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In complex and dynamic contemporary business environments the existing variety of activities creates the variety of information needs. We can describe an information need as a motive to use information required to support people engaged in certain activities. Such understanding of information needs is related to the definition of informing, as provided by Cohen (2009) in his paper on Informing Science: "The task of Informing Science is to provide the clientele with information in a way that maximises its effectiveness." The variety of information needs differs by a number of features: management level, business or activity area, formality, scope, urgency, complexity, and others. Based on the authors' previous work in the area of decision support information needs (Skyrius, 2008; Skyrius & Winer, 2000), the primary interest of this paper lies in the area of complex information needs (CIN). Although the field has been and currently is attracting considerable research efforts, it still is one of the most interesting and under-researched segments in the information needs variety. The research presented in this paper has taken a pragmatic approach--to gain insight into the user side of user-IT relations in meeting complex information needs in business. The user side has been rather well researched in terms of generic issues around information needs. However, in terms of different complexity of information needs there is considerably less research available. As well, in terms of differences of information behavior in different fields of activity (students, scientists, business people, individual users) the business users' information needs have been much less researched on the complex side. In published work in this area (of complex information needs and related issues), some neighboring dimensions come up: simple informing versus complex informing (Gill & Cohen, 2008); routine informing versus non-routine informing (Gill & Cohen,2009); technology-centered systems versus human-centered systems (Jaimes, Sebe, & Gatica-Perez, 2006; Kling, 1996), and so on. The common feature of such dimensions is that they distinguish simple, repetitive, and mostly technology-centric approaches from fluid, complicated, and heterogeneous user-centered or needs-centered approaches, where behavioral and contextual issues are of prime importance. The latter approaches might require such non-trivial (and hardly programmable) tools as intuition, improvisation, and drifting (Ciborra, 2002). The importance of research in the area of CIN in business is rather evident from the nature of activities that create such needs--decision making, analysis, insight development, project conceptualization, etc. These activities, related to sophisticated information engineering, usually are of high expected value, but at the same time risky. The user survey data from previous research, mostly on business decision support and IT role in providing support, showed that the proper balance of support is between human and IT functions, where IT does all the hard and dirty work, and the flexibility options are selected by the human actor. The nature of such balance is difficult to estimate, especially in the sector of CIN, and decision support needs are attributed to this sector. Consequently, a decision has been made to investigate further into this segment of information needs. The purpose of this paper is to present research on the user side of user-IT relations in meeting complex information needs and to clarify the definition of complex information needs in business activities. The focus of the paper is the business activities and environment of Lithuanian business entities (mostly) and public sector institutions, with the aim to examine the nature of CIN, their relation to user activities, and their overall information environment. This is done by using a questionnaire to extract user opinions and attitudes towards CIN and by combining its results with the authors' earlier work in this area. …

A Study on Complex Information Needs in Business Activities