Building Successful Relationships with IT Professionals - special librarians and information technology professionals

Information Outlook, April, 2001 by Martha K. Heyman

Speaking IT, and Staying a Librarian

TODAY'S CORPORATE ENVIRONMENT DEMANDS THAT CROSS-FUNCTIONAL TEAMS come together at a moment's notice and collaborate effectively to rapidly resolve business problems. These short-term task teams are often composed of people who have never before worked together, and may never again. If the team is to be successful, the leaders, whether formally appointed or informally emerging, must determine quickly how to motivate their peers to contribute beyond the minimally required effort. Studies have reported that workers apply as little as 30% of their available effort (Yankelovich and Immerwahr, 1987). Only by harnessing the members' discretionary effort can the team begin operating in a collaborative fashion. The only tool available to accomplish this task is influence, because these teams are typically composed of peers and not direct reports. The literature reports three critical success factors necessary for establishing a relationship conducive to influence. These factors include a clearly defined and understoo d common purpose, shared responsibility for results, and mutual trust amongst the membership. Mutual trust requires individuals have: a demonstrated level of competence or relevant domain knowledge, a focus on the "broken" work processes versus blaming people, a willingness to admit individual mistakes and to acknowledge limitations, a spirit of cooperation not competition, and an ability to give and receive assistance from associates. The recent explosion of affordable information technology solutions has placed corporate librarians and information scientists squarely in the midst of many task teams with information technology professionals. Librarians are challenged to work with technology without becoming lost in it. This article offers one practitioner's views and experiences on how librarians can collaborate successfully with IT professionals without losing their identities as librarians.

WHAT and WHY

There is nothing new in the statement that librarians need to network effectively with information technology professionals. Even before the March 1994 Library Solutions' conference "Building Partnerships" (7), library and computing professionals had been trying to understand how best to work together, though, as the depth of references in the literature would indicate, perhaps more so in academic settings than in corporate settings. To some extent, information technology professionals and librarians in academic settings seem to have done a superior job of recognizing the value of working together to deliver results to their customers in the rest of the academic community. The literature is full of case studies of successful collaborations.

In corporate settings, there tends to be a much greater level of competition for turf and recognition. This trend seems to be exasperated in technology-based companies, where the tangible glitz of slick new computers and software always seems to take funding precedence over the intangible benefits of solid information science practice. It's much easier to understand the connection between the efficacy of the accounting or inventory systems with relation to the revenue stream than it is to understand the money and time saved by being able to quickly and easily leverage knowledge nuggets to be found in proprietary or corporate literature. While the core competencies of the information technology profession result in the creation of tangible products, the core competencies of librarians and information scientists result in qualitative enhancement of those tangible products. (Much like the BASF advertisement "We don't make the products you use, we make the products you use better.") These qualitative enhancements can be critical to the successful operation of the information technology product because they enable the human user to make sense of the data and information.

Fortunately, however, there is a growing recognition in corporations that digitized information content must be handled in as rigorous a fashion as the print (9). As information systems become more pervasive and truly enterprise critical, upper management is increasing its expectations as to the speed and accuracy with which the information can be retrieved and utilized. There is diminishing tolerance for problems introduced by, rather than resolved by, the information technology solution.

Information Science Core Competencies: Sense-Making Tools

1. Expert knowledge of information resources (content and use)

2. Conceptual analysis (indexing, abstracting)

3. Ability to structure and organize content (information management)

4. Ability to synthesize and customize (information relevancy)

There is reduced tolerance for information overload. Corporations operating in the global economy must rely on the efficacy of their information systems to bring them the competitive advantage they need to succeed in the market place. As a result, librarians and information scientists are increasingly being invited to join project teams in the formative stages of problem identification and resolution. This is a welcome improvement over being asked to "clean-up the mess" after the fact.