Legal Research

Executives and Information Management

Cara Schatz at SLA blogged the higfhlights of a new report from Outsell, an SLA partner.

Outsell Report: What Execs Think About Info Managementby Cara Schatz

"Information managers continuously search for the best ways to measure and communicate their function's value to the organization. They often know their users' needs but find it challenging to connect to the upper echelons. This report provides a directional view of how executives perceive their organizations' information management (IM) functions and the role of information in furthering organizational objectives. It also considers executives? information use habits to reveal the gaps that IM leaders must address to fortify IM?s value proposition and to uncover opportunities that await information professionals who commit to taking their IM functions to the next level.

The Outsell report addresses key themes surfaced by executives, including:

Good decisions depend on good information
Executives view information holistically
Numbers alone don?t resonate when it comes to performance measures
The Briefing reveals some surprises about executives? preferences for and behaviors with information and considers what information professionals can do to leverage such findings as:

80% of executives use wireless handheld devices
65% of executives use the internet as their first choice for information, compared with 52% of other workers
40% of executives cite the lack of competitive information as the highest-ranked information gap

The Briefing also provides:

An analysis of how executives view IM, with quotes from executives who participated in Outsell research and interviews
Data from Outsell's Information Management Benchmarks survey and User Market survey
Analysis of gaps in executives' knowledge about IM activities and opportunities for closing those gaps
Imperatives for information managers who want to understand how executives think

The full briefing can be purchased on Outsell's Web site. Click here for more information about a discount for SLA members.

More good stuff from SLA.

Stephen

Full post as published by Stephen's Lighthouse on September 12, 2008 (boomark / email).