Facing the Future: Preparing New Information Professionals.

• Author: SMYTHE, DAVID

A relatively new practitioner in the field of information and records management discusses the rising challenges he faces in handling his organization's information needs. Focusing upon the corporate, regulatory, and technical environment, he addresses the actions that records and information managers must take to maximize their skills and effectively meet company objectives. The article offers some very practical suggestions regardless of the type of organization that one represents.

Information managers encounter rapidly changing corporate, regulatory, and technical challenges that require diverse skills, new thinking, and broadened perspectives. To successfully tackle current and future issues, information managers must be prepared to develop innovative ideas, assume leadership roles, disseminate information broadly, and demonstrate good management practices. Information managers will also be viewed by an increasingly sophisticated client base that values and expects practical, tangible benefits. What challenges can be anticipated? How can information managers prepare themselves?

The Corporate, Regulatory, and Technical Environment

Because they occur so frequently, information professionals should remain alert to significant chaotic corporate actions, regulatory changes, and technical advancements. Among likely corporate changes are mergers and acquisitions, expanding or transforming markets, and a converging of information services -- particularly archives, libraries, management information services (MIS), and records management. At the same time, companies in search of competitive advantages strive for flatter organizations, seamless business processes, and innovative teams.

Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) are common in virtually every industry today. What adversely affects companies most during these changes is a loss of "intellectual capital" (Stewart 1997). Terminated employees leave with many years of knowledge, and records -- the corporate memory -- are found to be haphazardly controlled or thoroughly neglected. Those employees who remain often slip into M&A's integration chaos, as opposed to driving through it.

Mergers and acquisitions present a tremendous opportunity and challenge. Given sound information management practices, properly managed information should be easily accessible. Such practices include practical automation, comprehensive inventories, retention schedules ("information maps," as some senior managers prefer to call them), along with effective information policies and procedures. If these are not in place, the merged entity will suffer from subsequent audit penalties, legal actions, increased risk, and reduced productivity.

M&As are prominent among corporate changes, in part, because companies are responding to globalizing markets and increasingly dynamic business environments. Global markets will place greater demands on the effectiveness and accountability of records and information programs. Relatively new businesses such as Internet services, energy marketing, and derivative securities, force action on as-yet-undefined information requirements. What information must be created and kept, and for how long? In addition, new business processes must be continually monitored because as they change, so will the records produced.

Flattened organizational structures and consolidating functions challenge records and information (RIM) programs to keep up. RIM itself can expect to be caught up, too. We may be asked to work with the archives, with the library, or with some technical information service. Do managers of these services understand our values...