Author: John Davies
TFPL, Senior Consultant
It’s interesting to read that Gartner has identified four “new” information management roles that IT departments will need to establish, in order to meet the “business demand for IT-driven growth and innovation. Gartner Analyst, Debra Logan believes that the “future" of IT lies outside the IT department. Increasingly CIOs are coming from “the business” and “users” are taking control of their own information delivery infrastructure.” By the end of 2010, Gartner predicts that 40% of people, who report directly or indirectly into IT, will have substantial business and non-IT experience”.
Ms Logan’s four “new” roles are:
1. Legal and IT Hybrids, who will create policies, design and execute discovery exercises and act as bridges between the legal and IT functions. More interestingly, these new staff will move to implement corporate retention schedules in the digital world and on e-mail.
2. Digital Archivists, who will apply traditional archivist skills to digital records. Her assertion that “suitable candidates can be found in Library and Information Science (LIS) schools or existing employees nearing the end of their careers” is, we think, debatable but poses an important question for those designing curricula in these areas.
3. Business Information Managers, who Logan seems to think have never existed. Information Managers, Information Analysts have been working for years in, amongst others, the finance and pharmaceutical sectors making Gartner’s expectation that “20% of companies [will] employ business information managers by 2013, compared with 5% in 2009” a somewhat surprising assertion.
4. Enterprise Information Architects who will “create taxonomies, document templates and data models”. Again, not a new role as far as TFPL is concerned but perhaps just not visible enough.
Logan rightly states that IT organisations have not changed to respond to changes in business and demographic trends and concludes that the “role of technology will now be to augment human contributions, rather than automate them. The only way to manage information better is to manage information better with people.”
Our own research has mapped the emergence of new roles like these alongside a continuing demand for more traditional skill sets. In a world where managing huge volumes of content is a growing challenge for the IT community, well-trained and appropriately-skilled information management professionals will become increasingly influential in all organisations.
Recent Comments