Finding Our New Middle Ground.

• Position: Brief Article

"Change can come with breathtaking speed, leaving a company on the defensive." -- Goldstick and Schreiber, Inc. Magazine Guide to Small Business Success

We're all familiar with an optical illusion in which two lines, or tracks, seem to converge in the distance. We might consider here one track to be information technology (IT) and the other "content." The interdependence of these entities has always existed. Only a few years ago, they seemed distinguishable. Now, with the emergence of knowledge management (KM) and strategic information management, we begin to realize that there is not merely a convergence but a fusion of the two.

The crucial challenge to information management professionals is how to manage information that seems so transient, so intangible, so unmanageable. Are e-mail and voice mail records? How can one "manage" the conversational content of corporate chat rooms? How can one "capture" a constantly changing Web site? There are implications for retention, storage and retrieval, legal issues, and for the possibility of information being used first for one purpose and then being recycled for another -- as in KM. Will we gain opportunities -- or face extinction -- as information professionals if we lose control over information resources that cannot be controlled in a conventional sense? Several contributors in this issue address the reality of IT as both an enabler and a challenge and the complex issue of managing fast-growing information resources of organizations doing business around the world.

In this and in the October 1999 Journal issue, Bruce Dearstyne has provided us with a vision of the rapidly changing information landscape. The vision of information as a resource is shifting from the more familiar static model (information-as-documents) to one less tangible, more elusive, and more dynamic (like an electrical current flowing from anywhere to everywhere to anyone all the time and at the speed of light). And what variations on this theme will wireless commerce bring? Once the information manager's focus was on the needs of corporate units. Today's focus on the customer, however, suggests a radical change in thinking toward individual customers in and outside one's organization.

Does a dynamic information-as-flow environment mean that an individual's reasonable expectations of privacy and confidentiality must become but a fond memory? Today, the battle is between an agenda to know almost everything about everybody and a...