Definitions & Responsibilities for Secondary Research
Secondary Research evaluates a wide variety of internally and externally available information sources, identifies the most beneficial, and obtains permissions for the company to use.
The Secondary Research specialty is an integral part of Market Intelligence and the business-decision making process and helps us to achieve and maintain competitive leadership. Secondary Researchers act as the focal point for the business unit marketing and sales teams, and executive management by providing tailored, proactive research and information services.
Secondary Researchers identify, evaluate, retrieve, organize, analyze and integrate key market insights. They obtain the usage rights for all data and communicate those rights to users. They disseminate to their clients the right business, scientific and engineering information from primary and secondary online and manual sources about us and our competitors, the competitive landscape, and our business partners, at the right time through the right delivery mechanism.
Secondary Researchers develop strong customer relationships to build and maintain an information partnership. They can articulate the mission, key messages and value statements of the customer sets they support. They vigilantly monitor changes in their customer sets and our strategy, that may impact the types of secondary information required to meet customer expectations. They develop a deep understanding of the customers unique information needs, and obtain the resources and services required to meet them. In addition, they design and deploy information delivery systems based on those needs, and provide advice and counsel to customers to ensure that information resources are optimized.
Secondary Researchers possess a high-level of consultative and project management skills that enable them to effectively refine the questions the customer wishes to answer and to provide timely responses to inquiries. They effectively define, plan for, acquire and manage information resources, and collections and materials (collection development) and ensure that clear, crisp, tailored results are provided and meet business objectives.
Secondary Research professionals team on a regular basis with their fellow specialty colleagues to ensure a holistic, integrated secondary research information strategy around the world; for example, professionals share “information discoveries” as a normal course of business.
- Effectively obtains and assimilates information to gain/maintain a thorough understanding of the competitive environment, who the key competitors are and our key initiatives, strategies, and matrixed organizational structure
- Has a thorough understanding of the needs of the customer audiences
- Hosts training sessions for users on new information sources and tools and provides advice and assistance to users on their use and deployment
- Has a thorough understanding of user needs and trends and makes value-add content selections and delivery based on that knowledge
- Applies a high-level of project management skills to ensure all projects are completed on-time, within budget, and meet customer and business objectives
- Adopts company-wide taxonomies for consistency in information sharing and recommends changes to them to keep them current
- Continually identifies information sources that will enhance the body of knowledge available to their customer set and guarantees their availability to meet user needs
- Develops new and innovative methods to increase user utilization of information resources
- Identifies and evaluates sources of content, both external and internal, to meet the needs of the audience
- Teams with other Market Intelligence professionals to integrate various pieces of secondary research into holistic reports that highlight key insights. Shares “information discoveries” with teams as a normal course of business
- Negotiates terms and prices with information resources that reflect our business needs and cost requirements
- Builds and maintains strong relationships with internal content authors
- Presents and disseminates information to the audience in a manner that optimizes the research results
- Acts as consultant on copyright issues, document handling guidelines, quality and posting issues, and ensures compliance
- Analyzes usage statistics to identify and prioritize content requirements
- Creates awareness and visibility to increase utilization of the content
- Understands and applies the concepts of knowledge management for the purpose of improving internal team effectiveness in customer engagements
- Influences team readiness to use knowledge management to build competitive advantage
- Advises Intellectual Capital Management.
Definitions of related intelligence disciplines
- Definition of Competitive Intelligence
- Definition of Market Analysis
- Definition of Market Data Analysis
- Definition of Market Data Execution
- Definition of Market Data Strategy
- Definition of Market Opportunity Analysis
- Definition of Primary Research
- Definition of Secondary Research
- Business Intelligence Terminology Glossary