Dash for value or back to basics?
Jinfo Blog

28th February 2009

By Tim Buckley Owen

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No surprise that respondents to the latest annual survey from Business Information Review (BIR) talk constantly of the need to add value; the more embedded an information service is, the harder it is to outsource, one respondent says. But neither outsourcing nor value-add always feature in this year’s survey (http://digbig.com/4yhws) in the ways you might expect. Although outsourcing remains a perennially live issue because of the risk posed to in-house staff (see http://www.vivavip.com/go/e15646 for instance) BIR’s survey suggests that it may also be contributing to a talent shortage. Earlier offshoring of many opportunities – plus shrinkage of overall numbers in the sector – means that the available job candidates have less experience than in the past. When it comes to value-add, recent survey findings from Dow Jones (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e12759) revealed twice as many researchers expecting to do more analysis as saying they simply found and forwarded information – and this trend is naturally reflected in responses to the BIR survey too. Nevertheless, several BIR respondents also report that information discovery skills – ‘that most traditional part of the professional armoury’, as survey editor Allan Foster puts it – are increasingly being recognised as a key priority too. One even goes so far as to say that an emphasis on analytical skills and synthesis is ‘misplaced’. ‘There are plenty of analysts around whilst those with a fine nose for information discovery are more elusive,’ the respondent continues. Indeed, some managers are actually taking services away from desktops and back into the information centre, because they’re not being used cost-effectively, or even not used at all. If there are indeed plenty of analysts, and some of them are searching ineptly, that would suggest that combining analysis with discovery should be the effective information professional’s unique selling proposition.

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