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July 28, 2005

Findings from Outsell's Information User Survey

Today, at an SIIA Brown Bag, Anthea Stratigos, CEO of Outsell, presented the results of their study of Information Industry User Habits, comparing habits today to that of four years ago. Outsell surveys knowledge workers to see how they acquire and consume information products. They surveyed more than 8,000 users across 20 industries and 10 job functions.

A few key data points:

The average knowledge worker spends 11 hours per week gathering and analyzing information, up from 8 hours per week in 2001.
Interestingly, the percent of that time spent on the gathering portion has increased from 44% to 53% during that period. Among sales & marketing types, that is even more pronounced, going from 8 to 13 hours, with gathering rising to 58% from 44%. People are spending more time looking for information, with only a modest increase in the time spent on analysis.

Users were surveyed for their top 3 criteria for using information. At the top were:
- Quality & Relevance
- Update frequency
- Ease of access and use

They also looked at the “top 3 unmet information needs” where they saw a trend towards more value-add information, such as Competitor Information and Private Company Info.

One of the top obstacles or problems in using information was listed as “not enough budget to pay for it.” Over the years that Outsell has been asking this question, this is the first time that this answer has shown up with any frequency. This could be due to the fact that corporations are centralizing their information purchasing, limiting the discretionary spending on content by individual users.

A few questions were asked about workflow-based tools. Across their entire user base, the most commonly mentioned workflow application was MS Outlook. Others mentioned were Financial Systems, HR Systems, CRM, ERP and Supply Chain apps. When asked about the importance of integrating content/data into workflow applications, roughly three-quarters of the users surveyed felt that it was very important. IT varied a bit by type of app and by user type, for example, Supply Chain scored 92%, CRM 85% and HR apps 71%.

Overall, Outsell felt that the trends were that users were spending more time searching for info than they would like. Some of that may have been caused by disintermediation (elimination of libraries). She believes that this will cause a return to greater use of “trusted sources” over time. Outsell feels that the big beneficiaries of growth in the coming years will be two groups:
1. Portal providers (e.g. KnowlegeStorm, GlobalSpec, Thomas) – ad supported portals that aggregate a lot of relevant vendor content;
2. Content companies who can do workflow integration on the high end
Conversely, the large, broad aggregators will face a strong run from Yahoo and Google.

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