When was the last time you chose to dine at an all-you-can eat buffet?

You know these places — you pay a fixed price, and then you graze through the buffet line piling your plate with a pile of salad, some beef bourgonon, some pasta, some chicken, and oh, you really need to try some of that salmon. If you’re like me, you usually sit down with too much food, and then either leave stuffed, or you leave some of the food you took behind. And it’s rare you come away from the buffet saying, “Oh, that was the most amazing evening! We have to go back!” More likely, you’re saying something more like, “Oh, I ate way too much; let’s go someplace nicer next time.”

That last comment brings me to the research business. Yankee Group CEO Emily Green wrote this week about how we here at Yankee Group need to present our insights and data more simply to help mobile clients. And as she also noted, time-starved and rushed mobile clients don’t have the luxury of browsing our content through big 15-inch screens — they’re lucky if they get 3.5-inch screens.

Ever since the mid-1990s, research companies — not just Yankee, but Forrester, IDC, and Gartner too — have been focusing on making research all-you-can-eat buffets even bigger. Companies that used to publish 100 reports a year went to 500 and 1,000 to cover more of the market. This was despite research that showed consumers and business executives reading research less and skimming it more. Frankly, research companies were in denial of their own research. We all preached the gospel of “less is more”, but our businesses relied on “More being more.”

What we may have missed is client appetites for research becoming more focused, discrete, and selective. Perhaps today’s business climate no longer has the room or time all-you-can-eat 3,500 word reports or 12,000 row spreadsheets. Instead, business clients are looking for clean simple nuggets of research — like how many VoIP lines were installed in the US last year, or what percentage of businesses advertise online. Said another way, client tastes seem to want a research version of a Tapas restaurant or Sushi bar, not an all-you-can-eat buffet.

I can personally vouch for this trend. Even as I write my first report here at Yankee on Anywhere Web sites, I find myself poring through pages of data just trying to find facts. I don’t face a scarcity of research; I’m drowning in a flood of it, something I’ve referred to in the past as the tyranny of too much. And I have the luxury of research being my full time job, which most clients don’t have.

So here’s a question for Yankee Blog readers: if all you can eat doesn’t work for you, what would? We want to publish our research to any client on any device and over any network. But at the same time, we don’t want to overstuff those clients with our smorgasbord of research. Think about 1) what specific data you want from Yankee Group, and 2) how you’d like to receive that data as you travel through the wilds of Anywhere. Leave a comment with your views, and we’ll try to compile and share the results.

Until then, tapas, anyone?