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The Slow, Tentative Rise of the Knowledge Professional

By Marc Solomon posted 10-17-2011 00:30

  

There may be no SharePoint proletariat. There may be no guild of usability artists or local brotherhood of global search configurators. But there are scores of unsung working stiffs attempting to create revenue boosters and strap them to the exploits of the account managers and sales teams they train and support.

The wind is in the sails of an emergent class of knowledge professionals. At least that’s the narrative weaved by Gartner Research – launcher of watchwords, plotter of magic matrices (do you know where your quadrant is?) and keeper of hype cycles. Gartner says “go big IM!” The instant message stands tall for these same information managers:

The vast majority of organizations see the need to manage information as an enterprise resource, rather than in separate "silos," departments or systems, but they don't know how to begin to address the challenge, as it is so large. To fully exploit information, people are needed to explicitly manage it. The enterprises that are moving first to create these roles, and train for them, will be the first to benefit from information exploitation.”

I’m sold. But who wants to be on the receiving end of all this exploitation? What analyst wouldn't heighten their own information threshold? Scarcities abound but we're awash in an information surplus that fuels the knowledge deficits of Gartner subscribers -- the same folks who insist on narratives, matrixes, buzzwords, and revenue neutral 9-9-9 tax reform.

But what about the rest of our ECM brethren? Are they buying this? Are they seeing the jet packs and rally caps Gartner is intimating? Or are they still puttering away on knowledge tractors. Are they referring back to five year plans for data harvestors still twisting in their original hanging folders?

The Medium is a Two Way Message

Is Gartner on to something?

Yes, if you ask the community manager of fledgling social media sites. They’re being given the watchful wink by the brass to bypass over-architected silos that serve the production quotas of a quarantined enterprise. Social media is probably the wrong tag to apply here when the message is a two-way medium. Those silos will cycle through their legacies as containers of document collections. It’s the community manager who mediates these resources to pool and build on the collective experience of their group members.

Hands off the Merchandise

Are the days of producer / users who build their own apps upon us?

No, if you’re waiting on leaders who see knowledge transfer as something abstract, or worse, as outdated as a Sean Connery Bond film or a Federal sting operation inside a research facility. In that leadership vacuum sits an IT function all too willing…

  • To delay the inevitable move to unfamiliar systems,
  • To keep non-IT hands off IT property – even when it means suspending development of the D.I.Y. services intended to support the business side, and,
  • To play the cost card – a winning hand in any organization where incumbent IT is required to run the lost and found at the orphanage of acquisition assets.

Up the Junction

So what's the true fate of the knowledge professional. Do we stick with the familiar script or do we rise to the occasion? There is a "qualified yes" in scaling the boundaries of sequestered server farms. Here's our choice offered through two implicit truths:

  1. Assets exist to be optimized.
  2. Liabilities should be obliterated (or mitigated to the max).

It’s that simple litmus test that speaks up for knowledge professionals better than any keynote speaker, ad campaign, or vendor-bound webinar series. It’s at the fork in the asset / liability junction where knowledge professionals are no longer …

Pushing paper but pulling resources

Hand-coding dead vocabularies but mapping tags to keywords

Standardizing on file formats or form-laden templates but on operational clock-speed and time-to-market

Social Acceptance

It’s been ten years since the web outside our firewalls determined there need be…

One click to purchase

One result page to review

One less middle-man between the checkout box and the warehouse

The same will be written this decade from the enterprise where every knowledge object is…

One step removed from deal-closing

One cut/paste to generate the right value proposition

One raison d'être: respond directly to business needs – not to generate a list of documents around a query

Either way the menial stuff will be workflow-enabled, outsourced, or simply ignored if we don’t design systems for the way our users engage as peers and as team members. That's true if we want to occupy leadership positions, retool our skills, and build service models that move beyond the one-off fire drills of the past.  In future blogs we’ll explore some certification programs, including AIIM’s own strategic focus, designed to do precisely that.

In the meantime my fellow knowledge workers – you have nothing to lose but your login to systems that will require your assistance in shutting down. But that's not where the value lies. The era of white glove document handlers is winding down. The actual problem-solving has just begun.

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