INNOBLOG

The Wall Street Journal dedicated an entire section today to the media industry (registration required). The industry is another fascinating one. The forces of disruption are just so obvious on every side. What is still less obvious is the best way for established firms to respond. Most recommendations push for relatively minor adjustments, or suggest that old media companies simply copy what new media companies are doing. My hunch is that there is a breakthrough strategy out there, but it requires a radical rethink of the media value proposition.

Anyway, the story that really caught my attention talked about the difficult of getting physicians to adopt Diagnostic Decision Support Software (DSS) that could help them diagnose patients. Producers seemed surprised that doctors have yet to eagerly jump on the new technology.

This should not be a surprise. Consider the value proposition from the doctors perspective. You believe your particular expert skill is being a great pattern recognizer, someone who can use their expert intuition and judgment to diagnose complicated ailments.

Along comes an if-then software program. Using that program not only threatens your reason for being, it requires that you have to learn new patterns of behavior. If you do adapt your behavior and the software program gets better, you might be putting your profession out of a job. Now, thats obviously a bit stark but directionally similar to the way at least some doctors would look at the software.

As is always the case, the disruptive route would be to find people who would be delighted to have software that was better than nothing at all. Imagine you were a sales person. You told a nurse practitioner: Are you tired of just doing the routine work? With this software, you could do more than you ever could do before. Its an entirely different conversation.

Whenever a company has to convince a customer about the value of a product that requires behavior change, expect the effort to be laborious. Whenever a company makes it easier and simpler for its customers to do what they are already trying to get done, expect great things.