Top bosses love DIY
Jinfo Blog

3rd July 2009

By Tim Buckley Owen

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‘While delegating research may be part of the stereotype of a C-level executive, it is not the reality. More than half of C-level respondents said they prefer to locate information themselves, making them more self-sufficient in their information gathering than non-C-suite executives.’ That’s one of the findings of a report by Forbes Insights, the primary research arm of business publisher Forbes, in association with Google (http://digbig.com/5baaeh – registration required). The Rise of the Digital C-Suite: How Executives Locate and Filter Business Information found that top bosses from Generation PC – typically aged 40 to 50 now and assuming leadership positions in corporate America – access information more frequently than lesser executives and are more willing to retrieve it through mobile devices or video. They were preceded by the Wang Generation – executives now in their 50s who have a terminal on their desks but may still be more comfortable with non-digital forms of communication. Snapping at Generation PC’s heels comes Generation Netscape, people who have never known an office without email and home pages, and who are most willing to exploit web-centric tools. Not surprisingly, the report also found that IT executives were the most prevalent users of the internet for information gathering – and this group has coincidentally also been profiled recently in the Outsell report IT Professionals’ Information Use Habits, Preferences and Satisfaction (purchase details at http://digbig.com/5baaej). It’s also probably no great surprise that the Forbes report finds Netscape Generation members likely to take collaboration and networking in research to ‘unprecedented levels’ as they rise into the C-Suite – with implications for the future of the information manager as corporate 2.0 specialist. Rather more revelatory may be the finding that C-Suite executives are actually more self-sufficient in their research than the next tier down, preferring to find their own information in 53% of cases, compared with only 40% for non C-Suite respondents. The proportion of self-sufficient chief executives is only likely to grow as the Netscape Generation reaches the top – so what should the specialist information manager’s tactic be? The top information requirement for Forbes’s empowered C-Suite executives – competitor analysis – was over 10 percentage points ahead of the next three needs: customer trends, corporate developments and technology trends. Trailing some way further behind was a handful of more occasional requirements, with societal trends, political trends and potential or existing suppliers at the bottom of the heap. Couple these lesser information needs with the recent Outsell finding (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e20174) that end users’ search failure rates are actually going up, and perhaps you have the makings of a survival strategy that beleaguered information professionals can exploit.

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