The following article was written for the newsletter of the Alliance of Information and Referral Systems, Inc., a national not-for-profit organization with the mission of advancing the profession of I&R.
Letter to I & R Professionals:
The Role of I&R Professionals in the Future--A New View
by Rick Troupin
Is anyone else out there tired of reinventing the wheel?
I began building a directory of resources for seniors in my community after finding it difficult to find the information well-organized and well-presented for consumers from other sources. I’m building it on the Internet to assist others who follow.
Serendipity led me to a MIRSA conference in which I first heard of the INFO LINE Taxonomy. It took me three months to see a presentation on it; there are none on the Internet.(Sadly, there were only 7 references to INFO LINE Taxonomy on the entire Internet in September 1996). Social Workers and Schools of Social Work are equally uninformed--I could not find any locally who had heard of it.
A great tool has been developed, it may not be perfect for everyone, but is its an excellent base upon which to build an I&R database. I will discuss why I think change is inevitable and imminent and how the taxonomy can be used to take advantage of change?
The next and last great frontier for re-engineering or "downsizing" will be government. Bureaucracies will become the roadkill of the information superhighway--and rightly so. They were created to deal with information management and have become anachronisms in the Information Age. Organizations are becoming flat because of PRODUCTIVITY GAINS and INFORMATION SYSTEMS. More people will be better served with fewer intermediaries. The role of I&R has to evolve as the environment changes, or face the fate of dinosaurs.
Technology and productivity improvements have brought us fast, cheap computers and reliable low cost connectivity, that will probably drop in cost by 50% in the next 2-5 years. Together, these developments have brought the Internet from exotic to pervasive.
What implications does a consolidating government structure have for I&R?
Prepare for future shock. Programs will change faster, evolving or ceasing to exist. Pockets of funds will probably exist in archaic laws and regulations until dealt with by a legislature or a Presidential line-item veto. Program and I&R people chasing this information in published directories, will waste time, and worse be ineffective for their clients. All will be forced to seek accurate up-to- date information --it will be found on "the Net".
The net is democratic --too democratic for some who have build careers and fortunes on possessing "inside information", or controlling bureaucracies be they "patronage" or "not-for- profit". It is untamable- neither government nor industry can limit it--tobacco’s secrets are there. This storm cloud of change can be frightening -- but it has a silver lining!
The Internet offers awesome potential to reshape community services in very positive ways. America was once a group of small communities, each took care of its own. People knew people in trouble and usually they knew people who could help. I&R professionals strive to identify all the needs of clients and connect them to the resources in the community to help them. As communities grew and changed, it became harder to keep track of everyone, and some fell through the cracks, unable to keep up. In the information age, fewer people will present themselves to the bureaucracy for help. Concerned individuals, friends and family will try to find help for them. They will call on other friends--some things do not change--and because the needs will not diminish as fast as the government funding, more will need help, but one of the values of Americans is to help the less fortunate ("There, but for the grace of God ,go I.")
These increasing number of small, informal help groups, many of them community and church-based need the help of I&R professionals. They need us and we need them. They need us to direct them and to paint signs on the information superhighway pointing to help for their self-adopted "clients". Why there? Because that is where they will look. The next generation to get involved views computers as tools and toys--for information and entertainment. More interestingly, the next generation will be largely composed of active seniors, born in the Great Depression, used to working all their lives, with long memories of what it means to help others get through bad times. Retired and facing decades before meeting their maker, they will seek to be "productive." Some of you will complain about these "amateurs" in I&R, but how many of you really have time to care for all in need in your community? Volunteers will need training, and direction, and encouragement, and will be willing to create a solution where none now exists. These are the multitude waiting to help, who have only to be asked, and embraced and offered guidance. They will be fought over; they already are. Active or frail, all who want to help and who can communicate can become part of the solution by helping in the field or from home and phone, or by computer.
The work will remain, the need will grow, the government funding will dry up. The role of I&R professionals is to not to try to do it all yourself, but to paint the signs and direct the traffic; showing those who need to help how and where to find the tools they will need. Remember the theme of Dr. Victor Frankl ‘s Man's Search for Meaning --people need a reason to live or they stop living. I&R is ultimately about people helping people help people.
If our role is to paint signs on the information superhighway and help direct traffic, how will we do it and how does a standardized taxonomy help?
My vision of the future is a world where community resources are presented on the Internet and they are presented two ways. One way is for the public--basic information, descriptions, pictures, stories, calendars. The second way is for search engines driven by I&R professionals who have already been down the highway painting the signs to follow and who change the signs as the terrain changes keeping people pointed to resources they can use.
Internet pages are cheap, easy to create, easy to modify, easy to keep current, and always available to those who need them and possess the right tools. A standardized Human Services Taxonomy (HST) already exits to classify human services. It offers multiple levels to accommodate more or lesser detail. It includes descriptions of terms and cross listings to help find the right information if you can get close. Today’s search engines enable someone to type a few terms and narrow a search of 50 million pages of data to a handful. The tools exist. What is needed is a concerted effort to integrate a standardized human services taxonomy into the blossoming internet pages of organizations whose mission is to help people and to publicize and train the multitude of informal I&R community resources.
We are seeking funding to bring the Taxonomy into the public domain where a broader base could support it. The final authority for structural changes, integration of new terms, etc. will still be centralized. AIRS would be the entity responsible for maintaining the taxonomy. Those who developed it at INFO LINE of LA would be contracted to maintain it. Major educational efforts would be encouraged to spread the word of what it is and how to use it. Programs would be developed and made available to enable an organization to go on the internet to create an abstract of it’s services, "classify itself" utilizing the HST. The result could be embedded in the top of its Internet home page to be read by search engines and shared with community resource databases. Major efforts would be made to encourage search engines to utilize the taxonomy terms in their more public classification efforts. A key to maintaining consistency might be limiting abstract creation to people who have gone through a training program , be it classroom or more likely, online and are able to demonstrate competency and consistency with the HST , or having the amateur’s work reviewed by a professional I&R taxonomy specialist before posting. This process also creates an opportunity to pull community information into central databases for communities, letting organizations share in the process of keeping them up-to-date.
This will enable professionals and those they train to quickly locate the resources clients need. The days of personal rolodexes are not gone, but hopefully they will change into days when concerned members of the community can find the information from the rolodex without having to interrupt a social worker busy working with a client to inquire as to a source. We can already post a request for help on a community "bulletin board" watched by I&R professionals who work in together to help others. Information IS Power--we can empower many clients by helping to direct them to the information they need to exert positive control over their lives.
Diminishing the resources passing through government bureaucracies can leave more in the community and encouraging public/private initiatives can channel the creativity and flexibility of local companies toward producing unique solutions to meet local needs. It is time to re-apply the positive lessons of enhanced corporate productivity to social problems and the needs of the community. The tools exist--learn to use them.
As I&R professionals, you share much in common with business managers--you understand the challenges, know the resources you have and, you work through others to meet your "customer’s"(client’s) needs. It is time for you all to become business leaders--pro-actively shaping your communities. Create teams with librarians, schools, students, churches, civic organizations, businesses large and small, and government agencies. Coordinate public and private resources with the sense of urgency of an entrepreneur, to create the infrastructure your communities will need to in the next millennium. Your mission should be to make it easier for people to help people--learn to use the tools others have developed toward that end.
Rick Troupin is Marketing Consultant for Riverside Pavilion , a St. Louis Skilled Nursing Facility that has build a directory of St. Louis resources on the internet.