Are employers rewarding purchasing decisions?
Jinfo Blog

16th January 2010

By Tim Buckley Owen

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Salaries for information professionals seem to be continuing their inflation beating trend for the third year in a row – in North America at least – according to the 2009 salary survey from the Special Libraries Association. Welcoming the findings, the SLA’s chief executive Janice Lachance said that it showed employers valued the knowledge and information analysis that information professionals provided. True enough no doubt – and the 17 mini reports on different job functions (summary and purchase details at http://digbig.com/5bayac) naturally include analytical activities such as legal research, knowledge management and competitive intelligence. But work going on elsewhere in the SLA may suggest that employers also value the discrimination that infopros bring in deciding what information to buy – an attribute that becomes all the more valuable when budgets are squeezed, products proliferate, more and more data is available for free and business-to-business publishers are struggling. SLA has partnered with Shore Communications in a survey to try to find out how business information purchasing is re-tooling to meet the challenges of the ‘new economy’ (http://digbig.com/5bayad). But unlike many surveys which rely on counting responses to preset questions, with any additional unstructured comment tagged on at the end, in this survey the stories that people have to tell are central (http://digbig.com/5bayae). Shore’s claim is that this narrative research technique can turn customer stories into actionable intelligence and help you find market trends that you hadn’t even thought of. Given a critical mass of stories, the software can detect patterns in people’s responses, some of which can be represented graphically to highlight clusters of views (http://digbig.com/5bayaf). For its survey, SLA suggests the kinds of stories information professionals might like to tell. You might describe one approach to purchasing business information that you took recently; talk about an alternative product you considered before deciding whether to renew an existing one; or report a conversation you had that helped you decide whether to renew or replace. Information managers sometimes agonise over the relative merits of not quite comparable products, as responses to Anne Jordan’s recent ‘Apples and Pears’ LiveWire posting indicate (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e27518). There’s also plenty of evidence that purchasers are getting tougher and suppliers more worried – try Outsell’s 2010 Information Outlook, for instance (outline and purchase details at http://digbig.com/5bayag), which foresees increasing information consumer selectivity, a continuing structural decline in advertising and the challenging of paid content. If Shore’s surveying technique is successful in this instance, it should provide some much needed guidance for beleaguered publishers and a wealth of good practice ideas for purchasers. It may even tell us something about why some employers appear willing to continue to pay information professionals well even when times are tough.

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