by Forest Woody Horton, Jr.
This article briefly addresses the evolution of the role of an organization's senior information officer as that role has evolved primarily in the last half of this century. The author does not deny the humorous overtones implicit in the concept. But his core thesis is that despite the guffaws, scorn, cynicism and general Weltschmerz (ho hum, here we go again) anticipated from the 'serious library, information, information technology, archival, historian, journalism, educator and other communities, he is willing to bet that by no later than 2010, graduate students and people in their early work force years will be scrambling to position themselves as very high paid "Wisdom Administrators." In short, if we first saw data analysts, then information managers, then chief information officers, and now chief knowledge officers, can the Wisdom Administrator be far behind? The author thinks they are already there--waiting silently in the wings for their cue to come on stage. Their scripts are virtually already written for them because of today's culture of continually pouring old wine into new bottles. All they need to do is behave, faithfully speak their lines, and collect their six figure paychecks! Is there life beyond the Wisdom Administrator? Read on!
1. Stage One: Enter The Data Analyst
When I was a freshman student entering college in 1947, over fifty years ago, there existed no occupational or career path for students aspiring to head "the information function" in an organization. Therefore, there wasn't any formal curriculum I might pursue in any of my university's schools or colleges because there was no such job in the marketplace. There wasn't even a "certificate" or a "minor" or a "concentration" or some other less formal and rigid course of study. How could there be? For, indeed, not only was there no job as an information professional, there was no such thing as "the information function." Information was considered some kind of "amorphous ether" in the heads of people, on pieces of paper, or being transmitted in a message, verbally or in pictures, from a sender to a receiver.
In those days you either knew something or you didn't. You either knew something yourself, or you knew where to find it. And if you had not learned in your K-12 and secondary and higher education schooling all that you needed to know to find and hold a job, professional or not, blue or white collar, you were scorned by your colleagues and bosses alike. The "function of information" (a tortuous and slippery idea then and now) if it was debated by intellectuals at all, was to empower people--educate them and make them smarter, enlighten them, edify them, make them more historically literate and "cultured". The concept, in short, was delimited by educational, cultural and scientific turf and philosophical boundaries. It had no place in the organization and management theories and structures in vogue at the time.
The possibility that information itself could be a resource that has value and costs to both individuals and organizations, or could be a commodity that is bought and sold in the marketplace, and therefore should be planned, managed and controlled like any other organizational resource or commodity such as human resources, financial resources, physical resources, or natural resources, were heretical ideas. If you dared to espouse those ideas, in all likelihood you would be exposed to the Information Inquisition and spirited away in the dead of night to spend the rest of your days as an unbeliever behind locked doors.
While data, information and knowledge had always been considered both a means and an end, the challenges of making sure that you had enough of the right kind of reliable and high quality information products and services delivered to you at precisely the right time and in the most appropriate format(s) and medium(s) you required, and were comfortable with, were a bit crackpot. In short, you had nobody to blame but yourself if your information skills and expertise were inadequate.
While the journalist, author, historian and researcher could well utilize vast library, museum and archival holdings (mostly external to their job context) to secure the information they needed, and while the busy corporate executive or government program manager could turn to a special assistant to search for, retrieve, and use the same largely external knowledge reservoirs, there was no "information function" within their organizations that had overall responsibility for planning, managing and controlling both the internal and external knowledge resources they needed.
If one perused the newspaper want ads in those days for an "information job" you would find jobs for librarians, museum workers, archivists, and, of all things, "automatic data processing" specialists whom, today, we would call an "emerging occupation." But the latter group was entirely technical in their orientation and training. That is, they were people who were beginning to learn how to use the punched card machines of the day--the keypunch and verifier machines, the tabulating machines, the sorters and collators, and the "high speed printers" which today would be considered sub-snail level in power and capacity.
There were also, of course, a wide variety of other information-related job offerings, including records specialists, organization and methods examiners, technical writers, printers, publishing specialists, and so forth. But these were all considered "standalone" occupational categories that had little, if anything to do with each other. Certainly they were not considered part of the same "information job fabric."
As the concept of the "scientific and technical information center" caught on in the late forties at the end of World War II, and the early fifties as scientists and engineers began to consider the consequences of accelerating specialization on the one hand, but at the same time the convergence of pure and applied disciplines into interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary fields on the other hand, there emerged the idea of a "data analyst."
