Managing External Content to Maximize Value and Minimize Costs
by Janice Keeler
Janice Keeler is the Global External Content manager for Accenture. Her comments are based on her own experience in several firms plus discussions with other content managers, and do not reflect official policy of her employer. She will be facilitating a roundtable discussion for people who manage global enterprise content contracts at the SLA conference in June. She can be reached at janice.s.keeler@accenture.com.
Maximize Value and Minimize Costs
Are you being asked to justify why you spend so much money on database contracts and usage? Are your users searching the Internet and thinking that's all the content they need? Have you been renewing the same sources for years just because you think they're useful to somebody?
Managing External Content
Actively managing external content selection and contracts in order to maximize value and minimize costs is essential, especially in these economic times. Don't wait until somebody targets your budget for cuts or tries to define the parameters of value for you ("You only have five researchers using that source; surely, you don't need to spend that much money just for them!").
"External content" refers to the set of information sources or products produced outside your own organization for which the providers must be paid. I am not addressing the ever-dwindling amount of quality information available for free on the Internet, although you should keep evaluating such sources in conjunction with those you pay for. Also out of scope are technical options for maximizing value and minimizing costs. I am focusing on the content itself and the financial issues surrounding external content acquisition, management and use.
I believe certain key issues are relevant to managing external content in all formats, whether your organization hosts the content internally on an intranet or portal, connects users to information providers' sites on the Internet or uses CDs or other methods of delivering the information. I hope these ideas help you build a solid business case to support your budget requests, provide the best combination of sources for your organization and make the most cost-effective use of your budget.
Maximizing Value
Understand Your Organization's Information Needs
· Always be aware of your organization's business strategy and priorities. Align your content purchases to the types of sources and topics your organization requires to achieve its objectives. As business needs change, you need to respond by adding and dropping sources to make sure your resources are relevant. Read about your organization's strategy wherever it is documented, including your public Web site. Network with people in various groups to find out what they expect to be working on in the future.
· Consider an information audit or formal interviews about information needs. Adopt your users' terminology to inquire about the information they need and how they use itnot what specific sources they want. Many articles, books and consultants are available to help you define and conduct an information audit or needs assessment. You may be able to get assistance from your own organization's primary research team if you have one. If you don't have time or a budget for a formal needs assessment, network informally with your researchers and users to see what topics are hot. If you have access to a database of research requests or to discussion forums, monitor these to see if you can spot new issues or topics that may indicate a need for new sources.
· Once you have identified your organization's strategic direction and specific information needs, identify the key types or categories of information needed. For example, you may need news, company information, industry information, chemical information, standards, legal and regulatory information, econometric and demographic data or other various types of information. Define these broad categories to the level of detail that makes sense for your collection and the products you are evaluating.
Evaluate Information Products Thoroughly and Comparatively
· Seek evaluations and comparisons of external content products. Collect detailed data from information providers. Read publications that cover information industry news and products. Subscribe to publications or market research services that publish evaluations or comparisons of information products.
· Do your own product comparisons for key information categories, using criteria important to your organization. Develop a detailed list of different topics within each category by which you can compare the sources you plan to evaluate. Your evaluation should include subject coverage, quality of coverage (with notes on methodology), depth/volume of coverage, geographic scope of coverage, language options, update frequency, functionality (search versus browse and advanced search features) and cost/measures of existing demand or usage for two sources you already have. In addition to evaluating the content and functionality of each source itself, you may also want to include customer service issues such as training availability and format, customer service hours and support quality.
Subdivide your categories or increase the detail in your list of criteria to clarify the distinctions between similar sources in your key categories. If you are dealing with global companies, document whether or not financials are "as reported" or standardized. If they are standardized, what methodology is used to standardize them? Compare the number of public and private companies by country in global company directories. For news sources, you might want to compare the scope of geographic coverage at the level of continents, countries or cities depending on your organization's needs. For example, does the source include regional newspapers where your factories are located?
· Create a table to evaluate specific sources by the categories and criteria you have identified. Putting your evaluations into a table for each category and directly comparing all sources you are considering makes the evaluations more rigorous and shows comparisons in a concise graphical format.
