Director, European Business Development,
Wolters Kluwer Global Platform Organization
Since April 2009, Guy Van Peel is Director, European Business Development, for Wolters Kluwer’s Global Platforms Organization, and is a member of the management team of this technology group. From 2004 until 2009, Guy worked in Wolters Kluwer’s European Legal, Tax & Regulatory division, responsible for monitoring content management and development programs across European geographies. He also lead a small team of skilled professionals located in the Netherlands doing research and development on Semantic Web technologies and their potential use in the company.
Guy started his career with Wolters Kluwer in 1987 as a product marketing manager for legal and tax publishing products. In that role, he was part of the core team that achieved the successful commercial launch of the first legal CD-ROM publication in Belgium. Since then Guy has held various managerial positions related to electronic and online publishing in Wolters Kluwer Belgium, Spain, and Italy.
Guy holds a Master’s degree in Law from the University of Antwerp, and a post-graduate degree in Information Management from Vlerick Management School, Ghent. He lives near Antwerp with his wife and 3 children. Apart from spending time with them, when away from the office he likes cycling, jogging, tennis, and reading; also he’s an “aficionado” of Mediterranean cuisine.
Be Fast or Be Last : that was the title of Chapter 2 of a book published back in 1993 (Fast Cycle Time, by John Meyer) and it still strikes a cord with me. It seems to me this mantra is more true than ever, as we embrace innovation in this world anno 2011 – which is subject to change at a pace much higher than when the book was written. Read further >
“A lot of people in technical professions just don’t ‘get’ design. They think it’s just putting on a pretty interface”
That’s not me saying it… I read it on the Communications of the ACM website, which published two very interesting blog posts by Jason Hong (assistant professor in computer science at Carnegie Mellon) on “Matters of Design.” Read further >
User experience design is a hot topic in my own organization these days. I stumbled across various articles recently that address this fascinating topic. I’ve come to realize that it’s undervalued and also often oversimplified. (Note: other contributors to this Intelligent Solutions blog, for example my colleague Ornella Zampieri, have explored facets of this same topic). Read further >
Publishers are experiencing – or should I say “undergoing” – the apparently unstoppable growth of information on any thinkable subject on the Internet. Amidst the abundance of content, the power of search engines, and the pervasiveness of social media, they are grappling with methods to keep their target audiences engaged. Content is a commodity, and the value proposition of traditional style publishing has become problematic. Read further >
As an invite to an international marketing congress, the following intro made an impression on me: “marketing has become blatantly intrusive, bombarding the retinae of consumers with a salvo of mixed messages that leave little or no impact.” Wow, I thought, that’s a way woo your audience. But what really first caught my eye though is the theme of this congress: “Return on Relevance.”
That same afternoon, I happened to stumble upon an article in ACM Magazine, about the concept of LifeLogging. Both things combined provided food for thought…and for this post. Read further >
In a meeting I attended last week it struck me how informally we often speak about certain concepts that are key in defining state-of-the-art knowledge products. In this case the discussion was about the importance of a comprehensive approach to classifying our tax, legal and regulatory content, and about what kind of classification system to use: taxonomy, thesaurus or other. Read further >
For the major part of my professional life I have always answered the question “So, what business are you in?” without a quiver of a doubt: “I’m in professional publishing.” But today, it’s proving more complicated to answer the same question, as the term “publishing” clearly falls short in describing the industry in which we work. We are now even moving beyond “information retrieval,” into a variety of solutions that under a common denominator could be labeled “knowledge support” solutions. Read further >