The duties and responsibilities of such an individual were quite different than a librarian or any of the other information specialists. The data analyst, in our view, the first "modern information professional." They were not custodians of the containers and for and packages of data, documents, and literature, such as librarians, archivists, museum curators, and so on. They were, differently trained specialists, with different aptitudes, who could analyze and interpret data and information, summarize it, give it additional meaning, and so forth.
Today we call those qualities "value-added" attributes. These individuals were a different kind of "author." Instead of writing books for very broad sectors of society, they were creators of "information products and services" for in-house clients in both public and private sector organizations and institutions. "Information products and services" was a much more eclectic, versatile, and medium and format-independent idea for thinking about, describing, and packaging information containers than were ink-on-paper books, sound recordings, hand-drawn manuscripts, folios, pictures, and so forth.
Stage Two: Enter From Stage Left the Information Manager
Data analysts and data specialists began to populate university campuses, government agencies, scientific research think tanks, and other kinds of organizations throughout the fifties and into the sixties. They were in high demand and pay scales and opportunity were very good. We also began to see professional societies and associations fragmenting and splintering to some degree in order to support the education, training, and professional development needs of the emerging occupational category. And the names chosen by these new societies and associations reflected the broad new specialization sector and sub-sector memberships they were trying to attract.
Of course the parent societies and associations such as the American Library Association in the library field, The Society for American Archivists in the archives field, and the Data Processing Management Association in the emerging computer field still retained their large core generalist memberships. But the inevitable professional society/association compartmentalization and splintering had begun, and is not likely to abate as specialization continues unabated.
Somewhere along the line in the sixties the idea that information should come to be regarded as a valuable, but at the same time costly resource to all kinds of organizations, began to appear. First there was a wave of prognostication in the professional and trade literature. Assorted gurus solemnly waxed that if information, indeed, was an organizational resource, then it needed not just to be analyzed and interpreted, packaged, stored, searched, retrieved, delivered, and communicated, but also to be managed for the good of everybody in the organization.
Public librarians were horrified when some of these pontificators began to say that information could no longer be regarded as a "free good." Archivists and museum curators, too, were worried that the vaunted new electronic information technologies were endangering the traditional and cherished rules of provenance, compounding the problems of specimen identification, preservation authentication, security, privacy, and permanent public access. Journalists fretted that too much information that used to be created, handled, stored, and disseminated in ink-on-paper formats were now moving to a new technology medium called microfilm and microfiche. Public interest groups sounded the alarm bell as the central government data bank or "Orwellian big brother" approach to collecting and storing government information was debated in the halls of Congress in the United States, and in Parliaments abroad. And all of these groups growled at having to buy and learn how to use microform readers and associated equipment and supplies.
How to cope with all of this organizational, technical, and associated chaos? Organizational and management theorists turned to resource management theory and modern business management ideas, and, lo and behold, there they found the answer--assign responsibility and accountability for all of it to a manager!
Suddenly yesterday's dog-of-a-data-analyst became today's darling of the Business School spin-doctors! (Somewhat earlier, janitors had become Floor Cosmeticiennes). Their pay, their fortunes, their peer status, and their career opportunities mushroomed overnight). Thus, the "information manager" was born, and university and college deans trembled with fear, greed, and excitement over the curriculum tsunamis and academic turf battles about to inundate them. Professional association and society executive directors suddenly made the transition from one to three martini lunches in order to adequately mull over the challenges. And existing information professionals in more long-standing and specialized fields quickly updated their resumes using the just-in-time "search and replace" word processor feature on their Lexitrons to good advantage.
As the old saw goes "use to be I could not even spell 'supervisor' and now I are one!" Whole new interdisciplinary fields began to emerge to accommodate the phenomenon, including Information Resources Management (IRM) in the seventies. The trouble is, IRM looked like a duck, waddled like a duck, and quacked like a duck, but it wasn't suppose to be a duck--the traditional kind of information specialist practicing the conventional kinds of information disciplines, but, rather, a swan-- a modern resource manager on a par with financial resources managers, human resources managers, physical (plant and equipment, property) resources management, and so on.
Stage Three: Enter From Stage Right the Chief Information Officer
At first information managers sprouted only at the lower and middle organizational rungs. But it soon became evident that if you have so many soldiers appearing on the battlefield, don't you need commanders and generals organizing them and telling them what to do? Of course! And there came to pass the Chief Information Officer or CIO.. At first the predictable belly laughs and gas pains held sway, and the concept stumbled in the eighties. But, by the early and middle nineties, unmistakably the idea caught hold and by the middle nineties it had caught on like wildfire! What self-respecting Fortune 500 corporation could possibly get along without one? The CIO was then given his own executive washroom key, a time-honored signal that he was being admitted to the boardroom, and would soon be lunching in the executive dining room with the CEO, the CFO, the COO, and the other "big C's."