Indicate the extent to which you think each source covers each topic or other requirement. You may use words, numbers or graphical figures to indicate the value you think a given source offers. Some of these indicators will be facts obtained from information providers and some criteria require value judgments based on your knowledge of the product and your organization's needs. Once you have filled in your analysis for each source on each line of your matrix, you will have an easy way to spot gaps and overlaps.
Conduct product trials for the most important sources, preferably comparing similar sources to each other. Remember that product testing time costs money and that similar sources may be available. Think carefully before doing a major trial when someone offers a free trial password for a new product.
Make Sure You Get Value From Products Once You Have Purchased Them
· Make sure your contracts specify some type of training for your users and that users are aware training is available. Make use of any relevant form of training offered by the information provider. Develop your own training, job aids or FAQs to complement training offered by the information provider so that you can tailor the information to your organization. Training adds value by helping your users recognize the full benefits of a product and how to use it effectively. Depending on the complexity of the source, the technical infrastructure, the number of users and their positions or research expertise, you may require some form of training before a person receives access to a source.
· Communicate about the content, features and benefits of the available sources. Once you have purchased an external content product, let people know about it so they will use it and get value from the investment. Communicate about the available types and potential uses of information. The amount of detail in your communications must depend on your audience. If you are marketing specific sources, give an idea of the benefits or applications, not just a laundry list of content and features.
Vary your methods of communication. Consider descriptive postings and news items in your intranet or portal, electronic newsletters, presentations to group meetings or new employee orientations.
· Negotiate increased usage and redistribution rights to improve value. You can increase the value of your content expenditure by negotiating usage parameters and seeking broader access or redistribution rights. Resist terms that allow no reproduction or distribution of even the smallest excerpt of information, or restrict use to a single physical location. Seek sources that allow use of excerpts with proper attribution. Seek products that allow researchers to redistribute ad-hoc copies of reports or articles to others in your organization within mutually agreed limits.
Document the Value of Sources to Your Specific Organization
· Conduct surveys. Think about conducting an annual survey of your researchers and ask them to rate the importance of each of your sources. Useful questions include their frequency of use, rating of the importance of each source and need for training. Be sure to seek comments and examples of how each source helps in their work. Such feedback helps build a business case for renewals and also helps you prioritize when budgets are tight.
If you have sources that are open to end-users in your organization and not just researchers, you may also survey these users or include them in product trials. Getting input from people who are registered users of a particular source can be very important in evaluating whether or not to renew it. You may even be able to partner with the information provider to conduct a survey for you, if you agree on the usage and parameters of the survey data in advance.
But be wary of random written surveys asking people who don't use external content sources directly or frequently to provide input about a long list of specific named sources. If you survey or interview these people, ask them about the types of information they need, not product names.
One of the most important things you can get from surveying or interviewing the people in your organization is evidence of how a particular source provided actual value, especially if you can get quantifiable measures such as estimated time saved or value of contracts won. Collect testimonials and concrete examples of providing value in any way your users define value.
· Monitor usage data. Collect statistical data on usage, including the number of users or volume of use, using whatever statistics can be measured given your technical infrastructure and the data collection capability of the information provider. Document user statistics by demographic criteria such as group, location or personnel level. Document usage statistics by service to help guide or justify renewal decisions. For example, if you buy five services from a market research provider, are all of them being used?
Statistical measures are useful indicators, but they should not be the only measures on which a source is evaluated. A source may be used by relatively few people but still be worth the investment if the source is unique and the user group is strategically important in the organization. If you are asked to report usage statistics to management, be sure to provide context, note trends in the data and include other evidence of the value of the source as well.
Minimize Costs
· There are two aspects to minimizing content costs. One is the amount of money actually paid by your entire organization to an information provider; the other is the way costs are allocated within your organization and whether they end up in your group's budget or somewhere else. You may have some control over the former and little control over the latter, but they are both worth some consideration to see if you have any flexibility.
· Review and change your content portfolio to reduce unnecessary expenditures. Drop products if your organization is no longer involved in the activity the source covers (after a divestiture), if usage data shows a deep decline or if your surveys and interviews reveal that a source is no longer valued. Spend your money on sources that are relevant to your organization's current needs and strategic priorities. Don't renew sources year after year just because you have always had them.
