I don’t play golf. Sometimes this lack of athletic interest works in my favor. Take Sunday at Buying & Selling eContent, for example. The people who do enjoy golf get to head over to what I’m told is an excellent course. If you’re a golfer, you’ll know much more about how to judge a golf course than I do, so I won’t even try. For non-golfers like me, the attraction on Sunday is the Enterprise Content Buyers Forum.

Organized by BST America’s Bill Noorlander and Carol Ginsburg, the Forum is all about maximizing the rules of engagement and usage for cost optimization and improved ROI. Sort of a mouthful, I know, but given the economy, absolutely essential information. Everybody’s budgets are under pressure. According to Noorlander, we need a totally different way of thinking. Information buyers need a new approach to their vendors and vendors need to consider being as flexible as possible. Information professionals should “focus on what has changed and what impact those changes have had on how people identify what they need to have, what they’d like to have, and what is just cool,” he said. “How much pain can be pushed down to end-users?”

We’re expecting content buyers, content sellers, and licensing experts to spend the afternoon discussing just what to do about cost constraints, return on investment, content distribution, and new models.

Panelists at the Forum include Nikolai S. Kopelev, GlaxoSmithKline; Catherine Porta, PriceWaterhouseCoopers; Craig Wingrove, KPMG; and Diane White, National Security Agency on the buyers side. They bring years of experience in the pharmaceutical, accounting, consulting, and government arenas. On the sellers side are Dave Oakley, LexisNexis; Steven Kaufmann, Dow Jones, and two other invited senior people from large international vendors.

The Forum is included in the registration fee for the conference, so if you’re not interested in golf, don’t feel like playing, or think you should concentrate on your cost optimization goals instead of your golf fame, I hope you’ll join me on Sunday afternoon at 2 p.m. for the Enterprise Content Buyers’ Forum. I’ll be in the audience, planning to learn a lot!

If you opt for golf, you’ll have a chance to hear a summary of the Forum on Monday morning. Bill will share the five top things, the “hot topics,” from the Sunday afternoon session.