Information Management Best Practices: 2006 Product Satisfaction Scorecard – A Tool For Making Portfolio Choices

This Briefing presents the results of Outsell's annual satisfaction data for dozens of information products in 13 content categories and is a tool to help enterprise buyers evaluate their information alternatives. Responses from 372 enterprise buyers from the corporate, not-for-profit, government, education, and healthcare sectors show no great improvements in satisfaction ratings over the previous year, with most respondents giving similar above-average ratings to products in many categories, a sign of intense competition in most product segments. Providers with the highest scores continue to be government and not-for-profit publishers such as MEDLINE or OCLC FirstSearch, and the Internet-based providers such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble. The data measures satisfaction with the depth/breadth of content, pricing, and ease of doing business, in addition to evaluating loyalty as a function of respondents' willingness to recommend each product to colleagues. Detailed analysis of ratings in the News & Trade, Company & Financial, Books & eBooks, Document Delivery, STM Journals, IT Research, and Market Research segments allows side-by-side comparisons. Buyers report pricing as their top issue with vendors, but other factors such as contract negotiation, ease of access, and multi-site access rank high as problem areas; this suggests that buyers have leverage with information providers in these parts of their relationships. The Briefing provides a list of Imperatives for Information Managers that will help enterprise buyers use the data to optimize their product portfolios and hone their negotiations with vendors.