Haul away the hardware, peel off the software, rinse off the mystique and you see what the people who manage data really are: They’re librarians. That’s the role IT workers should model themselves on.

I’m not talking about technology. I don’t care what tools anyone uses. Whether we’re talking about bound paper known as “books” or bits magically transmitted over “wi-fi,” I don’t care. It doesn’t matter.

I know, the comparison may seem harsh. Librarians are said to shuffle silently among musty old books that no one ever reads. Or, as my friend Karen Schneider puts it, they’re “some misguided brontosaurus snuffling in the antediluvian biblioforest.”

She’s director of the Cushing Library at Holy Names University, just across the bay from San Francisco. She’s one of the actual librarians who resist a trend among some in her profession. They want to run libraries like traditional information technology departments. They’ve been seduced by the old mystique — which in the business world has worn thin.

You know the complaints: IT guards its data like gold bullion instead of serving it to those who can create value with it. It tries to shop its way out of problems. Only the initiated may enter.

Why anyone would want to emulate that, I don’t know. Yet apparently, from what she wrote last week in her blog Free Range LIbrarian, this trend has legs among some who manage libraries.

That trend seems idiotic when you realize what a well run library is all about. Substituting just a few words, you can see a philosophy for IT in the one she describes for librarians:

In the end, what matters, and what we are about, are the ancient truths of librarianship: organizing, managing, making available, preserving, and celebrating the word [data] in all of its manifestations; helping our users build skill sets the fundamentals of which (if not the ephemeral details) will last a lifetime [a fiscal year]; and celebrating and defending the right to read [analyze], however that word is interpreted. This is what we do. This is who we are. This makes us librarians.

Librarians and IT workers, that is. Does technology really make anything new? I say that, fundamentally, nothing is new but the tools.

I asked a San Francisco taxi driver I happened to sit next to about indicators he sees. I didn’t mean “low oil,” I meant big things. Whether the economy is still falling or not, for one.

Figure out how to collect tip data from cabbies and waiters and you’ve have a good early indicator of economic trends, I’ve always thought. But the cab driver, Richard Roe — also producer of a website on verbal defense tactics and a retired programmer — says no. Tips have been the same. Moods, too.

However, he has noticed one thing. People used to forget their cell phones all the time. With the recession, no lost cell phones.

Then last week someone left something for the first time in months: a shopping bag with a spiral-bound directory of antique stores.

Things could be looking up.

This time of year it’s tempting to sit under a tree and wait for the apple to drop. Aha, a trend! But it’s better to go asking smart people what they think, and Dave Wells—former TDWI education director and now a consultant—is one of the smartest I know.

He says the one-tool-fits-all scenario is going to fade. Instead, how about the right tool on my desktop for me and the right one on your desktop for you? They both draw from the same set of standard data, of course. “As long as we’re both making good business decisions, how significant is [the difference in tools]?”

Among his leading candidates for desktop is Quantrix Modeler. “It’s truly impressive,” he says. For example, it expresses formulas not as cell references it expresses them in business terms. He also likes, among others, Lyza and eThority.

With permission from IT, business users can connect and manipulate data on their own. “If we put the right tools in the right places to support that, it’s a perfect evolution. IT does what it’s good at, and we put the responsibility for business analysis back into the business where it belongs.”

This is all just my first blast at what will help form my trends story for BI This Week, to appear later this month.

At 8 o’clock Monday morning, a few hundred attendees at TDWI conference in Chicago will hear the organization’s former education director Dave Wells give his keynote, “People First: Creating a Business Intelligence Culture.” He’ll say something startling: there’s much more to BI than data.

BI is no more about data alone, he has said, than Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” is only about brush strokes. For those of you whose brains itch with a sense that BI is ultimately a social practice, this is for you.

Among other things, he will propose a new definition of business intelligence and talk about cultivating a BI culture, “not exactly a science…something more like an art form.”

I can’t be there, but this story is just beginning.

No sooner did TDWI’s newsweekly post three views of business intelligence trends and events than the combined text appeared as a tag cloud on Many Eyes.

BI This Week editor Jim Powell had asked me, Stephen Swoyer and Mike Schiff to cough up two lists: events from 2007 and trends we expect in 2008. They gave him lists and I, always the odd one, delivered in a different format.

In the one-word view, the John Hancock—hey, now there’s a new meaning for that term—is “applications.” In the two-word view, it’s “analytic applications.”

Take a look for yourself below. For a much better view, see the Many Eyes page.

Events and Trends: A Conversation About 2007 and 2008 (12/19/2007)
Acquisitions of pure-play BI vendors was the big story, but the meaning will play out in 2008. How will the smaller vendors find a place in the new ecosystem?