Hullistic

“The growth areas are library management, taxonomy building, and deep understanding of business processes…”  This according to Bryant Duhon in the latest issue of Infonomics. 

It is good to see these areas in demand not just because they are the areas in which I work but because they are truly valuable. Every organization has a collection of information needing managed (a library). The information should be meaningfully organized (taxonomy building), and actually used efficiently (via business processes). 

Full disclosure demands recognizing that I am possibly expanding the context of Bryant’s quote beyond the boundary he intended, but my goal is not support any claim, just to think about the application of these growth areas, particularly librarianship and taxonomy building, to the enterprise in general. 

It might seem strange to think of enterprise content as a library needing taxonomy. Even the term ‘library’ might seem archaic and nondescript for the enterprise. In fact the SLA is going through a rebranding effort because many believe that the ‘L’ no longer fits. 

Whether a collection is called a library or information workers titled librarians ultimately makes no difference. The important thing is to realize that libraries have been built for people. Interestingly, even in 2009, many business processes are carried out by people. And classification and categorization seem to be innate in the brains of people.

 Good librarians organize and manage information with the ultimate goal of delivering to people so they can use it to learn and achieve goals. Indeed librarians were doing this long before electronics of any kind existed, let alone computer technologies. 

Is thinking of the enterprise content collection as a library for people to use the real growth area embedded in Bryant’s quote?