Rosy future for the info pro?
Jinfo Blog

25th January 2010

By Anne Jordan

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The global recession has had a profound effect on the information profession, with budget restrictions and redundancies the order of the day. However, this first month of the New Year has brought a number of good news stories and with it, a sense of increased optimism. The latest is a recent press release by Gartner predicting a huge jump in the number of companies employing business information managers – from 5 percent in 2009 to 20 percent by 2013. We all have anecdotal evidence of the credit crunch impacting our sector – from the redundancies of friends and colleagues, to the difficulties in budget negotiations. Hard figures have emerged, for example in the September 2009 VIP Report "Economic Impact Research" (http://digbig.com/5baywm). This showed over a third of respondents reporting decreases in staff numbers in the previous year, whilst less than 10 percent experiencing any increases. Last week's press release from Gartner (http://digbig.com/5baywp) examined the roles that IT departments need to establish and recruit from outside the IT team. It states that "the future of IT lies outside the IT department" and predicts that by the end of 2010, 40 percent of people who report into IT will have substantial business and non-IT experience. It cites four areas for recruiting into IT: Legal and IT Hybrids, Digital Archivists, Business Information Managers, and Enterprise Information Architects. Looking at Business Information Managers, Gartner believes there will be an increasing trend to combine business and information management expertise in a single role. It states that twenty percent of business managers currently rate the information that they get from IT as poor (according to the Business Pulse survey, June-August 2009). Hopefully library schools are taking note. The Gartner article follows hot on the heels of the 2009 SLA Annual Salary Survey, recently reported by Tim Buckley Owen (http://digbig.com/5baywq), showing increases in average salaries for information professionals in the United States and Canada. According to the survey, the 2009 average salary of an information professional in the United States was US$ 73,880, compared to US$ 71,812 in 2008, and CAN$ 72,705 for Canadian respondents, compared to CAN$ 69,971 in 2008. However, despite the rosy outlook for some, there are still redundancies in the broader information sector, such as those announced earlier this month by Reed Business Information. There is also a great deal of change in the structure of our sector, as evidenced by the recent launch of the UK legal industry’s first Shared Information Service for law firms and corporate legal departments, reported by Michele Bate (http://digbig.com/5baywr). As Heraclitus said, "the only constant is change".

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