0010 body

Case: 0010

Sector: Legal (and other professional services)

Stand back: I'm an infopro!

To what extent can an information manager reasonably give information without inadvertently or intentionally supplying advice and overstepping another’s professional role?

Summary: An information professional working in a financial services company was often asked to provide analyses of certain economic or financial events. He felt confident in doing this, but often wondered whether this was really the domain of the professional financial expert. Not to provide any information would appear to be an admission of failure to carry out the task for which he was employed.

NOTE: This Case Study is fictitious. It is informed by experience in the information world, but it does not claim to represent a scenario of actual events or relate to individual people or organisations.

Case Study: In order to resolve this dilemma, the information professional continued to supply information as he had always done but whenever he was presented with anything other than a routine or basic enquiry he would recommend the user seek advice from a more qualified specialist (most of whom could be found in this organisation).

A second, more wide reaching, method of preventing inadvertent acceptance of the information manager’s ‘advice’ was to inform the user that in any event the information professional was legally not permitted to provide certain types of advice in accordance with the rules of a financial services regulatory body.

Additionally, and perhaps more importantly, the information professional in this case ought to have recognised the responsibility explicitly to disclose the limitations of his professional expertise {A3}, and to disclose the limitations of service available from the information centre. {B1} Nevertheless, it does seem that the information professional realised the ethical issues involved in this case, and a failure to highlight the limitations of expertise and of service may not be so great in that context.

	Primary	Secondary
Principles	12	-
Code	B1	A3 – B2
Related cases	0017 - a case in which the information professional's service could be wrongly construed as advice (in a field in which he or she is not qualified).

References:

To recommend resources related to this Case, please contact the editors.

Feedback:

The editors welcome feedback. To comment on the facts of this Case, or to respond to the editorial review, please contact the editors.