Information Professional - Role

Role

In 2011, Gartner published “CIO Alert: The Need for Information Professionals.” The core finding in the report was: "The vast majority of organizations see the need to manage information as an enterprise resource rather than in separate 'silos,' departments or systems, but they don't know how to begin to address the challenge, as it is so large...Professional roles focused on information management will be different to that of established IT roles…An 'information professional' will not be one type of role or skill set, but will in fact have a number of specializations."

This perspective was reinforced in a January 2012 report by noted IT skills expert Foote Partners. Per CEO David Foote in IT Skills Demand and Pay Trends Report, "Gone is the tendency to hire specialists and large teams of limited range permanent staff for long-term initiatives. New models require smaller teams made up of multitaskers and multidimensionally skilled workers with subject matter expertise, business savvy, technology skills, and a range of appropriate interpersonal and 'political' skills.

The challenge is that this new breed of professional can have a number of roles within the organization. Few people currently have “information professional” as a title, but many have the stewardship, management, and application of information assets as a core part of their job. “Information professionals” can be found on the legal, records, and library staff of organizations. They can be found among those whose primary focus is governance – e.g., information architects and managers. Process owners, business analysts, and knowledge managers all have effective information management as a core part of their skill set, as do the new wave of information curators and community managers who currently focus primarily on social systems.

Information professionals provide a wide range of services in the areas of: classification systems, taxonomies, tagging structures, thesauri, retention schedules, assessment criteria, information audits, knowledge audits, information research, information resources planning and acquisition, training programs for people using information, information and knowledge literacy campaigns and other 'finding and organizational aids and approaches'. Some typical job titles for information professionals are Archivist, Business Intelligence Officer, Chief Information Officer, Community Information Officer, Customer Service Officer, Data Researcher, Information Consultant, Information, Knowledge or Records Manager, Librarian, Program Manager, Research Officer, Web-manager or Web-master.