Information Coalition announces new InfoBOK website, summit

The Information Coalition has posted to Twitter that there is a new site dedicated to the development of their information body of knowledge (InfoBOK). The site is live at https://infobok.com/; it also notes the scheduling of a 1-day summit to be held March 7, 2018 in NYC.

I certainly wish Nick well in this effort. That said, as I noted in my recent InfoGov17 keynote, I think there are significant challenges with this effort just as with other similar efforts by ARMA, Gartner, and even our own CIP development, including but not limited to:

• Getting consensus on what a given term/concept means
• The "SME" gap between those who are experienced enough to meaningfully contribute and the tendency of all of us to base best practices on what *we* know and do
• The opposite issue, which is the tendency to want to include emergent technologies and processes well before there are any best practices defined or even definable
• The Boundary issues that are always part of these efforts. No matter what is included, some information management-related topics will be excluded - in the case of the current draft of the InfoBOK for example there is no mention of customer communication management, geolocational/GIS management, COLD/ERM, or engineering drawing management. 

It's also the case that the general idea behind a BOK is to develop an assessment-based credential associated with it. This is obviously a topic near & dear to me as we approach 1500 successful CIPs since 2011; but the information management certification market is already pretty saturated between the CIP and the many deep-dive certifications out there from IAPP (privacy), ACEDS (e-discovery), ICRM (records management), ARMA (information governance), etc. and I'm not sure (yet) that I understand the new ground that this program would cover.

As I noted in that keynote, this is not to disparage the work that's already been done, but simply to note that any BOK is a tradeoff between these sorts of elements, and this is no exception. There are some exceptionally smart and experienced people involved in this effort and I'll be interested to see where it ends up.