Information and knowledge leadership

This edition of Business Information Review sees the publication of the first part of our Annual Survey 2022. The BIR Annual Survey is the world’s longest running survey into the information needs and changing professional environment of the commercial information and knowledge management sector. Over the past three decades the BIR Annual Survey has developed into an unrivalled account of the changing context and practices of information and knowledge work. This year’s survey, completed by Stephen Phillips, continues that tradition tracking the state of the profession in a post-pandemic world. One area of significant change that has been tracked by the survey through the 21st century has been the growing importance of leadership roles in information and knowledge management careers. Once a profession defined by technical skills and professional knowledge, information and knowledge management increasingly rely on soft skills and business acumen to drive or support organisational change. Leadership began to emerge in the surveys as a discrete topic the mid-1990s but has become an increasingly significant characteristic of information work over recent years. The 2015 Annual Review for example emphasised the importance of information professionals taking on leadership roles (Foster: 2015), and in 2017 half of respondents ranked leaderships skills as important to professional development (Carter, 2017). In broad terms leadership describes the ability of an individual or group to influence and guide other individuals, groups or entire organisation in furtherance of particular goals. What constitutes leadership remains, however, contested with conceptions of leadership as something possessed by virtue of a role or position of power ceding in recent decades to a focus on influential power relationships. Nevertheless leadership is also commonly associated with a number of key personal attributes, including assertiveness, extroversion, emotional intelligence, decisiveness and sometimes negative traits including narcissism. Notions of leadership generally feature more significantly in the professional literature of knowledge management than in information management; in some sense this is unsurprising as knowledge management tends to emphasise the social aspect of information work over resources and collections. Nevertheless Huvila (2014) has been instrumental in expanding concepts of leadership across information and knowledge roles, arguing that: The roles of information and knowledge leadership may be seen [...] as complementary to each other. A distinct process of leading information is a necessary precondition for functioning knowledge leadership (2014: 669)