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.

The long awaited regulations from the SEC outlining which firms must file with XBRL tags (generally the largest 500 that follow GAAP) and when (end of 2nd quarter)  have just been published by the SEC. You can link to the full report in PDF here, but the relevant information begin on page 39.

The surprise is that the final decision here was to exempt firms from having to tag their narratives: eg the management discussions, executive compensation etc. From a researcher’s standpoint, that’s too bad, as this means less potential for precision searching. However the SEC says it may revisit this, and/or make this kind of tagging “optional”. We’re doing a full report on sources for searching both the EDGAR and XBRL tagged filings in the March and April issues 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

Pew’s reports are always worth reading: this one just out on the Future of the Internet III concludes:

A survey of experts shows they expect major tech
advances as the phone becomes a primary device for
online access, voice-recognition improves, and the
structure of the Internet itself improves. They disagree
about whether this will lead to more social tolerance,
more forgiving human relations, or better home lives

Recommended reading for the day