Information Professionals: Changing Tools, Changing Roles

Information Outlook, March, 2001 by Nils C. Newman, Alan L. Porter, Julie Yang

No Profession will undergo more radical change between 2000 and 2010 than will the Information Professional.

THIS PRESUMPTUOUS PREDICTION IS BASED ON A SET OF CONVERGENT TRENDS that, taken together, imply a coming new world for information professionals. We associate these trends with a series of studies we have performed for industry, government, and academia to draw implications for information professionals. We make the case for dramatic changes, then recommend particular actions to the profession and to its individual members. Within the scope of this short article, we don't try to distinguish implications specifically for various information professionals (e.g., information managers, database searchers, marketing research supporters). We address these generally to "you" to determine how they come to bear personally.

Trends

The trends coming together to change your lives reflect the emergence of the Information Economy. Increasing availability of information--and our nascent efforts to more effectively use that information--drive this dominant societal transformation of our era. Without undue hand waving about exponential information growth and the Internet, let's look at four discrete trends.

1. Where once successful information retrieval might have yielded, say, 10 "good hits" (articles or whatever), today it might yield 1,000, and in coming years, perhaps, 10,000 relevant records.

2. Information staff resources will remain roughly constant.

3. To bridge the gap between good hits and what we can read, software tools will organize and process the additional good hits.

4. The product of this software processing will not be fewer hits. It will be new forms of information that add intrinsic value for users.

Figure 1 suggests the "paradigm shifting" potential of these trends. We need to take advantage of better tools to make use of this outpouring of information. We need to have the computer "read" for us, if you will. That is, we need to analyze text not just to point us to precious nuggets (to extract a few really good articles), but to illuminate patterns in the full body of information. The issue here is not information retrieval--there is too much good information for that to suffice. The issue is to perceive the patterns--e.g., associations among particular concepts within the domain, producer emphases changing over time, new techniques entering the "fringe" of the domain with promise to change it greatly.

Let's track what's driving each trend.

Trend One

Search potential is being driven upward by a) enhanced fingertip access to b) increasing numbers of databases with c) unlimited access licenses, using more comfortable d) search engines. Retrieval potential is bolstered by e) broadband media and f) more intuitive electronic downloading. Such enhanced search potential makes for a qualitative change in the nature of the resulting information. Previously you might have handed over a few well-targeted items for the requesting user to read. Now you and the requester must decide how to get maximum value from thousands of items. (Literally, we have found that our studies on particular scientific or technological topics often generate this order of magnitude of relevant information.)

There is no way that better search tools, better indexing, better information categorization, or better anything is going to reduce the number of good hits to a digestible number. Something new is needed in how we treat this pertinent information for our research reviews, competitive intelligence activities, or marketing assessments.

Trend Two

We may be mistaken, but our parochial sense suggests no increase in information staff resources. Multiple forces interact. Some promote increased support for information professionals due to demand for services driven by the increasing information resources, perceived value in accessing those resources, and changing technologies. But other forces press against increasing support--easier access encourages a do-it-yourself mindset; new graduates who have been trained on the far side of the "digital divide" are willing to perform their own information retrieval; and short-term financial payback considerations demand pressure "information services" to pay their full way. Taken together, we don't think these forces sum to increasing support for information professionals.

So, combining trends one and two, we find inexorably increasing textual (and other forms of) information with no increase in human capacity to absorb it. Also, information staff resources who could potentially prefilter the excessive information are relatively fixed. (Under trend one, argue that this is hopeless, even were that increasing information professionals at hand.) The gap between information availability and usability will keep increasing.

Trend Three

To bridge the gap between good hits and user capacity to digest, we need new knowledge perspectives. We need to extract insights from the set of information per se, not just from individual items within it. Software can help.