Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC (19 February, 2009) – Financial pressures due to the credit crunch are leading business information departments to strive ever harder to add value for their business, according to the results of the 19th annual Business Information Review survey of corporate business information services published today by SAGE.
"The 2008 meltdown in global financial markets has radically transformed the [business information] environment," writes an editorial introducing the survey. "We face almost certainly the biggest business slow down and economic recession in the long history of this Survey which began in 1989. If there was ever a time when these services required serious management and cried out for benchmarking and other forms of comparison and analysis then it is now."
The BIR survey is the longest continuous survey of the delivery and use of business information services and sources in the UK. Through a series of in-depth interviews with leading information and knowledge managers it aims to provide greater understanding of this dynamically moving environment – never more so than during a tumultuous 2008 – and to disseminate the findings to a wide audience of users, business information professionals and information providers.
The survey addresses the key strategic and management issues which face business information services and how these issues impact on their users and their parent companies.
30 information managers – drawn from legal services, investment banking, insurance, consulting and other financial services – were approached, and 23 agreed to undergo a 45 minute telephone interview in late November/early December 2008. 17 of the group had been respondents to last year's BIR survey to provide a degree of continuity in the results. The sample included a good mix of sizes of services (measured by extensiveness of budget or numbers of staff), of industry sector, of philosophy and of their approach to the utilisation of certain technologies.
Perhaps the most consistent theme running through the responses to the 2008/9 Survey questions about the financial crisis and its impact on the information departments concerned the relationship with vendors. "There is a real urgency amongst these senior information managers to establish a better regime for value for money purchasing. This mainly centres on charging levels, methods and flexibility but not exclusively so," explains the BIR.
Financial pressures were clear for all respondents. Almost 50% of the respondents have already suffered cuts of over 10% of their current budgets. Most expect that 2009 financial year allocations, when they are determined, will be "significantly less".
Furthermore, 75% of the survey's respondents have either already lost staff already or expect to do so in 2009. That makes greater pressures to have the right staff left in the remaining jobs. But several people reported that it was hard to find staff with the right skills in information discovery, particularly because of the shrinking market, a direct result of financial pressure.
Every cloud, however dark, has a silver lining, writes the BIR. There were no reports from respondents this time that 'maverick spend' on information resources by uncoordinated departments around companies was a particular issue. This contrasted with the last survey when a number of respondents identified the necessity for the introduction of stringent controls which directed information resources purchasing through the Information Department to ensure sensible negotiations with vendors. This finding suggests that companies are being more strategic in their information spend and pushing all staff to channel requests through the dedicated internal services rather than finding individual solutions.
"Information services need to promote themselves more to the people within companies that control their budgets. To explain how valuable their services are and how much value they add to the company bottom line." The main strategic priority of business information services now seems to be a need to continuously appraise how to add value, the BIR concludes.
The key findings of the survey, published in full today, are:
- Trends towards greater co-ordination and management of global corporate information management networks
- Further budget cuts are predicted
- The business climate is still rather uneven – banking and financial services are struggling whilst some other sectors, most notably corporate law, are generally busy
- Information departments put in great efforts to establish very tight cost control
- Constant search for ways for information department to add more value to the business
- Financial restrictions have affected service development capability and speed of response
- 75% of respondents have already lost staff or expect to do so in 2009
- Information discovery skills, that most traditional part of the Library and Information Service (LIS) professional's armoury, are increasingly being recognised as a key priority by senior information managers looking at their skill mix
- 20% of companies committed to offshore operations are consolidating; 80% have no immediate plans to follow this strategy but don't necessarily rule it out further into the future
- Vendor management and relationships: respondents demand more creativity and understanding on charging levels and flexibility
- Brokers' reports becoming unaffordable and therefore unavailable
- Information risks such as password misuse, Intellectual Property (IP) and copyright breaches and licensing violations should be better understood and managed
- There's a continued commitment to user training albeit in terms of coaching and support rather than formal programmes
Source: SAGE Publications UK