Skills IT will need in the future - 20/01/2010 - Computer Weekly

A story on the Gartner report on evolving roles in IT. Describes four new roles which sound uncannily like the roles librarians perform. The four roles are

• Litigation Support Manager - to "execute discovery exercises for regulators, and mediate between legal and IT departments" this sounds like the skills of a librarian would be useful, copyright expertise, legal issues around data protection etc, mediation are part and parcel of the librarian role.
• Digital Archivist - 'specialist expertise to access, appraise and preserve' - sounds familiar again
• Business Information Manager - this speaks for itself
• Enterprise Information Architect - 'create taxonomies, document templates and data models'

This thinking is interesting - IT in an age where increasingly we can outsource to the 'cloud' and in an age where libraries might be whatever device you hold in your hand (iPad if you're lucky) there is a new facet of the librarian emerging which provides both service and systems support to IT, to the business and to end users.

Or has it always been thus?..