Our industry resembles the early days of the PC revolution when computing power broke out of the glass room and was no longer controlled by IT departments. Today, almost every end-user has access to content delivered electronically right to their desktop. Broad collections of content, once the sole domain of the information center, are available everywhere. Vendors are running amok creating information products and services regardless of target market or distribution channel. Ecommerce continues to shape the industry as the Internet integrates advertising, product information, and the purchase process into a single venue. Organizations are trying to harness oceans of internal and external content.

Indeed we live in confusing times. But those willing to hold on to their hats and boldly set sail toward uncharted territory will face exhilarating and exciting new worlds.

At Outsell, we have a unique view of the industry and of the changes taking place. As a provider of advisory services to the information industry, our analysts work daily with leading vendors and buyers of information. We also do many quantitative and qualitative studies tracking the information use patterns of end-users, perform product evaluations and track pricing. We have the benefit of hindsight-several of our analysts were involved in the IT industry during the mainframe/PC/client-server/network/browser explosion. Hindsight is 20-20 and we often draw upon parallels from the IT industry that give us a leg up on our insights about the information industry. Sometimes, the uncharted new worlds aren't so new after all.

We at Outsell will share our experience with you in this regular ONLINE column. We'll begin what we hope will be a dialog with articles that are filled with practical observations, insight, data, and advice. This will be your column. We'll discuss a variety of subjects in depth, and you'll have a chance to meet several of our analysts. We'll begin the dialog with a general discussion of several key trends that will be covered in more detail in upcoming columns.

THE INFO PRO AS VENDOR

One of the most noteworthy movements among information professionals is a fundamental shift in understanding that they are vendors who must promote themselves and their services. As vendors, they understand that they must compete effectively alongside other information resources that are available to their internal constituents. They're creating their futures in their organizations rather than letting developments pass them by.

A few leaders are even becoming vendors to the outside world, such as Arthur Andersen's team of info pros in the AskNetwork, part of Arthur Andersen's KnowledgeSpace offering.

What does this look like and how are they doing it? The general themes fall along several lines:

A) Understanding internal (and where relevant, external) markets

B) Developing and delivering appropriate offerings for these various markets

C) Promoting these offerings as value propositions to the target market

D) Ensuring satisfaction within the markets and ongoing customer loyalty

E) Ensuring that the mission of the unit is articulated and performed consistently as a business within a business, in other words, keep it strategically and operationally aligned.

To do this effectively, information professionals are convincing users and decision-makers in their organization that:

Content is explicit, not implicit.

Content is visible, not invisible.

Content is valuable, not free.

Info pros should set boundaries to make sure they're not caught in an impossible role-trying to be all things to all internal customers, and successful with none. Info pros are accomplishing this by performing several key roles, and then promoting their benefits.

1. Buying and selling content

Information professionals have developed the skills necessary to evaluate content for use in their own intermediary role and to negotiate with vendors. Smart companies are leveraging those skills by inserting the information professional into the process of purchasing widely-distributed content for end-users. Further, they are honing their negotiating and licensing skills and are outspoken on the financial benefit this has on their organization's bottom line.

2. Making content available using technology

Information professionals are making better use of the pipelines that the IT folks provide to deliver content to the broadest range of users in the most economical way. They can no longer concern themselves only with their own connection to vendors of electronic content. They need to understand their end-users' technology environments and the delivery technologies offered by the vendors.

There should no longer be any doubt that the role of the information professional is largely a technical role. A recent Outsell study of a group of corporate librarians revealed that 55% of them were part of an intranet development team. Of the librarians, 30% had a lead role in intranet development, while IT departments had the lead role in 65% of the companies represented. We believe there should be-- and will be-greater parity between IT and information professional roles on intranet development teams.

Successful info pros are also positioning these deployed broad offerings (broad collections for many) with narrow solutions targeted to specific end-users. They're not rolling out a deployment solution without positioning it alongside other offerings, thus diluting the information center's brand in the eyes of the end-user.

3. Creating value-added research

Now that end-users have desktop tools for answering their own routine reference questions, librarians can apply their research skills to a more valuable product. They are creating things like technology and competitive analyses and market assessments that answer the "so what?" questions. They provide not just filtered searches, but insight that answers questions, such as "is there a market?" "How will our technology compete?" "What should our competitive positioning be?" Often they are taking on an explicit business intelligence function, providing essential information to day-to-day decision-makers.

Successful information centers are aligning their staff with end-user teams, realizing that ultimate loyalty means letting go, or giving the appearance of letting go to do the reverse-- which is to maintain a tightly-knit unit with fiercely loyal customers. Within Research & Development, technical librarians are becoming cross-functional product development team members, bringing this trend to life.

4. Educating users

End-users don't necessarily know how to get the most from the content available to them. They don't have the source-evaluation skills of an information professional, nor do they have a broad perspective on the range of content available-they don't know what they don't know. End-users need training to guide them through the content they do have, and to make them aware of other content that can help them with their business problems and decisions. Those needs have led to a greater educational role for the information professional. Our research studies indicate that endusers have trouble with content and they'd like information professionals to play a consultative role in solving these problems.

PARTNERSHIPS

Vital reporting relationships are emerging. Some information professionals are making career moves into competitive intelligence and marketing functions. These departments are large consumers of content whose budgets lie outside the walls of the corporate library. In those roles, information professionals are functioning as "marketing end-users," and applying the higherlevel research and analytic skills they've honed over the years. They're also cracking the whip on content purchases, helping these departments spend big bucks more wisely-market research is, after all, one of the most expensive types of content in the market.

Sometimes, information professionals and entire libraries are moving functionally to report to marketing departments. This is a great move and gets this vital corporate function out of the human resources, facilities, and administrative units that were dead ends for many information centers. And as mentioned earlier, many technical libraries are moving their members closer to, or on, the R&D teams that are responsible for the lifeblood of the company-process and product innovation. Being part of development means being part of a mission-critical function.

We're also seeing information professionals and their departments reporting to IT departments. Why not, when deployment decisions are so heavily dependent on technology? Few IT departments understand how content is utilized in end-user applications, how to identify best-ofbreed content, and how to evaluate and select external content. When IT does focus on content, it's almost entirely internal content. IT departments bring some heavy-duty negotiating horsepower to the table as a result of their frequent involvement in high-ticket purchases. The blend of skill sets makes it a win-win for open-minded CIOs and information professionals who see the benefits of working together. It also provides information professionals with a career path to the CIO function, something we believe we should and will see more of.

In some cases, we're seeing a combination of everything we've mentioned. Ernst & Young's Center for Business Knowledge blends internal knowledge capture, secondary research, analysis, and content acquisition for deployment of desktop services under the purview of a single unit.

Other variations we see are information professionals reporting to other high-level executive functions, including finance, CEOs, and CKOs. All of these moves provide higher visibility to information professionals and their responsibilities. That visibility requires ROI measurements on the department's offerings and on the assets-- content-that it brings into the enterprise. Just as CIOs and other operating management must prove that their investments pay off, information professionals need to provide a bottom line for their libraries and for the content deployed to end-users.

Successful info pros are putting the "I" back in CIO by applying asset management techniques to content, driving intranet and extranet development, and by explicitly selling the story of what they do internally, in a language the organization hears and understands-numbers, successes, benefits, and bottom line. The understanding that content is an asset and that its value can be measured is what will continue to drive the profession to improve quality and competitiveness. When the bar is raised, it's good for the individual, the profession, and the organizations of which they are a part.