I have been working on putting together a book, Intranets for Info Pros, with Mary Lee Kennedy, former Director of Knowledge Networks for Microsoft, and currently Executive Director of the Baker Library at Harvard Business School as well as Partner in TKG Consulting LLC. We have contributions from many wonderful practitioners and authors and you’ll hear more about that closer to book publication (this fall we hope). In the meantime, I wanted to share some of what Tom Davenport had to say in the Foreward of our book —
“Although I’m not an information professional, I feel a strong kinship with them…..I have always felt that the best information environments are a mix of computers, networks, and people with expertise. I believe if you’re going to do a good job of managing information, you need to know something about how it’s categorized, indexed, and otherwise organized. I could be a card-carrying member of the Special Libraries Association (SLA). …. The world is clearly leaving behind the physical artifacts that many information professionals love. What’s left is primarily the Internet, intranets, and the applications, content, and collaboration that rides upon them. Unfortunately, most Internet users don’t seem to feel that they need much help, although they would clearly benefit from it. It’s going to be hard for information professionals to make a living assisting people with the Internet. That leaves intranets and content management as the key tasks for information professionals to do in the forseeable future. In other words, if you want a good job as an information professional, you need to know a lot about the subject of this book.”