Stifling bureaucracy, UK office in steep decline, no direction
Pros
Great people throughout the business: lots of smart colleagues who believe in their products. Sales team is a real strength: despite many restructurings & layoffs, it still includes a lot of knowledgeable and experienced people who know the library market. Fairly sensible, pragmatic approach to product approval, scheduling & budgeting. Streamlined production processes means that its possible to deliver products quickly as long as they fit a narrow template.
Cons
Has rapidly moved away from caring about content to being a generic service provider, completely focused on the platform. Leadership doesn't understand the value of what product management does, and doesn't understand the strengths of specialist content-based products which have a lot of loyal users. There's no vision of what makes it distinctive from competitors, and an often slavish attempt to compete directly with the main competitor (EBSCO). Chronically disjointed: dozens of offices around the world from different acquisitions, each with entrenched processes and ways of doing things, and poor communication between the silos. Production processes where underskilled people have being using the same handed-down method for 15 years and have no idea how to adapt it even slightly: crying out for some fresh expertise in data processes etc. Very poor at staff retention and career progression. It's been made blindingly obvious to staff in the UK office that there is no real possibility of advancing beyond a certain level, as all of the management functions have now been removed and located in the US offices instead. Cambridge office should be valued as a centre of innovation but is just atrophying. Not great at deciding they want to do something and then putting the required resources behind it across all departments. Result is a lot of half-hearted initiatives and inefficiencies.
