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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