International Online celebrates 20 years.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the International Online Meeting (IOLIM), an ideal venue for reviewing what the industry has achieved over the last 20 years and for speculating about the future. It will take place December 3-5 in London, U.K. According to my phone conversations with the speakers, it promises to be one of the most important Onlines to date.

One measure of progress is the growth in IOLIM attendance figures. In 1977 there were 400 delegates to the conference and 500 visitors to the exhibition. Last year these figures had grown to 1,260 and 11,500, respectively. Total attendance (including delegates, press, speakers, and exhibitors) was 16,780. But do these figures properly express the dramatic changes the industry is undergoing?

More telling, perhaps, is the event's newly acquired ability to attract high-profile speakers from outside the industry. This year's proceedings are being opened by a U.K. government minister, the Right Honorable Roger Freeman, MP. There will be a debate on the information society, with contributions from a European Union representative and the U.K. Labour Shadow spokesperson on the Information Superhighway and Communications. As an AM fillip, the exhibition is, for the first time, being sponsored by The Guardian, a leading U.K. national newspaper.

"This year the industry has come of age:" commented keynote speaker Martin White, a senior analyst at London-based TFPL. "This is a direct consequence of the growing interest in the Internet and in corporate intranets, combined with increasing awareness that the really successful companies are those integrating their internal and external information, and embracing the tenets of knowledge management."

What all this implies is that the industry is at a crossroads. It can either seize the opportunity to leverage what it has - and what it knows - into a far wider marketplace, or it can sit on its hands and risk being sidelined by a growing army of newer, faster-moving players.

For information professionals, the litmus test could prove to be how they respond to the growing fad for knowledge management. Many organizations are increasingly conscious that they are failing to effectively manage their "corporate memory" - a realization spurring them on to create new posts, variously titled chief knowledge officer, chief learning officer, or director of intellectual capital.

On the downside, this could lead to an increasing invasion of the information profession's territory by IT professionals, with proposed solutions geared heavily toward technology, since most of the chief knowledge officers being appointed have a technology background. Yet who could be better placed to play a vital role in organizing. managing, and distributing an organization's internal (and, increasingly, external) information than a professional with 20 years' experience handling electronic data?

This is a point that Dr. Winzenried, information manager at the Lilydale Adventist Academy in Victoria, Australia, makes in his IOLIM paper. Too many organizations, he believes, are mistakenly appointing computer professionals to run information systems. "Yet, those that have done so usually experience major problems within six months," he said. "They may end up with an impressive network, but users soon start complaining that they can't find things; and the computer people can't help them."

Recognizing Librarians' Expertise

TFPL (http://www.tfpl.com/tfplhome. htm) has initiated a research project precisely to look at the skills and competencies required for knowledge management. Explained TFPL director Angela Abell, "The objective is to identify all the roles within a knowledge culture and to establish where traditional information skills can play an important part and add value. While `knowledge management is a complex concept with implications for organizational development, human relations management, training, and IT, information management skills will be crucial to the successful implementation and maintenance of knowledge systems."

Another European organization committed to a proactive response to the current challenges is the British Library Association (http://www.fdgroup.co.uk/la.htm). This year it launched an Information for Business '96 campaign, designed to draw attention to the skills set that librarians can contribute. And its Investors in Information initiative is offering advice to businesses on how to access and use information - an initiative sponsored by Bnet (http://www.bnet.co.uk), a newly launched Web site. Bnet CEO Stephen Bartlett is a staunch advocate of librarians and has employed staff with a library background to develop the Web site. While conceding that it is essential to also have IT people involved, he commented, "You don't get the paper merchant to design the brochure."

Clearly, the Internet offers information professionals an important avenue for promoting their expertise, a subject I raised recently with the CEO of Excite, George Bell. "I think the library world's experience of handling electronic data could be very useful," he responded, pointing out the perennial problem with technology-led development: It all too often delivers functionality that users don't want. "It'd be great if I could have, say, two people on staff from the library world who could sit over the shoulders of our engineers every day and say, `You know, in my experience people won't care about that breakthrough'; or, `People will find that tough to use.'"

Our hectic times bring a mix of opportunities and challenges to those on the supply side as well. Online distributors who own no content of their own are particularly vulnerable and face being cut out of the information chain altogether. But intellectual property aside, many of these companies ave 20 years' experience building and managing electronic information resources. As such they have long wrestled with - and in most cases found solutions to - many of the issues currently puzzling the new wave of online actors - Internet service providers, Web-search-engine developers, software companies, consumer online service providers, etc.

The time will come when people will get fed up because there is too much information on the Internet," argued Bob Howells, president and CEO of Information Access Company. "They'll start saying, `I don't want 40 articles, I want one.' So they'll be looking for filters that better help them find it. This is good for us because our main focus has always been on developing tools for filtering information."

As the Market Turns ...

Opportunities can only grow as the emphasis changes from software to content. Until recently, Microsoft and Netscape competed in the browser market exclusively in terms of software features. But the battleground is shifting, with a new emphasis on gaining a competitive edge through bundling content. "Search will become a commodity," argued Bell. "It will be something Excite will have to continue offering but it won't be what distinguishes us from our competitors." This is good news for content providers looking for new distribution channels - as Reuters realized some time ago.

And the route to market is as diverse as the number of commercial Web sites. LEXIS-NEXIS has been offering its Tell Me More service via CNN's Web page for over a year. More recently, IAC has secured a license with Microsoft that has seen its Web product, Cognito (http://www.cognito.com/), rebadged as the Encarta Online Library. But with every wish there comes a curse. In this case, it's a sharp downward pressure on pricing - the Encarta Online Library is priced at just $5 a month. "The Web will bring high-volume business:" promised Howells. "But it means that the traditional $300 or $400 dollars an hour pricing model is under extreme pressure. The fact is that, as the market shifts, we will all have to shift together."

Online Services Migrate Webward

Of course not all content is suitable for mass markets. Moreover, although we can expect to see provider after provider migrating their services to the Web, it is likely that many will retain their existing price structure. Early Web convert MAID, for one, has maintained its existing European tariff - currently 6,000 [pounds] (about $10,000) for an annual subscription. And in the U.S. it has quietly withdrawn Executive Profound - a service exclusively offered in the U.S. and originally designed to recruit just the sort of end user one might expect to find on the Internet. This move provokes the entry level for U.S. users of Profound to, rise from $19.95 to $199 a month.

On display at IOLIM for the first time is FT Profile on the Web. Will its launch see a radical shift in pricing? "We're currently reviewing our pricing," commented Donal Smith, managing director' of Financial Times Information. "I can't say more than that at the moment." I doubt, however, that FTI will be focusing on volume markets. In fact, hinted Smith, the service may not even be targeted at Internet users. "We don't necessarily envisage selling our services through the public Internet:" he said. "What is clear is that all our users now have their own intranet, and they all want to access information with a Web browser."

Migrating traditional online services to the Web is clearly sensible. The questions are: How does one then market them; and what is the business model? There is no shortage of doomsayers happy to predict that traditional players cannot survive the transition. Amongst those presenting a paper at IOLIM is Adrian Garcia-Sierra, a post-graduate research student at the University of Cardiff. A fan of intelligent agents, he predicts they will have a devastating impact on information intermediaries, both online service providers and information professionals. "I realize I may get heckled:" he said. "But if my message is threatening, then so be it."

The central question that IOLIM attendees have to answer in this anniversary year is a daunting one: Is this a celebration of the first 20 years of an industry now coming of age; or is this a farewell party for its founders as they make way for a brasher generation?