Visual Knowledge

"Thursday, June 9, 2005
Search For Information Wasting Professionals' Time

Anthea Stratigos, CEO of Outsell, reporting on the survey results, "2001 vs. 2005: Research Study Reveals Dramatic Changes Among Information Consumers," concludes that professionals are shifting away from their Internet research methods of just four years ago to more efficiently gather information and get on with their jobs. They are now looking more to their peers and colleagues, "alerting" services, and other conveniences.

According to the new survey, 67 percent of professionals now go to the open Web for information, versus 79 percent in 2001. Fifteen percent rely on their corporate intranets (up from 5 percent), and nine percent consult their colleagues (up from 5 percent). In addition when seeking information fewer now prefer to get it themselves (51% down from 68%) preferring to rely on regularly scheduled updates, members of their team, or their library.

Today's professionals spend 53 percent of their time seeking out information. Four years ago, knowledge workers were able to spend 58 percent of their time analyzing and applying what they had found. Collectively, the time spent gathering and looking for information translates to an estimated. 5.4 billion lost hours per year for US corporations.

Time Spent Between Gathering and Analyzing Information 2001 vs. 2004 (% of  each group)
	Gather		Analyze
	2001	2004	2001	2004
Finance/HR/Legal	42%	52%	58%	48%
Information Technology	45	55	55	45
Sales/Marketing	44	58	56	42
Science/Engineering	46	42	54	58
Manufacturing/Purchasing	44	49	56	51
Total	44	53	56	47
Source: Outsell, May 2005

Comparing the new research with results from 2001 shows a number of trends, says the report:

* Today's users are backing off from self-service models and relying more on information intermediaries
* Users of all kinds are increasingly interested in competitive information
* The time users spend gathering information has increased from 8 to 11 hours per average workweek, and that "gathering time" has also increased in relation to the time spent analyzing and applying it.
* Another change in this period is a strong consolidation of search engine preferences around Google, compared to the six search engines that reached reasonable numbers in 2001
* Discretionary spending for content is down among end users, a trend that puts fee-based commercial vendors at risk compared to ad-based ones

For more information."