Top 10 Reasons Why IM/IT Is the Right Place to Be

By Emily Gusba

It has occurred to me that it is all too easy to think of IM and IT as unexciting fields in which to work – either by outsiders, or by those of us insiders who have been working really hard and are feeling a bit wiped. So, in the feel-good spirit of the holiday season, I’d like to remind everyone that IM/IT is actually a great place to be, especially right now. There are fascinating academic and practical challenges in the field, and we get to solve them! We get to set the stage and pave the way for the next 20 years in the field, rather than just sitting back and letting others make the decisions for us. Right now, we have the opportunity to participate in the streamlining of internal IM/IT services in the federal government of Canada, the renewal of libraries and records management and plenty more. And so, I give to you…

Top 10 Reasons Why It Is Great to be in IM/IT

10. Great Slogans: “IT’s in your best interests” & “I am IM”, “I am Canadian Government, I am IM”

9. Better Success: New controls in place to manage and augment the success rate of IT projects, through the new TBS Policy on the Management of Projects and its associated tools. Fewer failed projects means that we will see more concrete results from our efforts.

8. Not Reinventing the Wheel: Architecture is finally getting recognition in a way that will help us meet these challenges – there is greater clarity around the IT and the IM lens as they apply to business architecture, and there are more tools and frameworks to draw upon. In short, there is more structure and substance upon which to draw in meeting business needs and solving existing IM/IT issues; we don’t need to figure things out as if we were the first to do them.

7. Awesome Learning Opportunities: Industry has embraced the consolidated IM/IT offering – Gartner, Forrester, AIIM, ARMA – most of these organizations are now encompassing both IM and IT and stepping up to the plate in terms of their offerings. Professional learning opportunities abound, locally and internationally!

6. We Get to Work With Everyone: As business enablers, IM and IT get to work with all the businesses within the organization making for a much broader, richer and more rewarding understanding, outlook and experience than most of our highly siloed federal colleagues — look forward to more of this interaction with business clients as the transformation continues.

5. Tools and Technology:

• we have SOA, cloud computing and more – and it is finally moving from the realm of the purely academic to implementation and management;
• the Internet, Web 2.0 and collaborative technologies open a range of fascinating possibilities in the world of libraries and information resource sharing;
• we have also matured tools and matured thinking in the EDRMS world– where classification is both more significant (it serves a greater number of useful purposes) and less significant (in that RM classification may become transparent to the user) and where the records and even document management functions are repositioned into the background in support of business processes (nobody “does” document management  – they do a job).

4. Need for Big-Picture Thinking: There are some fascinating transformational challenges coming for IM/IT – renewing libraries, addressing the findability crisis, making the move to electronic records management (bigger still, embracing the e-record), leading knowledge management efforts in an environment of high turnover (retirements, steady employee movement, etc), enabling business processes and much more . There is no question that the work we are doing will remain interesting.

3. They’ve Got Our Backs: ORO is looking after us before everybody else. It is a good place to be!

2. Culture Change: IT and IM are becoming an integral part of business as opposed to a back office function. One of my favourite examples is that now, the CIO sits at the executive management table.

1. Integration: There is increasingly greater integration of IM/IT across government – IM and IT are finally together, and together we’ll be able to realize the true potential of each.

Emily Gusba works within the Information Management practice at Systemscope. Contact her at gusba@systemscope.com.