Talk:Information management
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I quite like the article on IM with its brief history. It carefully avoids the usual pitfall, that IM is intrinsically to do with the IT upon which the information resides or travels, but still recognises its importance.
I often describe what information managers ought to worry about - in summary:
IM should be concerned with two things: accurate delivery of information, and efficient creation of that information.
Information is in effect, data with meaning. For example, a single piece of information might be the capacity of a pump. to contextualise that, you need to know which pump, the unit of measure, exactly whch capacity (maximim design or operating value), and also the status of that value (is it actual, design, theoretical, and so on).
Accurate delivery means timely, to the right people, of known status.
Efficient creation is to do with cost effectiveness or minimum effort.
I work in the engineering industry - multiply this effort several million times and you get an idea of the scale of this task.
[edit] Significant Edit of Topic "Information Management"
I am considering a major edit to the topic Information Management. Before I do so, I was wondering if many people actively track this topic. See http://imbok.blogspot.com/ for a general idea (it would not be a copy & paste though!). My intent is to convey that Information Management is a management discipline and should be covered accordingly. Comments welcome. Fidelis 03:37, 8 December 2005 (UTC)
I have been an IM practitioner and consultant for many years now and the revolution in information use that we are witnessing is bringing with it a step change in the evolution of the traditional IM discipline. It would be really useful to identify the clear differences between the largely 'librarian' disciplines that have existed previously and the 'personal content' disciplines that rewrite (and in many ways undermine) those historical practices.
Yutt245 14:38, 5 June 2006 (UTC)
The subject of Information, Information Management (IM) and Informational Management (IaM) is very close to my heart and to those of my users. I also would like to break away from the 'librarian' image that hijacked the IM phrase many years ago. Maybe IaM can assist to refocus. I welcome a colloquy. Prof_7
--Thulemanden 18:12, 20 October 2006 (UTC)
I suggest different definitions are described, like this one from the U.S. Army Field Manual 3.o:
Information management The provision of relevant information to the right person at the right time in a usable form to facilitate situational understanding and decisionmaking. It uses procedures and information systems to collect, process, store, display, and disseminate information.
or do in google: define:information management
I could ammend "operational" to that:
The provision of relevant information to the right person at the right time in a usable form to facilitate situational or operational understanding and decisionmaking. It uses procedures and information systems to collect, process, store, display, and disseminate information. --Thulemanden 18:12, 20 October 2006 (UTC)
The mission of information management is to secure predictibility of operations or create knowledge and insight supporting decision making and company objectives by establishing the best possible information level based on already available data in the company.Information management encompasses document management, records management, imaging, and knowledge management systems.Information is an asset to an organization and the management of this information is a means to plan, budget, manipulate, and control a document, analog or digital, during its entire life cycle.The objective is the provision of relevant information to the right person at the right time in a usable form to facilitate situational understanding and decisionmaking or an operational foundation by applying procedures and information systems to collect, capture, process, catalog, register, classify, index, store, locate, display, retrieve and disseminate information.The management of information applies the theories and techniques of information science to create, modify, or improve information handling systems to support the mission.
--Thulemanden 19:12, 20 October 2006 (UTC)
What seems to be missing from this discussion of Information Management is the context of the LIFE CYCLE of information. Information is managed within its life cycle. Typically, the life cycle of information is described as: Creation or receipt (also called Capture within a software application), Use, Storage, Retention, and Disposition.
Within this context, the task of Information Management is to ensure that information created and used is stored in a manner such that the information can be easily retrieved for later use. This task entails the association of Metadata with the information, without which retrieval is difficult, if not impossible, and costly. How the information is stored, once saved, affects its retrievability. Retention and disposition pertain to how long a period the information will be kept and how the information will be disposed of at the end of that period.
Retention and disposition are important because some information qualifies as a Record --Information created, received, and maintained as evidence or information created by an organization or person in pursuance of legal obligations or in the transaction of businessJts-tnr 02:59, 22 November 2006 (UTC) (ISO 15489). Retention is either Temporary or Permanent; that is, either kept for a period of time or kept for the life of the institution or enterprise. Temporary information is disposed of through destruction when its retention period is exhausted. Retention and disposition are also important because in many settings information kept longer than necessary may become a legal and financial liability to the institution or enterprise.
Information management, in this sense, is the set of policies, procedures, and systems for ensuring that information passes through its life cycle in a planned and efficient manner. The failures in information management that make headlines can usually be ascribed to failures to manage the life cycle stages of the information.
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- I agree that the article could benefit from an extension regarding Information Life-Cycle Management. However, this issue also requires a distiction between 'data' and 'information' to be established first, since these terms are frequently mixed up and used as synonyms. Data can be stored, retrieved, transferred, etc. Information, and subsequently knowledge, is something being created by an individual within a formative context, i.e. that the same data can result in different information depending on the recipient. I know that this kind of discussion tends to become academic, but the issue should be included as part of a conceptual discussion. --Kai a simon 08:59, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
