The Future of Information Professionals: Seize the Day
by Lucy Lettis
An aging baseball pitcher once said, "Never look back; something might begaining on you." I'd like to suggest another reason not to look back: Itmakes it that much more difficult to go forward. And forward, at least for our profession, is the only way to go. I know I may sound like a trite politician speaking about the new millennium, but I've learned two interesting things about clichés: They're almost always true, and we tend to ignore their messages.
Sometimes we ignore the need to go forward because it is so safe and comfy right where we are; if that's your situation, it's hard to insist that you move. But while you are stationary, remember that when a duck sits, it becomes an easy target, and from what I have read and heard lately, information specialists can all too easily find themselves prey for certain kinds of hunters. So sit if you feel safe, but while you do, do look back, because if something is gaining it may well be someone with a gun, and then it's time to move.
One major move that I see for all our profession is transitioning out of the academic cocoon of our university training and into the world of the businesses we serve, making our only basis for action the question of whether it serves our corporation. We must discard activities in corporate libraries that don't benefit our organizations. In every move, I suppose, one takes something along and leaves something behind: In this move we must take all that our excellent teachers taught us, but leave behind any sense we may have developed that we are nonbusiness professionals, exempt from the concerns of competing, cooperating, taking chances, making money. One of the failures I believe I see in some information centers today is that they focus all too myopically on themselves, without considering what they must do to fit into the bigger picture of the firms they are to serve. Some information center managers and information specialists are more concerned with being good librarians than with being effective contributors to the business. I fear that some librarians take the "special" of SLA to mean that we are different, not just from our colleagues in academic and public libraries but also from colleagues in others areas of our firms: we approach our work not with the standard business and management methods of our fellow workers but with a sense of difference, as though we are apart from (and of course above) them and the ways in which they work. Consider for example the way we too often talk to our clients--and why do we sometimes call them "patrons"? Is it because we anticipate being patronized? Is there another profession that calls its customers "patrons" instead of "customers" or "clients"?
Sometimes I fear we may talk to our clients or customers as though we were patronizing them, using a little nice librarianship jargon we rather hope they won't completely understand, leaving us erudite but incomprehensible. What do we hope to achieve, for example, by telling the CEO of our organization that our research has produced forty-six "records"? What's a "record" to him? Are we offering him an Elvis collection? Bach's greatest hits? Let's use words our clients understand--and where possible, always a business word.
Let us, too, struggle gamely with the love I assume most of us have of books. Books are wonderful things, but we must face the fact that their importance in our information centers is, compared to other information sources, fairly low. Nevertheless, my reading tells me that if we examined the book budgets of information centers across the country, we would still find disproportionately high percentages set aside for low-use books, and too much time given to cataloging them. Let's reserve our love of books for our home shelves, and use our professional time and money only on sources that offer maximum benefit.
And while we're at it, let's abandon that paradigm so linked in the public mind with librarianship: the popular idea of a librarian's predilection for control. The paradigm for today's information professionals has shifted from a mode of gathering, collecting, and protecting data to today's mode of choosing, evaluating, organizing, and distributing information for maximum sharing potential. As information professionals, we should not be controllers; we should be purveyors. Of course this doesn't mean let the customers take the CD-ROMs home (at least not for keeps), but it does mean we need to see ourselves as more interested in being suppliers than controllers, and to be sure that others see us that way too.
Many people who enter our profession tend to be tactical and task-oriented rather than strategic. We often have a very technical orientation, meaning we tend to intellectualize facts rather than to sell ideas. This is a tendency we all need to be conscious of. We need to learn to be better salespeople.
On the subject of selling, let's turn to the reports we write for our senior management. When you analyze your activities for them, don't write tedious reports of how, for example, you have streamlined some tasks so that they can be done by fewer people (though it doesn't hurt to let such a fact drop in casual conversation), and don't report on acquisitions and circulation statistics. Instead, fill your reports with productivity, with usage, with the ways your information center is prepared to provide, is providing, and has provided knowledge to all members of the firm who need it, giving them the information edge. The tester of usefulness has always asked, "What have you done for me lately?"; he rarely asks, "How did you do it?" He may well ask how much it cost, but in your annual report don't focus on such things as cost of acquisitions or equipment; let these items stand in the budget document only, for to emphasize them elsewhere is to invite cuts. And to emphasize them elsewhere is to take time away from our main concern, the distribution of information and the transformation of information into knowledge.
