Page 57 - 4188
P. 57

55

                  business/  marketing/  competitive  intelligence  specialist,  knowledge
                  broker (Boom, 2002), information manager or chief information officer.
                         Managing Information Services
                         One of the important major competencies of an  IP is controlling

                  the information process. The IP may oversee this process by managing
                  the  entire  life  cycle  of  information  services,  from  the  concept  stage
                  through  design,  development,  testing,  packaging  and  delivery  of

                  information (Abel, 2003). This IP is specialized in Information Science
                  and gathering information in a pro-active way, and can put information
                  so that it fits the needs of the person that is searching for information
                  (Van Dijk,2003). The IP has the knowledge of information behavior and

                  understands how information services can most effectively be utilized.
                  He/  she  is  often  doing  research  for  other  companies  and  analyzing
                  information into accurate answers or actionable information for them to

                  immediately  apply.  IPs  specialized  in  these  competencies  could  be
                  called information analysts, reporters, advisor, information researchers.
                         Applying information tools and technologies

                         The  IP  knows  their  tools  and  is  aware  of  the  appropriate
                  technologies. Not necessarily understanding the very technical side, but
                  especially  the  logical  design  side.  He/  she  appears  as  a  information

                  architect,  who  knows  how  to  carry  out  the  business  analyses  and  the
                  accompanying  information  analyses  (Van  Dijk,  2003).  The  IP  is
                  prepared  to  advise  all  levels  of  the  organization  on  how  technology
                  trends will affect the organization and the clients (Abel, 2003). He/ she

                  uses appropriate technology to deliver the best services and to provide
                  the  most  relevant  and  accessible  recourses.  Applying  expertise  in
                  databases,  indexing,  metadata  and  information  analyses  are

                  competencies as well. The IP maintains awareness the latest policy and
                  legislative initiatives that will impact privacy accessibility and openness
                  of  information  use  (Abel,  2003).  Because  of  these  reasons  the
                  Information Officer often gets confused with a Technology Officer.

                         Managing Information Resources
                         The  last  major competence  of  the  IP  is  the  total  management  of
                  information resources and includes identifying, selecting evaluating and

                  providing access to the varied repositories (Abel, 2003). In this paper we
                  discuss  these  competencies  as  the  core  competencies  which  we  will
                  compare with the main features of ES. The core competencies of the IP

                  go  back  to  the  roots  of  the  profession:  search  &  retrieval,  metadata,
                  analyzing,  making  repositories  accessible,  organizing  information  and
   52   53   54   55   56   57   58   59   60   61   62