This was a very interesting piece by management guru Gary Hamel published in the Wall Street Journal on how the values and expectations of what he calls the “Facebook Generation” are going to rub up against the traditional ways of doing things in Fortune 500 firms.

Well worth reading, and ties in closely to the new Enterprise 2.0 supplement that I edit and that Information Today has just launched for readers of The Information Advisor.

In an interview I had yesterday with Information & Knowledge Management Forrester analyst Gil Yehuda, on Enterprise 2.0, we began talking about information professionals role in E 2.0.   Gil made one of those “stop and makes you think” observations, which I felt was worth noting here. He told me:

A challenge to librarians now is, just how interesting is old [that is, archived, in databases, etc. ] knowledge these days?  Knowledge is being created at such a fast rate, that its value is expiring at a faster rate?   So librarians’ expertise in finding stuff that “WAS” is no longer as relevant or useful; BUT what is replacing this and what librarians need to focus on is the kind of information and connections being made in the Enterprise 2.0 organization.

Gil made several other insightful comments, as when we discussed how the economy is impacting how info pros should be thinking about their role in E 2.0. Gil said that as people are being laid off, the organization’s “connectors” are being lost–people will no longer be sure who knows what and who the go to person is, if their previous contacts have left the firm. Again, there’s an opportunity for the librarian to step in and help people surface,  identify and reach out to those connectors.

I’ll be including the entire interview in The Information Advisor’s March 2009 new quarterly supplement on Enterprise 2.0, which will also look at how to categorize and think about vendors that occupy the E 2.0 space