How do you know whether your team is doing the best job possible? What benchmarks should you be using to measure your performance? Who are your peers for evaluating best-in-class products and services? How do you define excellence?

If your job role is based on a technology or content type — e.g. books, corporate records, news media, databases, user guides — these questions are increasingly difficult to answer. Because the Internet is expanding some boundaries and collapsing others, excellent performance in traditional roles is no longer enough. In this fluid environment, finding new role models and benchmarking partners is tricky. In this article we look at an alternative: owning the business problem as well as the technology solution.

The technology-based portfolio
Historically, the job roles of information professionals have been defined by publishing and information technologies: the printing press or the computer. The more technology-related skills we can list on our resumes, the easier it is to get a job. Career paths are well known. Standards are codified and published through professional associations. We know who we are, and we know how to recognize superior performance.

But what happens when the technology changes — when physical libraries "go virtual," databases morph into metadata-tagged documents, and policies and procedures become embedded in software? If the library disappears, what do the librarians do? If users can easily get computers to do their bidding, what do programmers do? If bloggers and podcasters become a significant source of news, what do journalists do? One answer is to isolate our "soft" skills from our technology-based skills. For example ...

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