Creating a Digital Enterprise – Part 5: Raise of Information Professional

The current conventional focus is all about the technology plumbing we need to put in place to manage the looming Information chaos. Traditionally, IT has been more about the T than the I. Technology staffs have focused and have been valued on the deployment of massive enterprise software applications, seemingly the more complicated, the better, and maintaining the plumbing of our information infrastructures. Even at the highest levels, most CIOs have not really focused on the I part of their job title, and part of the frustration that the CEO has with the CIO is that many CIOs have been more focused on deploying technology than on optimizing information assets.

Reviewing the skill sets required for digital transformation

The digital transformation is ultimately more than just data and technology. This narrow view is a recipe for unfulfilling and suboptimal returns from digital transformation initiatives. In order to drive digital transformation, organizations need IT staffs with broader skills. Specifically, they need executives who understand the I part of the IT value proposition. That's not to say that technical competency is unimportant; far from it. But there is a complementary skillset necessary at this unique moment of both chaos and opportunity.

They need IT staff who understand the management, utilization and application of information and social assets, and are as skilled at connecting systems as they are at developing them. Here’s a great quote from the 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 multidimensional skilled workers with subject matter expertise, business savvy, technology skills, and a range of appropriate interpersonal and 'political' skills." But digital transformation requires more than a change in IT skillsets.

It also requires new skills on the business side. For far too long, the business has been content to throw technology problems over to IT with a vague set, and often conflicting set, of requirements, and expect IT departments to return a perfect solution on time and on budget. And if that didn't work, in an era of consumerized solutions, many business executives can now end run their own IT departments and deploy solutions without IT intervention. And while this may be satisfying in the short term, it is not a recipe for long-term success and for solutions that can operate across departments and at enterprise scale.

It is time for business executives to step up and enhance their technical skills. That doesn't mean that business people need to become technical people, but it does mean that business people need to get serious about understanding the core technologies that they use to run their operations. On both the IT side of the house and the business side of the house, there is need for a new job description. I will call this an Information Professional. 

Understanding the rise of the information professional

The new job of information 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 within the legal, records, and library staff of organizations, they can be found among information architects and managers whose primary focus is governance, they can be process owners, business analysts, and knowledge managers. All of whom need to have an effective information management as a core part of their skillset, or they can be the new wave of information curators and community managers who currently focus primarily on social systems.

And that's the point. At the early stages of a new profession, particularly one that cuts across and encompasses a wide variety of technical disciplines, it is difficult to define where the role begins and where it ends. Consider just one profession that is very well-defined today, project management. 25 years ago, the idea that there was a body of knowledge associated with people who manage software projects and manufacturing projects and construction projects would have been met with extraordinary scepticism.

How can that be? The projects are so different. There can't be any commonality across projects that are that different, and yet today we have the established role of project manager applicable to many diverse kinds of projects. That's how the role of information professional stands right now. A new set of broad skills that will someday be expected standard for analysing information in the enterprise world.

So in conclusion, let's recap the requirements for success in the new era of digital transformation.

1.      One, organizations are being disrupted by the combination of Consumerization, Cloud and Mobile, and the Internet of Things. 

2.      Two, this creates enormous opportunities to rethink your business, but it also creates enormous risks of information chaos. 

3.      Three, in order to address information chaos, organizations need to focus on four key business problems, information risk, automating processes, engaging customers and employees, and applying analytics to gain insight.

4.      Lastly, there is a new skill set needed to capitalize on the opportunities created by digital disruption and avoid the risks of information chaos. IT has traditionally focused on the T part of their job, technology, but the new information professional will focus much more on the I, information, and harness this resource to meet the challenge of digital transformation. We need Information Professionals.

Wishing good fortunes to you and your organization in the digital transformation exercise and look forward to see you in a Digital Enterprise soon.

Cheers

DC*