Technology has always been fast-moving, but it seems that there is a “perfect storm” of change right now. Cloud, mobile, social and big data are forces that create dramatic opportunities for improved business process, better employee collaboration and closer customer engagement. Meanwhile, content overload, security, litigation and compliance create huge potential risks for most organizations.
Increasingly, these new forces revolve around unstructured content - the information that flows through systems of engagement rather than systems of transaction. Because of these global information management trends, the career opportunities for “information professionals” have never been higher. Leading the way in these new uncharted waters provides a real chance for a knowledgeable and qualified information practitioner to raise their value to the business.
At the same time, though, there is also a risk for skills marginalization as the premium for pure domain-specific technical skills declines, and the premium for a wider set of skills tied to the needs of the business increases.
In Race Against the Machine, Andy McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson talk about the new challenges that arise relative to skills development once the exponential pace of technology reaches the point where jobs that were traditionally exclusively the province of humans (e.g., those requiring complex pattern recognition like driving a car, or those requiring complex communication skills like translation) can be done by "machines." They indicate that we are approaching a time in which mental labor is increasingly being done by computers. They compare our current time to that experienced in the 1700s and 1800s when steam (i.e., machines) replaced physical labor, and they use the fable of John Henry, a steel driver who beat the machine but died in the process, as a way of illustrating the need to race with rather than against the machine.
Racing with the machine in the modern era requires an understanding of the power of networks. It requires imagination to understand how technologies can be combined to create new value. It requires technical knowledge, but also the business acumen to put that technical knowledge into context.
About a year ago, Information Week had this cover, which underscores the nature of the challenge facing information professionals. Either speed up the game, learn new skills, and connect to the business, or face increasing marginalization. Per David Foote, an expert in IT skills development, "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 multi-taskers
and multi-dimensionally skilled workers with subject matter expertise, business savvy, technology skills, and a
range of appropriate interpersonal and 'political' skills."
A new whitepaper by AIIM identifies a high demand for qualified information professionals who have a combination of business experience and a broad base of general IT skills, but who also understand how to manage content and information lifecycles. According to the report “Career Development for Information Professionals,” underwritten by Oracle, there is a recognition of the changes and challenges in technology at the moment, and a strong desire to update and broaden skill sets to meet the new demands.
According to the survey, the role of the information professional is seen as vital to the successful exploitation of mobile, social, big data and cloud technologies, and for many has become an aspirational mid-point between a technical specialist and business generalist. Currently, there is an optimistic view across all areas for employment in information management, but the biggest change is a need for more information/data analysts and information architects, followed by project managers and business analysts. Taxonomy and metadata design, information architecture, standards compliance, and governance were seen as the most difficult skills to find.
These technology changes present individuals with the opportunity to increase their value to their current organization, although 37 percent of respondents are expecting to move to new jobs within the next two years. A higher salary is the most prevalent motivation to change, but 22 percent of respondents rank an opportunity to work with different technologies as more important than better promotion prospects. The most popular step to developing skills was identified as certification, with 43 percent reporting to hold two or more business or technical certifications. AIIM’s training qualification is held by 22 percent, and four percent have already passed the recently introduced Certified Information Professional (CIP) exam. Respondents identified the information professional role as the most important to the future health of business, with 30 percent considering themselves information professionals.
Recruiters in the survey see ideal candidates as having an understanding of the business, as well as knowledge of the cloud, social and big data analytics. In general, certifications are acknowledged as a more up-to-date indicator of competence than college qualifications, which underscores the value of business experience.
According to my colleague Doug Miles, “There is general agreement that improved information competency results in increased productivity, better decision making, and improved collaboration, but the real challenge is that IT experience is struggling to keep up with the rapid changes in business."
Oracle's Christian Finn (Senior Director, Product Management) echoes this, “The increasing importance of analytics, big data, cloud, customer experience, mobile and social has created a need for a new kind of information professional. People who have the skills to tackle rapidly evolving business challenges through an understanding of these technologies will have a distinct advantage moving forward. Building knowledge and validating skill sets through a range of training and certifications, including the new CIP, can be a critical component of success for today’s information professionals, whether they are looking for a new job or trying to help their organization achieve its goals.”
The paper suggests there is a real opportunity for knowledgeable, qualified information professionals who can reconcile the advantages of cloud, mobile, social, and big data technology with compliance and security risks. They can raise their value to the business by delivering improvements in business process, employee collaboration, and customer engagement. For individuals looking to evolve into sought-after information professionals AIIM recommends: