Search For Information Wasting Professionals' Time Anthea Stratigos, CEO of Outsell, reporting on the survey results, "2001 vs. 2005: Research Study Reveals Dramatic Changes Among
Information Consumers," concludes that professionals are shifting away from their Internet research methods of just four years ago to more efficiently gather information and get on with their jobs.
They are now looking more to their peers and colleagues, "alerting" services, and other conveniences.
advertisement
advertisement
According to the new survey, 67 percent of professionals now go to the open Web for
information, versus 79 percent in 2001. Fifteen percent rely on their corporate intranets (up from 5 percent), and nine percent consult their colleagues (up from 5 percent). In addition when seeking
information fewer now prefer to get it themselves (51% down from 68%) preferring to rely on regularly scheduled updates, members of their team, or their library.
Today's professionals
spend 53 percent of their time seeking out information. Four years ago, knowledge workers were able to spend 58 percent of their time analyzing and applying what they had found. Collectively, the time
spent gathering and looking for information translates to an estimated. 5.4 billion lost hours per year for US corporations.
Time Spent Between Gathering and Analyzing Information 2001 vs. 2004 (% of each
group) |
| Gather | Analyze |
| 2001 | 2004 | 2001 | 2004 |
Finance/HR/Legal | 42% | 52% | 58% | 48% |
Information Technology | 45 | 55 | 55 | 45 |
Sales/Marketing | 44 | 58 | 56 | 42 |
Science/Engineering | 46 | 42 | 54 | 58 |
Manufacturing/Purchasing | 44 | 49 | 56 | 51 |
Total | 44 | 53 | 56 | 47 |
Source: Outsell, May 2005 |
Comparing the new research with results from 2001 shows a number of trends, says the report:
- Today's users are backing
off from self-service models and relying more on information intermediaries
- Users of all kinds are increasingly interested in competitive information
- The
time users spend gathering information has increased from 8 to 11 hours per average workweek, and that "gathering time" has also increased in relation to the time spent analyzing and applying it.
- Another change in this period is a strong consolidation of search engine preferences around Google, compared to the six search engines that reached reasonable numbers in 2001
- Discretionary spending for content is down among end users, a trend that puts fee-based commercial vendors at risk compared to ad-based ones
For more information.