When Is "Enough" Enough? Modeling the Information-Seeking and Stopping Behavior of Senior Arts Administrators.

This article reports that the information-seeking process followed by museum administrators and orchestra administrators was essentially the same regardless of type and amount of information wanted. This study found that arts administrators do not consider information seeking to be a discrete management task, they rely heavily on direct personal experience to fill their information-seeking needs and they are "satisficers" when it comes to seeking information. The finding that arts administrators do not characteristically engage in a formal information-seeking process to support managerial activities has important implications. These administrators perceive themselves to be following a highly intuitive process based on personal experience or expertise to meet their information needs, but that process has not been explicitly structured or evaluated. This approach may serve well in familiar situations, in which the pertinent factors are internal or commonly known, or in situations where replicating past results is desirable. However, the intuitive approach may be of more limited success in situations where the complexity and the potential impact of the task or decision are high. The inexplicit information-seeking style identified in this research provides little opportunity for identifying the need for new, external information.