Content Buyer Market Profile: Professional Services

Individual professionals and departments in the management consulting, accounting/audit, and advertising/public relations industries spend $4.1 billion dollars per year on information in support of their practices. That's on top of the $208 per user that their organizations pay to provide them with centralized information services. This Briefing identifies the drivers of content use in the professional services industry. Drawing on Outsell industry benchmarking studies and data on thousands of end users, it analyzes the industry's content spending levels and trends in the use of digital content, user behaviors, content vendor relations, and content management practices. Drivers highlighted include flat revenues that are poised to rebound in 2004-2005; changes in auditing practices that will affect content purchasing patterns; and changes in the way advertising is purchased that are putting a squeeze on agency budgets. Trends include the continued popularity of research intermediation that will benefit professional researchers; a recommitment to knowledge management as service firms try to leverage existing thought-work; centralization and rationalization in information organizations; and the politicization of content funding models as information organizations attempt to allocate the costs of information to the business units using it. The Briefing includes a table of industry metrics; key end-user data on spending and preferences; and trends and metrics for information management practices in the professional services industry. For commercial content vendors, this industry will present a tough market as budgets continue to be tight. For content managers, the challenges are to show return-on-investment data and to tie content purchases to specific, billable engagements.