For Knowledge, Look Within

Here\’s an interesting story from KM Magazine on an alternative career for librarians, they call the position an \”Internal Infomediary\”, someone who creates or manages systems to connect employees with the knowledge they need.

\”In this information age, I think people are acknowledging there is more to it than sticking a Web browser on your desktop. There is usually a curve organizations go through of Why do we need intermediaries? We have the Web. We have Yahoo. We have Alta Vista. We can do our own searching. Then the organization usually comes full circle and says, What are we doing? We are not paying engineers to surf the Web all day.\”

Here\’s an interesting story from KM Magazine on an alternative career for librarians, they call the position an \”Internal Infomediary\”, someone who creates or manages systems to connect employees with the knowledge they need.

\”In this information age, I think people are acknowledging there is more to it than sticking a Web browser on your desktop. There is usually a curve organizations go through of Why do we need intermediaries? We have the Web. We have Yahoo. We have Alta Vista. We can do our own searching. Then the organization usually comes full circle and says, What are we doing? We are not paying engineers to surf the Web all day.\” More from KM Mag

The disjunction between company employees and company knowledge hasn’t always been so acute. A business is, after all, a community of sorts, and every community has librarians, chroniclers, sages and gossips. But as the speed of business has accelerated, the tolerance for delay in getting information has shrunk almost to the vanishing point.


This demand for immediate access to relevant knowledge has given rise to a new business role: the internal infomediary, who creates or manages systems to connect employees with the knowledge they need. Infomediaries may bear any of a range of titles and may not be designated on the org chart as knowledge controllers; what matters is what they do. \”Their responsibility is to keep their finger on the pulse of the knowledge flowing around the organization,\” says Stacie Capshaw, senior analyst with the Delphi Group in Boston.