Speed matters – or does it?
Jinfo Blog

6th June 2008

By Tim Buckley Owen

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Now here’s an interesting conundrum. You’d expect one of the most economically successful countries on earth to be top of the heap when it came to broadband penetration – yet, as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation & Development reported recently – http://digbig.com/4xamt – the United States barely scrapes into the top ten. Reviewing the Organisation’s latest report on Broadband Growth and Policies in OECD Countries – http://digbig.com/4xams – the Economist made an intriguing observation: ‘There is simply not good data to show that broadband matters’ and, especially, little notion that faster is inherently better. ‘Can the Japanese and Koreans (who finish at the top of OECD's charts) do something at 100Mb/s that the Americans, British and Germans (in the middle tier) can't at 20Mb/s?’ it challenges. This may offer some comfort to corporate information managers currently struggling to do more with less. According to Outsell’s new 2007 Information Management Benchmark: State of the Function – details at http://www.outsellinc.com/store/products/733 price $895 – they are still tied to the traditional services they have always provided: a physical library, client enquiries, document delivery. True, its findings do also show that they are ‘jumping on the Web 2.0 bandwagon’, providing information to their users via intranet postings, collaboration, RSS feeds and blogs. But, ‘with slow-growing budgets and few new hires on the horizon, IM functions will not be able to remain relevant in the Web 2.0 world and still serve up a full plate of traditional services,’ Outsell believes. Consequently, it advises, information managers must make user needs research a priority before they decide what to do with these new tools. For example, although their perception of their most valuable services correlates tolerably closely with that of their users, there are some surprises – such as users ranking ‘locating experts’ second from the top, while the information managers put it way down at the bottom. Which may make them sit up at news from Jigsaw, a provider of business information and data services that leverage user-generated content – the ‘wisdom of crowds’ combining to provide valuable applications for sales & marketing departments among others. Jigsaw’s new Open Data Initiative – http://digbig.com/4xamw – claims to set the price for gaining easy access to and open usage of company information at zero, because its own members provide all the data. Declaring 4 June Data Independence Day, Jigsaw’s co-founder Jim Fowler said: ‘The days of the multi-billion dollar data industry being under the rule of the few, and accessible only by the few with deep pockets, are over.’ Well, maybe. The point, though, is that you don’t need a Korean internet speed to run or access innovative collaborative services such as this; good ol’ British or American speeds are quite fast enough.

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