Steve,
Yes. I've been thinking about this for several years, and it looks like my thinking has been following the same tracks that your has.
IT is a comparatively young profession - It took two hundred years for the assembly of country doctors, barber chirurgeons, leech healers and votive healing nurses to reach a stage where they were considered as pillars of the community, and much of that had to do with the combination of growing knowledge, the emergence of professional organizations, and from that a consensus on standards of conduct. In medicine this is typified by the Hippocratic Oath, in accounting by FASB, and in law by the American Bar Association and the network of bar exams necessary to practice law in most states.
What also differentiates these professions is a certification process that's become widely recognized, one that combines professional knowledge with experience. In most fields of engineering, there are similar certification processes, and you can not call yourself an engineer or represent yourself as one without such certification. IT tends to suffer at the moment from a bloat of certification processes that largely mean that the person in question has mastered company X's APIs, but nothing that gets at what the distinction is (if any) between a developer and an architect, nor anything that deals with the ethical issues involved in systems or information architecture.
I think this extends beyond information interchange, however, to the topic of Information in general. Note how all the examples that Steve gives fall cleanly into core disciplines that have very real (and potentially tragic) consequences. Doctors have control over a person's life and health, and a failure on their part can result in people dying or becoming incapacitated for life. Accountants control most aspects of an organization or person's finances, and a failure on their part can result in people losing their financial health - going bankrupt or facing punitive action by the state. Lawyers who fail in their duty can result in criminals going free or innocent people being incarcerated. Life, Money, Freedom ... the next pillar, the one that's emerging now, is Information.
What constitutes an information professional? What differentiates an information professional from someone who simply uses the tools? What ethics does such a professional follow?
I think the need for answering these questions is becoming more persistent daily.
Kurt
