Groundbreaking trends: the foundation for meeting information challenges and opportunities.

• Author: Dearstyne, Bruce W.

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As the recession recedes, the future looks brighter and definitely more digital. Organizations will be altered substantially by information-centric collaboration, new web applications, proliferation of mobile devices, and younger, information-savvy workers using social networking in unprecedented ways. There are exciting times ahead for RIM professionals, who will need to educate, advise, guide, regulate, evaluate, and generally help bring order to the new, sometimes chaotic, information frontier. Ten trends will help them cultivate this frontier.

1. Chief executive officers (CEOs) are improving their understanding of the role of information.

   CEOs are becoming more perceptive about the role of information in supporting enterprise work. Their growing insight is partly driven by the recession, which has occasioned new thinking about all organizational assets. IBM's 2009 white paper The Information Agenda: Rapidly Leveraging Information as a Trusted Strategic Asset for Competitive Advantage is a good example of framing the issue anew for CEOs by connecting information to worker productivity and competitive advantage.

   The white paper suggests an enterprise-wide approach is needed to organize a company's information into "a trusted strategic asset that can be rapidly leveraged across applications, processes, and decisions." The first step is an information strategy that contains "principles which will guide the organization's efforts to create and exploit trusted information," driven by the organization's business strategy and operating framework. The Information Agenda notes that these principles might include:

   * Information should be efficiently provided as a shared service to all parts of the business by experts working in information-critical functions.

   * Information should have one standard definition and presentation, unless compelling business differences dictate otherwise.

   * Data quality and compliance with standards should be built in at the source, with minimum intervention in the flow to the user.

   * Information is a corporate asset. It should be freely shared with the business unless cost, legal, or commercial sensitivity prevent it.

   IBM also recommends careful attention to information definition and governance (e.g., where is it stored, how is accuracy verified, what is its actual value, and "What information do you retire and when do you do it?), and to the infrastructure, or the systems needed to store and manage information. The work of IBM, other IT companies, top consulting firms, and business schools and journals will continue to sharpen CEOs' under standing of the value of information and how to put it to work.

2. Chief information officers' (CIO) work is being redefined.

   CIOs will re-conceptualize their function and, in effect, reinvent themselves as challenges, needs, and opportunities come along. They need to be versatile, proactive, strategic, and determined to lead. CIOs will need to step beyond IT to what Forrester Research's George F. Colony calls "BT' or "business technology." In a September 2009 online article from Forrester, "From Information Technology to Business Technology," Colony advocates "measuring your usage of technology with business metrics instead of technology metrics ... think about technology as a whole and what it means to their business results rather than ... technically oriented goals and metrics like storage system availability or network and router performance."

   Colony also says to let the CEOs and the boards of directors know, "We're not in the technology business anymore; we're in the real business--the company's business."

   CIOs and other information professionals will need to consider how their work aligns with, and contributes to, enterprise priorities; find ways to get the story out about the strategic importance of their work; and develop convincing measures that executives can understand.

3. Co-creation of products and services is increasing.

   This trend uses information technology to connect with and harness collective intelligence. "... Most of the smartest people work for someone else," observes Jeff Howe in Crowd-sourcing, presenting the need to build conduits to connect with them.

   People like collaborating when they have a deep...