Even if sources are used and valued, do you really need several that offer very similar types of information? If budget is tight, you may need to drop something that overlaps with other sources to be able to put scarce funds toward filling a gap in coverage.
· Consolidate content purchases to obtain volume discounts. Some information providers will tell you that other departments in your organization are also buying content from them and some will not. However, if you haven't already consolidated content contracts into single agreements, try to identify opportunities for doing so. This takes a lot of time, but can also save a lot of money. You may be able to leverage your purchases to get volume discounts instead of buying at the single-copy price or for a low number of users.
· Negotiate pricing; work with your organization's purchasing group if possible. Your organization's purchasing department may be willing to share their expertise or provide a person to help you negotiate your content purchases. They are adept at negotiating prices, although you may have to educate your purchasing agent about the differences between buying commodity products (such as office products) and proprietary copyrighted products.
· Consider varying levels and forms of access or purchase smaller contracts. You may be able to control costs by negotiating and purchasing different levels of access for power users (such as researchers) and occasional users. Consider purchasing fewer seats if some of your licensed users don't really use the source. Sometimes you can negotiate for concurrent-use seats instead of naming individuals for products sold on a per-user basis.
Changing the method of accessing the product may also increase value or save costs. Consider options for saving money by purchasing a different format or payment plan (such as a monthly CD or pay-per-use access instead of a big annual subscription contract for a Web product that is not heavily used).
Content pricing models are hugely complex and beyond the scope of this article, but talking to your information providers and users about alternatives can lead to savings if you find a cheaper solution that still meets your needs.
Consider Alternative Options For Funding Content Purchases
Content budgets are funded in a wide variety of ways and through many combinations of the following models:
· Content costs are in a single central information budget and users are not charged either directly or by specific allocation to their groups.
· Content costs are in a central budget but the total content budget is redistributed by allocation to various departments, based on percentage of use, number of personnel or some other measure.
· Content is purchased centrally, but costs for specific sources are divided among various groups. Here, each group contributes funds to pay for a specific number of users, specific services or other content-related costs, such as analyst hours on market research services.
· Charge numbers or project codes are applied to every search or every password so that costs are attributed to the individuals who access or receive the information.
There are pros and cons to each of these budget models, and your organizational culture may dictate which model you are expected to follow. The bottom line is to manage your budget in the most businesslike manner.
You may need to shift from one funding model to another for specific sources, types of sources or levels of access. For example, if you are searching expensive specialty databases that only pertain to a few groups or projects, you may want to get the funding for those databases from the relevant group or charge back those searches to the individuals requesting the search. On the other hand, if you have important and generally relevant sources being charged to individuals per password or per search, investigate options of utilizing your usage data and user feedback to get sponsorship for making the investment at a higher level to reduce administrative costs and widen access. Even if you do not currently charge back for usage, consider using the cost accounting functions in many information providers' software or in your intranet or portal to capture usage data by project, group or requester. This will enable you to document which groups and projects are being supported by your content investment, whatever your funding model.
· Identify stakeholders and get sponsorship. Even if you are not seeking funding from different groups in your organization, identify influential individuals in the groups you support and communicate with them. Make sure you understand their needs but also make sure they understand how your content expenditures support the organization's objectives. Don't wait until budget cuts are threatened. If you have testimonials and support from these individuals about the value of the sources you provide, you have a better chance of continuing to have the budget to provide them.
· Recognize that actively managing content takes a lot of time. Actively managing a large number of content products can be a full time job for one or more people, especially if you are consolidating contracts, negotiating global contracts, conducting major surveys and product trials or writing targeted communications to different groups. Leverage your time by partnering with your information providers as appropriate for marketing materials, training or help with single product surveys. Consider hiring consultants to help you negotiate contracts, conduct information audits or manage multi-product surveys.
Conclusion
Carefully determine what types of information your organization needs based on organizational priorities. Purchase the best available set of sources to supply that information in a cost-effective way. Train users and communicate about the types of information available to ensure that people access and use the information to maximize value. Be able to document the value and usage of the products you provide. Know who your stakeholders are and solicit their sponsorship or funding as needed, preferably before budget cuts strike.
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