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PROFILE: MIKE TANSEY
John Murphy profiles the President and CEO of Thomson Scientific. Some people who run large information services know what the research community wants because they have worked in science. Mike Tansey is an exception. His background is a little more literary. Everything he knows about what researchers want comes from talking to them. Some would say this lack of pre-conceived notions of what they might want is the reason for his success. As president and CEO of Thomson Scientific and Healthcare, he has been at the forefront of developments in electronic delivery. While newcomers and dotcoms have tried to take the market away from established players such as Thomson, his company appears to have lasted the course. Pat Tierney, CEO of Thomson Financial, and Tansey's former boss when he was head of Thomson's Reference, Scientific and Healthcare Group, said: 'Mike is an unusually gifted executive in that he has an unusual mix of sense of the marketplace and the technology. There are those who understand the market and those who understand the technology, but very few who understand both. 'What serves him well is that he spends a lot of time in the marketplace with customers, understanding how they use information and what it is that they need. He then translates that himself into thoughts about product. He understands the underlying technology of the business well enough that he can see immediately how to translate a customer's interest into product features. 'Mike's biggest contribution was in bringing scientific information to the web in a very accessible manner. There had been moves to make information available electronically in various ways. But things like 'The Web of Science', which Mike pioneered, really took advantage of the web in delivering this kind of scientific information in a way that was both economical and compelling. 'Mike has a great sense of humour. He is a very charming guy, which you might not always find in that part of the industry. You would enjoy having a pint with him after work.' Tansey was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, to a family with no scientific background whatsoever. He did reasonably well at school and went on to study English Literature at Stirling University. Tansey's family had friends and relatives in the States and, after he graduated, they offered him the chance to spend a year there. He mostly stayed in Washington DC during that year and took a few casual jobs working in shops. During this time, however, he met and married his wife, which meant that he had come to the US to stay, so he had to think about sorting himself out a proper life. His first thought was to study further under the US system and he enrolled in a graduate programme at the University of Virginia studying English Literature, but he soon left. He said: 'There was a notion that I would pursue an academic life, but I got disillusioned about that pretty rapidly.' He started working at the University of Virginia in administration, which at the time was beginning to computerise its patient records. Tansey found himself working with the data-processing department on the requirement for a patient index, which involved talking to all the users about what they wanted, and feeding that back to developers. He said: 'From a career standpoint, the ability to write a logical sentence translated into dealing with fundamental-requirement documentation for systems development.' Little did he know at the time that he was acquiring a core skill that would carry him to the top of scientific publishing. He later moved back to Washington DC and worked for Georgetown Hospital doing a similar job, before joining a publishing company called Aspen Systems as a business analyst. Aspen specialised in healthcare administration publishing, but also did a lot of information management consulting for government institutions and for law firms looking to manage information in complex litigation.
This was the early 1980s and the technology of databases was pretty novel. Tansey ended up running the IT for the consulting part of Aspen, which in the meantime became part of Wolters Kluwer. In 1987 he left to join a company called BRS Information Technologies, which was an early competitor to Dialog and focused on US academic biomedical information. He said: 'This was my first exposure to the scientific information business, but it wasn't really that different. At Aspen, we were building databases using text-retrieval technology targeting one particular group of professionals. We actually used very similar technology to that used at BRS, where we were looking at repackaging and aggregating databases for the biomedical community. It was very early days and things were very different. 'We were moving towards giving access to some of the big medical journals online, but they were telling us we had to embargo the information for 90 days after the print version was published. Everything was on a transactional pricing model, and people were very conscious about controlling costs because people could rack up a sizeable bill if you let people just browse around. That model really changed when the journals started publishing on CD-Rom. 'When I joined BRS the cost of computing was starting to drop considerably, so we were looking at ways of delivering information directly to a broader range of people. 'It was an enjoyable place to be but unfortunately the business was acquired by Robert Maxwell, so I decided that it probably was not the best place for me to be.' Tansey left to join the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) at the end of 1989 as VP of product development, where he oversaw from the start the transition to electronic distribution. ISI had seen a number of competitors entering its market so it had to move quickly to keep its market position. The two ISI flagship publications were Current Contents and the Science Citation Index and Tansey worked first on a diskette version of Current Contents and a CD version of Citation Index. He realised that in an electronic environment it was viable to print abstracts as well as contents, which made it a much more useful publication. Users switched from paper to electronic format very quickly, although the paper version of Current Contents still sells about 10,000 copies. He also realised that customers had their own databases of useful information, depending on their research interests, and having the basic information in electronic form allowed them to filter it into their own databases and set up alerting systems for their scientists. It was about productivity, not just information. The biggest problem in this period was pricing, as customers started to move from a number of print subscriptions to wanting site licences so that information could be distributed to anyone in a company or institution through the internal network. ISI was acquired by Thomson in 1992. By the mid 1990s the Internet was starting to make an impact with customers and it was obvious that the CD and diskette versions of journals would rapidly make way for web-based distribution. If the larger companies did not act, they would find themselves swept away by the myriad of start-ups, so Tansey was given the task of converting the main publication to the web. This evolved into 'The Web of Science'. He said: 'It was clear that publications like Citation Index were just waiting for something like the web to come along, because they were nothing more than a vast collection of hyperlinks. We started with the concept of making it easy for people to get access to everything cited in a bibliography - plus access to every item that had subsequently cited it would be very useful.' The web version of Citations hit the market by 1997. The ISI business had been brought together with the Derwent division, which was publishing patent information, and Tansey also took on the job of developing Internet versions of its products. By this time the dotcom boom was in full swing, but Tansey said that most of the high expectations were in the medical information field, and that scientific information largely escaped the hype and the pressures that went with it. He said: 'The fundamentals of science publishing have not changed dramatically. There are compelling forces that hold it together and it is going through evolutionary change rather than revolutionary change. Most of the hype has collapsed. The scientific information market has evolved to electronic distribution and the academic market has pushed back against journal pricing. On the whole, customers are better served than they have ever been.' Tansey believes that electronic distribution will dominate scientific information within the next few years. More information will be published freely on the web, but he thinks that companies like Thomson will continue to be able to make a living by making that information easier to access. He said: 'On the commercial side we are seeing an increased emphasis on intellectual asset management, looking at ownership of science and intellectual property. Historically this has been the lifeblood of the pharmaceutical industry, but we are seeing movement in different areas. We will continue to provide greater visibility of the landscape in terms of who has patents in what areas from a competitive intelligence and strategy standpoint.' Tansey said that the Internet boom has thrown up a few smaller companies with bright new ideas, but there is a long history of these publications being bought up by the larger publishers. He said: 'There are a number of things that have started from a small base and what happens is that, if they really do have a viable position that is beginning to challenge, then they end up getting bought. You can't get away from the fact that what determines your long-term viability is your editorial value, and that does require infrastructure and fixed cost to be able to drive it. The Internet is just a better distribution vehicle that makes the information more accessible to a larger audience. The Internet has changed it a little, but it has not fundamentally altered the game.'
Curriculum Vitae
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