage and highest possible growth. Consistent with this policy, we. do not as a rule increase prices except in direct reaction to royalty increases. D.
A FORWARD LOOK
In the context of our corporate setting and our stated mission, we are focusing our development in 4 specific areas: - Continued database additions and enhancements System service features and efficiency New product developments Enduser services Each of these will be discussed in turn. 1.
Continued Database Additions
From mission statement you can see that DIALOG will continue to serve the full spectrum of needs of the information user. There t wil}, however, be some change in direction. - With some 180 databases and 80 million searchable records, a searcher can reasonably expect to solve most any significant information retrieval need through the DIALOG service. - Consequently our future direction is to be more selective in database additions. Whereas we added 43 databases in 1982, we expect to add on the order of half that many in 1983. It is interesting to note, however, that even our additions in 1983 exceed the total offerings of all but the three leading U.S. services. A final point is that we will continue to experiment and test file types beyond our traditional bibliographic files; such as -3-
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Source document (full-text) Handbooks and directories Encyclopedias People and organizations Current news Numeric and statistical
Primarily though, our direction will be to make the databases we have more easily accessible. An excellent summary of our rather extensive database activities was, by the way, given by Bob Donati in a luncheon talk at the UPDATE '83 meeting in Boston last month. 2.
System Service Features and Efficiency
DIALOG now has some 50,000 customers throughout the world with interfaces to all major domestic packet-switched networks and leased-line connections to Japan and Great Britain. Accommodating to levels of growth of 20-30 percent per year has been challenging and besides using significant amounts of resources usually has required a major computer upgrade annually. This year though, in addition to growth accommodations, there are two important systems developments underway: a) The first is known internally as DIALOG II. We have undertaken a major"rewrite of DIALOG with the following objectives: Incorporation of users' suggestions Greater processing efficiency - Greater flexibility for incorporating new features in the future Provision for larger, consolidated databases - Provision for simplified multi-file searching Provision for optional security password New features are being developed in a manner so as to be backward-compatible (insofar as possible) and will be introduced incrementally as they become operational. It is planned that you will start seeing these new features by early 1984. -4-
b)
The second major systems development is in the area of telecommunications. Currently we are developing an extensive domestic private datacommunications network with initial nodes to be located in cities of major DIALOG usage. The objectives will be: Better response time Better reliability Higher speed Special services such as interfaces to internal corporate networks, overnight printing on local terminals, and automatic SDI output to terminals DIALNET is planned for initial availability by mid-1984.
3.
New Product Developments
Several new product developments are currently underway which are planned for fruition in 1984. The first is: a) Report - Many of you are already familiar with the current version. It is undergoing revision based on Beta test feedback from several users. - Basically it allows field values to be extracted through a series of menu-driven prompts to provide userspecified reports. ..*" b)
Source or Full-Text Files Expect to see more source data files as this closes the service loop: citations - abstracts •* primary source records Besides currently provided HBR and CBD, we have undertaken a major effort with Information Access Corporation to provide the text of many of the articles behind Magazine Index and National Newspaper Index
c)
Electronic Mail A major new service for all DIALOG users planned for mid1984 is electronic mail. This service will allow conferencing and message communication: -5-
Between users themselves Between users and DIALOG personnel Between users and participating database suppliers (and the reverse) In addition it will provide for - Electronic delivery of PRINT output Electronic delivery of SDI output Electronic delivery of search and SDI output from one user to another user It is my hope that someday soon offline prints through the U.S. mails will take their place in the DIALOG Historical Museum next to the IBM 2321 Datacell (the first massrandom access storage device used by DIALOG). This was an electro-mechanical, hydraulic pneumatic device with reliability problems in each system. 4.
Enduser Services
The "car in every garage" addage of the thirties is rapidly turning into "a personal computer in every livingroom". With IBM and IBMcompatible P/Cs selling at 100K units per month, we are witnessing perhaps the most dramatic phenomenon of the entire computer revolution. The final direction of DIALOG development that I will be discussing today is that of enduser services. We have in planning or operation a variety of activities to introduce the P/C user to online information services and to facilitate their use. a)
The first was KNOWLEDGE INDEX or KI for short which was introduced last December. - Non-prime time and weekend service Greatly reduced rates - Simplified language Selected subsets of databases We are evaluating the development of a somewhat similar service for prime-time usage. The main difference would be that full prices would be charged for this service. This consideration has resulted from suggestions by our information specialist users who feel such a service would substantially extend database accessibility. -6-
b)
We have established a P/C Development Group within our own Systems and Operations Division which will develop and introduce custom P/C search and telecommunications software. Our intent is not to compete with the independent developers, but rather to cooperate with them by making DIALOG like a peripheral to a P/C. SCI-Mate from ISI and Search Helper from IAC are examples. Those of you attending COMDEX in two weeks will see a new approach to an intelligent front-end utilizing the IBM P/C.
In summary we have heard users comment about enduser services by saying others are a mile wide and an inch deep whereas DIALOG is just the opposite. It has taken us 10 years to build that mile of depth; now we're going to concentrate on building breadth through adding an intelligence and direct decision support facility.
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