To become more effective businesspeople we need to abandon some of the sacred cows of traditionalist librarianship. There are still corporate information centers today, for example, that devote inordinate amounts of time to interlibrary loan procedures and even to sending out overdue notices. There are at least several reasons why these are not effective uses of corporate time or resources, but I will not digress on this.
So here I am in a faultfinding vein, not I know calculated to win friends or induce invitations to social events. But the great advice of the Delphic oracle was, "Know thyself," and we in the knowledge profession must do a considerable amount of mirror-staring if we are to know ourselves, to see what we need to do and to be. In their 1993 landmark article, "Blow Up the Corporate Library," Tom Davenport and Larry Prusak argued that many of our profession's problems are attributable to librarians themselves. By "blowing up" they did not mean destroy, but expand, grow, stretch; and by my comments I similarly hope not to dynamite my colleagues out of existence but to offer possibilities of growth, of expansion.
Let me provide one illustration of growth from my own experience. Even though all 70,000+ Arthur Andersen employees have desktop access to the Internet and to the KnowledgeSpace, our intranet (which has within it the ability to create one's own customized current awareness service with feeds from Dow Jones Interactive, Reuters, Hoover's and other sources), and though many thousands of employees have desktop access to Lexis-Nexis and numerous other resources, my Business Information Center (BIC) started a year or two ago to advertise a "BIC Current Awareness Service." In just the past six months, we have seen an increase from preparing only a handful of current awareness packages per week to dozens per week. Some information professionals have been fearful that direct end-user access would dilute their role; on the contrary, we have found that the more users do on their own, the more they seek the value added by our staff. The volume of requests continues to climb. But the nature of the requests has changed. Users do the straightforward research on their own, and they turn to us for complex, in-depth, sophisticated, value-added research. So our customers are using us more than ever, and they're using us in smarter ways.
But I do not mean in all this to declare that large is always better than small, that growth means getting bigger, having more. In a Browning poem an artist says that often in painting, "less is more." A work of art that crowds the picture may weaken its thrust, dilute the message, while the sparer image speaks more clearly and forcefully to us, does its job better. I suggest that we can apply this to our profession, that less of some things we have in the past thought essential may prove to be more effective. Let us have less control, and see what openness can achieve; less management, and test the virtues of unrestricted effort; less equilibrium, and learn whether the unbalanced and unsymmetrical may accomplish some things that orderliness cannot. I am speaking here of course of the ancient opposition of classical order and romantic liberation from restriction, and I know that in the long seesawing between these two men and women have never found one to be perfect, the other fatally flawed. But our profession has been slave to classic restraint for so long--perhaps for the length of its life--that I think it worthwhile to emphasize the openness of the romantic dialectic. Bet you'd never read someone urging librarians to get romantic!
Here's another illustration of how we must integrate with our business colleagues. The most important yardstick by which they measure themselves is something our college training again probably did not prepare us for: the yardstick is money. The ascendancy of the knowledge worker as a creator of wealth offers information professionals a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reinvent ourselves, to prove that we are value-adding professionals. If we feel ourselves to be above money, we may find ourselves without a salary; if for us there is just something a little too hot in the idea of creating money, we had better get out of the business kitchen. I don't mean to emphasize this too much, for I am aware that it is easier in my area, the professional services firm, than in other types of organizations to measure intellectual capital: knowledge is our product, and so customer surveys and metrics which measure innovation are more readily tied to what we, as information professionals in a consultancy, do. But I know from my own experience that in many other kinds of firms there are also opportunities for proving your contribution to the bottom line. For example, obtain and make use of testimonials from key clients about the value of the time they saved by utilizing your professional services versus trying to track down the information on their own. Too many information professionals fail to effectively manage the packaging and sale of their expertise.
Some talented journalists in our profession have offered us articles that should be a wake-up call to library school professors who have never worked in corporate America. A useful effort, surely, but of help only to future information professionals; we already in the field are on our own to develop what our professors did not give. And, glad to say, we are at the task. In the SLA report, "Competencies of Special Librarians in the 21st Century," some of the personal and professional competencies needed by the new information professionals are outlined. In the following comments, I will try to emphasize a few of these that I consider most essential for the success of our profession.
