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Managing up: stakeholder relationship imperatives. (Industry Insights).

Article Excerpt
Content deployment functions (libraries, information centers, knowledge management groups, market intelligence operations) are fighting for survival in the current "lean-and-mean" economy. While the users of these functions profess to receive value, executive management isn't stepping up to the plate to defend information budgets. There remains a gap between content deployment functions' value to their users and management's perception of that value. Effective stakeholder management bridges this gap, and this article explores our observations on the buyer market's efforts on this front.

We define stakeholder management as the process of engaging the executive management team that has leadership responsibility for key target markets (e.g., business unit/practice leaders, campus administration, the city council, agency heads, R&D site management) through the strategic planning and product development processes. Stakeholders are executives who have an explicit or implicit interest in the content deployment function. Their units are or should be obtaining significant value from content services, and in some cases, they may be major users themselves.

According to Outsell's study, "The Changing Roles of Content Deployment Functions, 2002," 38 percent of content deployment functions budget on a corporate overhead basis, and formal business planning is conducted by just 36 percent, which means that executives are not systematically engaged in resource allocation decisions.

We recently conducted 14 interviews with senior library managers and directors in the corporate and government sectors to evaluate the state of stakeholder management with two of the techniques we recommend, advisory boards, and service level agreements (SLAs). In addition, we talked with a broad cross-section of vendors and buyers about the visibility of information content at senior decision-maker levels.

ENGAGING EXECUTIVES WORKS

Engaging executive management throughout the content deployment business and product planning process ensures that...