Role expansion fuels Factiva surge

When Dow Jones bought out Reuters to take full ownership of information
provider Factiva in October 2006, the general reaction was that Factiva would be a good fit with the Dow Jones news services.

Since then, Factiva’s original CEO Clare Hart has become president of the Dow Jones enterprise media group as well as vice president of the wider organisation. She has overseen the integration of Factiva into the group and been tasked with growing the business in that time.

Speaking exclusively to IWR, Hart explained the process the organisation
had gone through in the last 18 or so months but also how she saw Factiva’s information services complementing the changing roles of information professionals.

“We realised in 2006 that Factiva would be stronger under single-parent ownership,” said Hart. “While it could have been either Dow Jones or Reuters that ended up acquiring the company, from a strategic perspective,with its content of the Wall Street Journal and Newswires, Dow Jones made sense.”

A BIGGER PACKAGE
Within a year of the move to 100% Dow Jones ownership, Factiva had made available an additional 500 publications including websites and 150 blogs. So far in 2008, it has forecast its online content will surge from 4,000 sites and blogs to 12,000 websites and 4,000 blogs. Recently, an improved set of widget applications have been made available to clients so they can share Factiva content more easily across their organisations. Hart believes that the way the products are developing is the result of the organisation’s listening to its customers.
In particular, she cited Factiva’s Research the Researcher programme, a study it conducted last year to identify what information professionals did in their day-to-day roles and what influence that should have on Factiva’s products.

“The Research the Researcher effort is something that is going to drive the
way we evolve the Factiva product, specifically Factiva.com, to respond to
the needs of researchers,” she said. The study found that 27% of professional business researchers worked for a centralised organisation, 54% for a specific research department within a business unit, and 19% for a nonresearch department.

The vast majority of them are therefore spread across enterprise business
functions, where they are either working in teams or alone. It’s a trend that
Factiva believes has been increasing among its customers in recent years.
“Research the Researcher was a fantastic effort led by our product and
marketing teams to really understand what it is researchers need, so that
while we continue to focus on providing capabilities for our end-users, the core of our business is still researchers, and we need to make sure we are differentiating our product offerings for them,” said Hart.

The Factiva survey also calculated that researchers would be spending more time on the value-added components of their job, and less time on finding information and forwarding it to the relevant executive. This shift reflects the improving search skills and technical acumen of end-users. Whereas 10 or even five years ago an end-user might have gone to an information professional, they now have the skills to use general tools like Google better, as well as the more specialised ones, like those offered by Factiva.

But aren’t information professionals being bypassed by the increasing functionality of Factiva’s services? “No way,” said Hart. “I think information
professionals are more than just researchers. They are people who understand quality content and sources. We sort of take it for granted
in the industry.”

For Hart, the path of the information professional is clear.

“Information professionals are expected to know more than just the primary aggregators, so they are also going to be the resource who will know where the best blogs and websites are for the people in your company,” she said. “They are the content specialist as well as the researcher, as I see it. I don’t see them going away. In fact, the demand for the skills of the information professional, complemented by technology skills, is only going to increase in the organisation.”

EMBEDDED POSITION
Hart recognises the pattern of info pros working in specialised areas of the business: “I think the role of the information professional has the potential to evolve in so many ways. There will be people who continue to do research and there is always going to be a job for researchers. “One of the trends is information professionals embedded in a business unit – someone fully dedicated to marketing or competitive intelligence or research and development. There is an embedding process where you can play the role in a specific department.”

For Hart, the modern information professional is an ambitious knowledge worker with business as well as technical nous.

“The more sophisticated, business savvy information professionals are going on to roles like knowledge management, competitive intelligence, chief knowledge officers, chief learning officers. We are seeing that in organisations.”

Hart pointed out that there wasn’t one set route, even suggesting corporate communications as a possibility. “I don’t think that there is one path, and that is the upside of the changing role we see today. You can continue to
do your first love, which is research, but you also have the opportunity well
beyond that because so many organisations are trying to gain competitive
advantage.”