I think one thing we fail to move forward with is a constant contact with the rest of our businesses, not waiting until someone comes in with a question but aggressively communicating with them whenever possible. (I don't remember anyone in graduate school using the word aggressive. Someone should have.) In particular we need to convey our ongoing work to senior management, keeping them aware of our business and marketing plans, our metrics, our annual goals and objectives. Too often we also fail to form alliances with user-oriented IT personnel-- our natural allies, those responsible for the conduit that carries our content--and also with our vendors, whom we should not regard as used-car salesmen trying to stick us with a lemon complete with defective transmission, but rather as valuable providers who can help us rise within our own organizations as we create more useful vehicles for information delivery. Some information professionals who were our forerunners thought of themselves as sufficient unto themselves. Today's information professional, however, is intimately partnering with information technologists and acting as mediator between vendors and end users. We alpha and beta test products, we provide the market, we liaise, facilitate, and coordinate for vendors while we coach, consult with, and train users.
Remember Benjamin Franklin's pronouncement about what happens to those who refuse to hang together (if you don't remember, he said they would all hang separately). In concert with these groups, we can say that, though we may not claim to have all the answers, we do have the partnerships to find them. This means, of course, that we fully recognize the importance of all our partners, the necessity of an equality of roles. In the past, providers had direct, almost exclusive, relationships with information professionals; there was a linear relationship between providers, information professionals, and end users, with information flowing back and forth in one dimension. But as we know, three factors impacted this linear structure: increasingly sophisticated end user desktop applications, the Internet, and the evolution of intranets. From this we, the information professionals, emerged functioning first as information strategists--designing, organizing, and "architecting," if you will, the flow of information within the company, as well as performing individual and organizational needs assessments; second as internal consultants--advising end users on search methodology (to enhance efficiency, ensure accuracy, and avoid bias), and validating sources (thereby ensuring quality control); and third as those who add value to information by filtering, synthesizing, massaging, packaging, and to varying degrees analyzing it. Now we see a circular, interactive relationship developing: the providers serving as suppliers and builders, the information professionals working as architects, and the end users becoming much more involved with the decision-making process. (To hold ourselves aloof from their ideas and suggestions and needs is not to protect, but to destroy, ourselves.)
A powerful part of moving forward is expressed in a Latin adage: Carpe diem--seize the day, the day of opportunity. Technology and the Internet have given us the opportunity; vendors are giving us the opportunity every day, with every sales call; it remains for us to seize, and to use. I'll give you one more aphorism: seize occasion by the forelock; occasion is waving its tresses at us, and all we have to do is reach out a hand.
We are talking here about movement as means for survival, which I suppose should bring to all our minds the great student of surviving, Charles Darwin. To be a survivor, Darwin said, you have to be among the fittest. But perhaps it is not generally understood exactly what Darwin meant by "fit." "It is not the strongest of the species that survive," he said, "nor the most intelligent, but the most responsive to change." Among the many good things I learned as I trained to be an information specialist, I do not remember learning about the value of change. But change is essential to movement and survival, and though it can be scary ("Don't look forward; something might be waiting for you"), it cannot be avoided: we adapt, or we become extinct. If you can stand it, one more Latin motto: veniente occurite morbo: run to meet trouble. The quicker we face a problem, the less difficult it becomes to deal with it. Staying safe is, if you will, too dangerous for us: we must embrace change, see its potential, minimize its danger, make it work for us.
A personal example: just over a year ago at this time, I'd been told that it would be necessary for my BIC to move to another floor, a move that would take us away from some of our heaviest users, a large segment of our customer base, and away from a heavily trafficked floor in the middle of a dynamic part of our practice. As I headed for the 1998 SLA conference in Indianapolis, I did so with a heavy heart, trying to figure out how I'd be able to turn this impending move of my department from a negative into a positive. For starters, I decided we'd throw a gala Grand Opening celebration for the new facility. I persuaded my Office Managing Partner to agree to perform with me a ceremonial ribbon cutting. We held a nighttime party complete with two open bars, tables of food, candlelight, and elegant hors d'oeuvres served by waitstaff in black-tie. A marvelously generous vendor agreed to more than split the expenses with me, helped with the catering plans, and provided beautiful floral arrangements in return for the opportunity to showcase their new products and mingle with the many partners, principals, and senior managers who I knew would show up by virtue of the fact that I was putting the Office Managing Partner's name on the invitation. Where he goes, the partners (and aspiring partners) follow.
