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ensuring that adequate information is available for use in economic and
financial decision making, and this may indeed have contributed to the
economic crisis which has swept the world. The remainder of this paper
examines various ways in which the information profession might make

a more positive contribution to future economic and financial stability
and growth.
The role of information professionals in a “New Global

Economy”
First, information professionals have an important role to play in
ensuring that the diverse types of data and information now needed to
support business and financial decision-making are collected,

documented, and made readily available to users. Whereas traditional
financial risk-management and decision-making might have relied on a
fairly narrow range of quantitative data held by specialist analysts, this is

no longer adequate. Users are much more likely to look to information
professionals to help them locate and use many sources of national and
international information. Increasingly, corporate executives are

demanding pertinent, timely, and high-quality data (McKnight, 2009).
The continual dissemination of information to key individuals
within organizations is a necessary condition of increased organizational

performance (Hatala & Lutta, 2009). Research shows, however, that
information sharing is still relatively unusual within organizations (e.g.
Davenport & Prusack, 1998; Li & Lin, 2006). Information professionals
are often among the first to be aware of new information and have a

responsibility to proactively disseminate this to individuals or
organizations that they serve, in forms which are user friendly and easy
to interpret.

In addition, information management professionals working in the
financial services sector will also be required to play a central role in
ensuring that adequate information is maintained by organizations or
made available to them in order to meet the requirements of the Basel II

Framework. This legislation is intended to strengthen banks’ risk
management strategies and includes requirements for more extensive
assessments of all types of risks. It is expected that even more legislation

will be imposed on the financial sector in future (Montana, 2008), with
an associated requirement for more information generation and
management.

One of the identified problems with traditional risk analysis is that
it was conducted in a fragmented way in individual “risk buckets”