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.

Robin Neidorf, General Manager, FreePint Ltd.

One thing that is particularly special about the BSeC event is the quality of attendees and the kind of networking that goes on. A favorite part of the program for me are the conversation groups, in which a small group gathers together to discuss a topic of interest to the industry. Unlike listening to event the best presentation, these groups really generate discussion and since the attendees are all industry leaders, real meaningful ideas based on actual experience are exchanged. This year, Robin Neidorf of FreePint Ltd. is leading one that looks like my choice: Flexible Content & Facilitating Reuse. It has never been more important to find incremental revenue and enabling content reuse is a key aspect of this.

When we think about Buying and Selling eContent, the value proposition may seem simple: people need quality information to make good decisions. However, demonstrating the value of information to decision makers can be an esoteric proposition. How does one place an ROI on the “good stuff” versus the masses of free content available? Capgemini did a damn good job of it in its report released last year called “The Information Opportunity,” which found that 63 percent of survey respondents faced making crucial business decisions without the correct information on a daily basis.” Yikes. The report recommends that organizations treat information as a strategic corporate asset and invest accordingly.

This week, Economist.com published an article entitled “Knowledge management” that, at first glance, may not seem to help us make the case for increased use of quality information. However, if we consider the author’s premise that “Knowledge [is] seen as the key to the creation not only of business wealth,” we can make a clear case that better informed employees make better decisions. While certainly our “2.0” concept of knowledge is driven by sharing and community, what we share and what informs our interactions builds the foundation for true knowledge. At BSeC, talk will inevitably turn to how to build the value proposition for fee-based knowledge resources in these challenging times. We will, in fact, be kicking off the event with an Enterprise Content Buyer’s Forum on Sunday on “Maximizing the Rules of Engagement and Usage for Cost Optimization and Improved ROI” that should help both buyers and sellers approach this complex equation.