We have discovered as many or more new customers since our relocation as the numbers we were afraid of losing. We've developed outreach endeavors customized to the personnel near our previous facility to help lure them to our new location. Most significantly, we have capitalized on the fact that we are now located down the hall from our recruiting offices, interview rooms, and corporate training classrooms. With this we saw the opportunity to market ourselves as a recruiting tool. The recruiters point out the BIC to promising candidates. For example, during the summer campus recruiting season, when recruits are being courted and wooed by all of our competitors, our recruiters bring candidates through the BIC, emphasizing particularly our large and beautiful end user technology area, and they suggest that access to this cutting edge information facility should be among the many reasons why a recruit would want to accept Arthur Andersen's offer as opposed to working for another firm.
We run the information center like a little business within a business. Like every business, an information center should spend a part of its time on new product development, making innovation a routine operating procedure. Each quarter, year, half-year--whatever works best--an information center should decide on one or two new services it can develop and "sell"--yes, we too can become salespersons without the stigma of the used-car lot. Delivery of information is another area in which we should constantly invent and reinvent in response to current business trends; to work out a nice delivery plan, see that it works, and think that no more will ever be required is to become a sitting-duck target.
Forgive me if I belabor the necessity of change for survival; I hardly think it can be overemphasized. The great foe of the future, I suggest, is the present. It seems so permanent, so unchangeable that we almost cannot think tomorrow must be different. You probably remember the Shelley poem in which a tyrant named Ozymandias boasts of the permanence of his mighty works: the speaker in the poem looks around and sees nothing but a stone bearing the recorded boast. Ozymandias thought his deeds would last forever; you and I are tempted to think next week will be just like this week. But to move forward, one needs to ask, "What will my role be like two years from now? Am I ignoring some writing on the wall?" Changes are everywhere, in knowledge integration, in the developing of new classes of business intelligence tools, in increased emphasis on data mining.
Here then, to sum up, are my recommendations:
Get out of the library and into business.
Operate by business principles as informed and as strict as those required by our colleagues in any other area of the workplace.
Seek out ways, if possible, to demonstrate your ability to make money.
Use the same metrics to measure performance that other areas of the business do.
Decide whether it makes sense in your organization to abandon some of the "sacred cows" of librarianship such as devoting tons of money to automated cataloging projects that, when all is said and done, are perhaps not benefiting your particular organization in a meaningful way.
Don't be a library traditionalist; abandon traditionalist library science methodologies if they don't make sense for your organization.
Form strategic alliances. I heard an information center manager at this year's conference say, "No one ever tells me anything." I was stunned by this remark. Our job is not to wait to be told; our job is to find out. By forming the necessary alliances to do so, you will eventually become sought for advice and viewed as a person who can play a role in major company endeavors.
Be aggressive in seeking new responsibilities. Some personal examples: In my first corporate library position, I was asked to do research on corporate ethics policies. I went through the usual steps you might imagine, collecting examples of best practices, etc. But then I wound up soliciting the assignment to actually draft what would become the official ethics policy for my company, published and distributed to all new hires. (Yes, the only way to accomplish this assignment was to devote late nights and weekends to it.) Later at the same company, I turned the numerous requests I received for trademark research into a sideline role as the company's "trademark administrator," assisting corporate counsel by managing registrations and renewals for over 400 active trademarks. (This new role helped justify further additions to my growing library staff.) In a later job, I turned a research assignment on Total Quality Management into a high-visibility position on a firmwide quality committee that reported directly to the CEO.
Face ambiguity and uncertainty head-on. When you stumble over professional problems, be--as a song line puts it--grateful for that pleasant trip; pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and look for the productive change the solution can offer. Eschew the tidy; repudiate the neat; abandon the orderly, and see what can be done when you and your information center get out of the box.
And above all, work within the confidence of your strong and contributing profession. We of the SLA have the skills, the resources, and the relationships; if we work as business professionals--marketing our skills instead of hoarding them--we will not need to worry about where we'll be in the future. We will be the future.
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