Once again academia, societies and associations, government and not-for-profits scrambled to try to keep up with the realities of the situation, and vied with one another for who and which could write the most attractive brochures to attract the expected mobs of devotees into their ranks.
One dark night there appeared scrawled in an eerie green light on some Lexitron computer screen the words "knowledge engineer" and suddenly the prospect of a whole new generation of information mandarins materialized! The race was on again!
Not only was a new generation of wine being vinted, but also the entire process of iterating and re-iterating new titles and labels was speeding up exponentially!
Stage Four: Enter From Center Stage The Chief Knowledge Officer
As we write these lines the predictable debate regarding the legitimacy of the CKO concept is just beginning. On the one side are the spin doctors who point out that, after all, knowledge is quite different from data or information. Knowledge is rock solid--the product of collective scientific research, discovery, documentation, experimentation, testing in the laboratories of science and the laboratories of life. Whereas information is "neutral" in that you can take it or leave it and its impact on your endeavors will be marginal. And data! Good Lord, data, as someone once put it, are a mere excrescence!
On the other side are the spin doctors who cry out "here we go again! We're pouring old wine into new bottles yet another time. When is all this silliness going to stop? All we're doing is giving business to the resume-writers, psychiatrists and advertisers who thrive on such foolishness.
Want to make a bet? Chief Knowledge Officers are already being put in place. Some are reporting to Chief Information Officers. Some are working side-by side with CIO's. And still others are becoming the new darling of the organizational chart and the CIO's all the "lesser disciplines and functions" will soon be reporting to them!
Even as I was writing this my Microsoft Outlook icon flashed, announcing the arrival of the following e-mail message:
"Apologies for cross-posting. Knowledge management report launched. Skills for knowledge management, a research report published on behalf of LIC by TFPL Ltd was launched on Monday at a seminar in London. The report looks at the roles, skills and training required to successfully implement a knowledge culture. A press release announcing the launch is available from the LIC website at http:/ /www.lic.gov.uk/ publications/pressreleases/knowledge.html and an executive summary is available at http://www.lic.gov.uk/publications/executive summaries/kmskills.html."
Stage Five: Enter From Above The Wisdom Administrator
Can the Wisdom Administrator be far behind? After all, isn't "wisdom" different from knowledge? Wisdom allows one to make informed and enlightened decisions, not just discover and learn some new tidbit of knowledge. Wisdom is the sage advice that only the most trusted high priests are allowed to dispense. Wisdom is the purist from of data ore, one that is distilled painfully, and expensively, only after decades of trial and error. Wisdom Administration is Decision-Making Under Virtual Certainty, to turn the old saw on its head.
Stage Six: Enter From Only God Knows Where The Sustainable, Empowered and Many-Splendored Zeusian Director General
You may laugh, dear reader, perhaps weary and bored with cynicism and speculation! But I promised a serious argument, didn't I? It is simply this. The Arts and Sciences alike, in general, see increasing specialization as inevitable and ultimately beneficial. They have no problem coping with whether to attend either:
The XXIV Conference On Developing Knowledge Cultures in Industrial Enterprises, or
The XXXII Congress On Applying Knowledge Search and Retrieval Theories to Public Enterprises.
That is, they contend that coping with the problems of choosing between multiple and overlapping career and professional enrichment opportunities such as which meeting to attend, is, after all, a cheap price to pay for the benefits of specialization.
Information Science and Technology is no less subject to splintering and compartmentalization than are any of the other sciences or associated technologies, pure or applied, or the arts.
Where the rubber hits the road is that when we have (or will) progressively moved from data to information to knowledge to wisdom, the multi-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary character of the problem increases exponentially because with each such widening and broadening the academic turfs and disciplines that come into play increases. Getting them to agree on even theorems and hypotheses and experimenting with and testing the "new" concept becomes extremely complex.
But the specialization genie is out of the bottle and I doubt if he is going to give us three wishes.
So, why not sit back and relax. Join the Global Wisdom Administration Council! And later, become titillated at the prospect of the emerging Sustainable,
Empowered and Many-Splendored Zeusian Director General! Taste and drink the heady elixirs of new labels and titles on the organizational door.
Why bother to defray the time and expense of traveling to Fiji or Tahiti when you can experience occupational metamorphosis addiction sitting behind your desk!
Forest "Woody" Horton is ***************************
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