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.”… Read the rest “Data managers should emulate good librarians”