Aligning information services to corporate strategic needs

Abstract

Special librarians traditionally play important information support roles to their parent or client organisations. They provide raw data and information to executives and other end-users in the organisation, who process it into meaningful intelligence that goes towards forming strategic plans for the organisation. However, librarians could lose their importance in this role. This is because end-users are becoming increasingly empowered to find the needed information and data on their own. This paper proposes that librarians re-invent their service offering and increase their value to organisations. One way they could do this is by adding to their established strength in research, the further step of offering analysis and by providing information in meaningful frameworks, such as a scenario plan. Such an information service would provide value-added, actionable intelligence and would be more tailored to meeting the organisation's strategy needs. This paper shares the experience of the Information Services Division of the Singapore National Library Board in aligning its information services to better support the strategic needs of its client organisations.