Four information management roles IT departments need
Gartner has identified four information-management roles that IT departments need to establish and recruit from outside the IT team in a major trend that will affect both IT and business.
Legal and IT hybrids
Gartner predicts that 20 per cent of Global 2000 companies will add the role of litigation support manager by 2010, up from less than 5 per cent in 2005. Legal and IT hybrids create policies and schedules, help design and execute discovery exercises for regulators, and mediate between legal and IT departments. Organizations can fulfill the role by retraining security professionals in law or giving legal professionals some IT training.
Digital archivists
Digital archivists will be required to appraise, arrange and preserve digital records for legal and regulatory purposes. Gartner expects around 15 per cent of companies to add a digital-archivist role by 2012 compared with fewer than 1 per cent in 2009. Suitable candidates can be found in library and information science (LIS) schools or existing employees nearing the end of their careers.
Business information managers
There will be an increasing trend to combine business and information management expertise in a single role, carried out by a single person, rather than a “business and IT partnership” with two people, two hierarchies and two sets of reporting relationships. One company already taking this approach achieved all its objectives including a cost reduction for the department of 10 per cent in the first year. Gartner expects 20 per cent of companies to employ business information managers by 2013, compared with 5 per cent in 2009.
Enterprise information architects
Within IT itself, enterprise information architects will be required to create taxonomies, document templates and data models. Gartner has observed several additional roles within the title of information architect, which has developed to include a mix of skills to enable both structured and unstructured content to be managed effectively. In some cases, the same person may fill more than one information architecture role, such as business-level information architect, data-integration architect, application-oriented information architect and content-oriented information architect. All these roles focus on adding structure and context to data so that the data can be leveraged to increase its value and maximise efficiency and reuse.