The Convergence of INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY & INFORMATION MANAGEMENT.

• Author: MYBURGH, SUE

AT THE CORE

THIS ARTICLE DISCUSSES

* New information management professions emerging from the convergence of information technologies (IT)

* How the convergence of IT and information management professions creates greater insight by each group into the work of the other

* Why an understanding of RIM and IT terminology is crucial to managing records in electronic form

Arrival of the year 2000 is only one of many inducements for the information professions to look both backward and forward. Another is information technology (IT), which has been changing the nature of information creation, publication, and communication for almost five decades. In so doing, IT is creating changes for both information professionals and the society in which they find themselves. The ubiquitous nature of IT and its fast development cycles have created confusion about the boundaries of specific professions and even their very nature. It has also created a need for reflection and analysis of the professions themselves.

Developments in today's IT spectrum (e.g., intranets, push technologies, and information filtering) have profound social implications, suggesting that IT has moved beyond data management within organizations and now influences the ways in which organizational communication takes place. This in turn affects the nature and fabric of societies and organizations, predicated as they increasingly are upon their information flows. IT no longer handles raw data, or indeed, just information. IT systems are now being developed which address the most intangible and unquantifiable -- yet probably the most valuable -- resource of all: knowledge.

Information and its dimensions are perceived and dealt with differently by IT specialists, librarians, archivists, records managers, and corporate information systems staff. While superficially a clear distinction is understood about the nature and work of each of these professions, members of each have long experienced conflicts with one another and with management: clashes of interest, overlapping duties, lack of mutual acknowledgment, lack of consultation, and other turf wars.

There are, of course, differences in education and training, differences that serve to exaggerate the contrasts rather than clarify the similarities between the various groups of information workers. Relationships between interested parties have ranged from indifference to intolerance to outright hostility on occasion. However, much of the confusion about how these bodies deal with information seems to stem from semantic confusion surrounding the terms data, information, knowledge, record, and document.

IT As an Agent of Change

Ironically, convergence is probably the term that most describes the changes in IT. Various aspects of IT seem to be converging and becoming integrated or concatenated. Multifunctional services such as the Internet with its array of functions (e.g., World Wide Web, e-mail, e-commerce, telephony, and newsgroups) causes changes as well in the human functions or activities it affects.

We find confluence of disciplines, a conjunction of activities and tasks, and convergence in media as everything becomes digital, blurring distinctions among visual, print, audio, and multimedia documents. This conjunction of events, activities, and roles is even evident in our daily lives. We act in a range of various roles -- parent, teacher, friend, cook, chauffeur, and student -- perhaps all in one day and sometimes simultaneously.

Will IT, as an agent of change, lead to a similar convergence among the various disciplines that can be described as the information professions ? Or will even greater clarity and distinctions be identified among these various roles? Some information professionals may not view this as a problem; in fact, they may find their positions enhanced and strengthened by IT.

As a contributor to the electronic listserve RECMGMT stated, "RM is dying. RM is thriving. Or another way to describe it is the traditional records management profession is rapidly metamorphosing into RIM (records and information management). RIM is the convergence of traditional records management disciplines and the IT profession."

This is not a solitary view. Cox (1997) agrees that convergence in IT results in the convergence of the information management professions, as well as emergence of new IM disciplines:

Convergence in the information professions is fairly easy to characterize. It is the unifying of the professions and professional objectives or functions -- as opposed to the continuing schismatic nature of specialization, or divergence. It is also, through such unification, the harnessing of technology in particular settings to improve or to create new activities. Such discussion about the information professions is quite important because these professions have become distinguishing characteristics of our information age. Interestingly, none of the debates on this topic consider that technology itself can supplant any of these groups of information professions. The emphasis in the dialogue focuses on how information professions can deal with such changes and how IT can be usefully integrated into their work. This view is supported by the underlying belief that technology itself neither produces, evaluates, understands, nor adds meaning to information.

In this scenario, the merging of professional objectives is a result of IT. This in turn creates a commonness of purpose, which means a less clear distinction between professions in their activities and functions. Daum (1997) explains the working categorization of functions within organizations, although not allowing for internal politics and overlaps:

There are three significant classes of information within an organization: data, documents and published information. What you will find in most organizations is that technologists are responsible for data management, librarians are responsible for published information management, and document management (paper and electronic) slips though the cracks with no assigned management accountability. Documents are records and yes, they are being managed, but often with little overall planning and without standard records management tools. However, there has been, until very recently, a general ignorance of the value and importance of information within the organization. According to Darnton (1992):

A glaring omission from the organizational charts of most enterprises is responsibility for the enterprise's overall information needs. Yet it is critical to look at the information flows of the enterprise, together with its business processes ... Because knowledge and information are key assets in any enterprise, each business unit is responsible for their correct use, just as it is for other enterprise assets such as cash, people and facilities. This illustrates that, until very recently, organizations were generally unaware of the cost of the information they were producing. They were also ignorant of the fact that decisions were often based on insufficient information. Organizations were also oblivious to the fact that poorly arranged and documented information was costing a substantial amount in storage and staff costs.

One reason for this lack of understanding is that, typically, the people who handled information were better acquainted with data processing, accountancy, mathematics, or engineering than with information management. They lacked a holistic view of corporate information resources, the information life cycle, or how to manage information (as opposed to managing data). There was a lack of direct communication between those responsible for information handling and those who determined corporate objectives and policy. These were seen as two entirely separate activities. Managing information was frequently interpreted as merely having the appropriate information technology.

Shifting Paradigms

We are now witnessing a profound change in the way in which organizations perceive, understand, and manage their information. There is now clear recognition of the value of information, the creation of new information, the retrieval of existing information, the storage of important information, and the disposal of redundant information. There is also greater awareness of the cost of not getting the right information to the right person at the right time.

To fully reap the benefits of this change, a coordinated approach to the work done by various information workers in the organization is essential. This group or team includes information technology support staff, systems analysts and programmers, corporate librarians, knowledge managers, and records managers.

Records managers have been around since the earliest days of the Mesopotamian civilization, but are they becoming more central to business effectiveness? Jobs and levels of responsibility are changing as a result of the introduction of IT (in the work domain in particular) to organizations with groupware such as Lotus Notes and PC Docs and with various...