Index reveals information weaknesses

Organisations in the sectors that rely most heavily on enterprise information are among the worst at enabling access to internal content and utilising it, according to the Industry Information Index, a new benchmarking study from Content Intelligence company Smartlogic and MindMetre Research.

Overall, only 38 per cent of the organisations surveyed rated their sector as capable across four categories of effectiveness and the sector that performed the worst in the study was media and publishing, where only 30 per cent of respondents found this sector’s internal information efficiency to be satisfactory.

The study included more than 2,000 senior managers from public sector organisations, non-profit groups and companies of all sizes in the USA, UK, Germany and France. The index factored in four major criteria in benchmarking industries: enterprise search effectiveness; information categorisation effectiveness; fragmentation of information systems; and categorisation and search progress and investment.

Most of the sectors that performed least well in the study are highly reliant on unstructured internal information – either producing very large pieces of complex content such as research, product development reports, market analysis and technical specifications, or generating huge numbers of smaller articles and information items that are continually being created such as news, comment, blogs, reviews, alerts, market updates, financial results and other announcements.

Jeremy Bentley, Smartlogic’s chief executive, commented: ‘For any organisation hoping to leverage its information assets to achieve greater commercial success or to meet its mandate, a sub-par score in the Industry Information Index signals a serious concern and its problems with unstructured information need to be addressed. With no industry scoring even 50 per cent in the Index, the results clearly indicate that every sector can stand to improve its information efficiency.’