The End of One-Stop Products for Current Awareness
Jinfo Blog

By Robin Neidorf

Abstract

Are you responsible for specifying, recommending or purchasing products for current awareness? Take the time to take a hard look at the one-stop premium database model.

Item

The point of premium news databases has been "one-stop" efficiency: comprehensive content and terrific features for finding, analysing and sharing information.

But what do you do when that model no longer suits your needs, or no longer represents value?

You learn to think about, evaluate and even purchase separately the two components: content and technology.

This is the approach that, as part of the Topic Series, "News, and Other Commodities", we have come to see the best organisations adopting, as a natural reaction to the trends documented in that series and in our eight-year history of studying the news category.

This approach requires a different strategy, more time, and more collaboration across the business and with suppliers. It's worth the extra effort, however, when you look at how different the solution may be for your optimum content set and right-sized feature set.

Right Content Set

Database vendors promote the marquee titles as well as the breadth and depth of industry-specific, localised and foreign language content, bringing to buyers tens of thousands of sources they might not otherwise have access to.

Ten years ago, this positioning still represented unique value.

Buyers increasingly realise that the content set in any of the premium databases isn't optimised for all the needs they must meet.

Amongst the most common complaints:

• Specialised content (e.g. Asian news, email newsletters from thought-leaders, social content) is not effectively covered in premium databases

• Users find articles faster via free alerting systems they've set up on their own than they can get via premium databases with upload times and embargoes

• Information managers want to use (and pay for) subsets of the database, not the entire collection of tens of thousands of sources.

These are in addition to the usual worries that key titles may be pulled from products for any number of reasons.

Right Features

Premium news databases offer robust tools for searching, analysing, distributing and interacting with news content. The question is, are these the right features in the right balance at the right price?

With the growing maturity of the aggregation platform technology category, you now have more choice in how to pull in, select from and deliver news content to your users.

A highlight of the Topic Series, "News, and Other Commodities" was the collection of reviews of these products, which also produced our "Market Landscape for Aggregation Platforms."

If you haven't taken a good look at this product category, now is the time. Amongst the key benefits we hear from customers we work with that have tested and adopted them:

• Greater visibility into how users interact with news content

• Focus on just the features that matter most to them

• Appropriate cost justification and transparency into the value of investments in current awareness.

What To Do

You may be missing opportunities for improved service, visibility into activity and cost justification if you don't consider alternatives.

• Document the features for analysis, distribution and user reporting that are most important for you, as well as for your users

• Talk with users about their use of supplemental current awareness - their own sources, feeds and alerts they have running to keep them up to date

• Review additional sources or management features you and your team are already handling.

It's time to take a hard look at the one-stop premium database model. It may still work for you now; it may continue to work for you for some time in the future. But you may find, as many other information managers are finding, that the environment for which these products were designed and optimised is quickly moving into the past.

Join our Communities of Practice session on separating content and technology evaluation, scheduled for 30 March.

To see relevant Content download the Index Report for the Topic Series: News, and Other Commodities. To work on this challenge with the support of your peers, participate in Community. For one-on-one assistance with Jinfo, ask about our Consulting. All are available through a Jinfo Subscription.

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