Information management

Not to be confused with Content management or Knowledge management.

Information management (IM) concerns a cycle of organisational activity: the acquisition of information from one or more sources, the custodianship and the distribution of that information to those who need it, and its ultimate disposition through archiving or deletion.

This cycle of organisational involvement with information involves a variety of stakeholders: for example those who are responsible for assuring the quality, accessibility and utility of acquired information, those who are responsible for its safe storage and disposal, and those who need it for decision making. Stakeholders might have rights to originate, change, distribute or delete information according to organisational information management policies.

Information management embraces all the generic concepts of management, including: planning, organizing, structuring, processing, controlling, evaluation and reporting of information activities, all of which is needed in order to meet the needs of those with organisational roles or functions that depend on information.

Information management is closely related to, and overlaps, the management of data, systems, technology, processes and – where the availability of information is critical to organisational success – strategy. This broad view of the realm of information management contrasts with the earlier, more traditional view, that the life cycle of managing information is an operational matter that requires specific procedures, organisational capabilities and standards that deal with information as a product or a service.

History

Emergent ideas out of data management

In the 1970s the management of information largely concerned matters closer to what would now be called data management: punched cards, magnetic tapes and other record-keeping media, involving a life cycle of such formats requiring origination, distribution, backup, maintenance and disposal. At this time the huge potential of information technology began to be recognised: for example a single chip storing a whole book, or electronic mail moving messages instantly around the world, remarkable ideas at the time.[1] With the proliferation of information technology and the extending reach of information systems in the 1980s and 1990s,[2] information management took on a new form. Progressive businesses such as British Petroleum transformed the vocabulary of what was then "IT management", so that “systems analysts” became “business analysts”, “monopoly supply” became a mixture of “insourcing” and “outsourcing”, and the large IT function was transformed into “lean teams” that began to allow some agility in the processes that harness information for business benefit.[3] The scope of senior management interest in information at British Petroleum extended from the creation of value through improved business processes, based upon the effective management of information, permitting the implementation of appropriate information systems (or “applications”) that were operated on IT infrastructure that was outsourced.[3] In this way, information management was no longer a simple job that could be performed by anyone who had nothing else to do, it became highly strategic and a matter for senior management attention. An understanding of the technologies involved, an ability to manage information systems projects and business change well, and a willingness to align technology and business strategies all became necessary.[4]

Positioning information management in the bigger picture

In the transitional period leading up to the strategic view of information management, Venkatraman (a strong advocate of this process of transition and transformation,[5] proffered a simple arrangement of ideas that succinctly brought data management, information management and knowledge management together (see the figure). He argued that:

This simple model summarises a presentation by Venkatraman in 1996, as reported by Ward and Peppard (2002, page 207).[4]

This is often referred to as the DIKAR model: Data, Information, Knowledge, Action and Result,[5] it gives a strong clue as to the layers involved in aligning technology and organisational strategies, and it can be seen as a pivotal moment in changing attitudes to information management. The recognition that information management is an investment that must deliver meaningful results is important to all modern organisations that depend on information and good decision making for their success.[6]

Some theoretical background

Behavioural and organisational theories

Clearly, good information management is crucial to the smooth working of organisations, and although there is no commonly accepted theory of information management per se, behavioural and organisational theories help. Following the behavioural science theory of management, mainly developed at Carnegie Mellon University and prominently supported by March and Simon,[7] most of what goes on in modern organizations is actually information handling and decision making. One crucial factor in information handling and decision making is an individuals’ ability to process information and to make decisions under limitations that might derive from the context: a person's age, the situational complexity, or a lack of requisite quality in the information that is at hand – all of which is exacerbated by the rapid advance of technology and the new kinds of system that it enables, especially as the social web emerges as a phenomenon that business cannot ignore. And yet, well before there was any general recognition of the importance of information management in organisations, March and Simon [7] argued that organizations have to be considered as cooperative systems, with a high level of information processing and a vast need for decision making at various levels. Instead of using the model of the "economic man", as advocated in classical theory [8] they proposed "administrative man" as an alternative, based on their argumentation about the cognitive limits of rationality. Additionally they proposed the notion of satisficing, which entails searching through the available alternatives until an acceptability threshold is met - another idea that still has currency.[9]

Economic theory

In addition to the organisational factors mentioned by March and Simon, there are other issues that stem from economic and environmental dynamics. There is the cost of collecting and evaluating the information needed to take a decision, including the time and effort required.[10] The transaction cost associated with information processes can be high. In particular, established organizational rules and procedures can prevent the taking of the most appropriate decision, leading to sub-optimum outcomes .[11][12] This is an issue that has been presented as a major problem with bureaucratic organizations that lose the economies of strategic change because of entrenched attitudes.[13]

Strategic Information Management

Background

According to the Carnegie Mellon School an organization's ability to process information is at the core of organizational and managerial competency, and an organization's strategies must be designed to improve information processing capability [14] and as information systems that provide that capability became formalised and automated, competencies were severely tested at many levels.[15] It was recognised that organisations needed to be able to learn and adapt in ways that were never so evident before [16] and academics began to organise and publish definitive works concerning the strategic management of information, and information systems.[4][17] Concurrently, the ideas of business process management [18] and knowledge management [19] although much of the optimistic early thinking about business process redesign has since been discredited in the information management literature.[20]

Aligning technology and business strategy with information management

Venkatraman has provided a simple view of the requisite capabilities of an organisation that wants to manage information well – the DIKAR model (see above). He also worked with others to understand how technology and business strategies could be appropriately aligned in order to identify specific capabilities that are needed.[21] This work was paralleled by other writers in the world of consulting,[22] practice [23] and academia.[24]

A contemporary portfolio model for information

Bytheway has collected and organised basic tools and techniques for information management in a single volume.[6] At the heart of his view of information management is a portfolio model that takes account of the surging interest in external sources of information and the need to organise un-structured information external so as to make it useful (see the figure).

This portfolio model organizes issues of internal and external sourcing and management of information, that may be either structured or unstructured.

Such an information portfolio as this shows how information can be gathered and usefully organised, in four stages:

Stage 1: Taking advantage of public information: recognise and adopt well-structured external schemes of reference data, such as post codes, weather data, GPS positioning data and travel timetables, exemplified in the personal computing press.[25]

Stage 2: Tagging the noise on the world wide web: use existing schemes such as post codes and GPS data or more typically by adding “tags”, or construct a formal ontology that provides structure. Shirky provides an overview of these two approaches.[26]

Stage 3: Sifting and analysing: in the wider world the generalised ontologies that are under development extend to hundreds of entities and hundreds of relations between them and provide the means to elicit meaning from large volumes of data. Structured data in databases works best when that structure reflects a higher-level information model – an ontology, or an entity-relationship model.[27]

Stage 4: Structuring and archiving: with the large volume of data available from sources such as the social web and from the miniature telemetry systems used in personal health management, new ways to archive and then trawl data for meaningful information. Map-reduce methods, originating from functional programming, are a more recent way of eliciting information from large archival datasets that is becoming interesting to regular businesses that have very large data resources to work with, but it requires advanced multi-processor resources.[28]

Competencies to manage information well

The Information Management Body of Knowledge was made available on the world wide web in 2004 [29] and sets out to show that the required management competencies to derive real benefits from an investment in information are complex and multi-layered. The framework model that is the basis for understanding competencies comprises six “knowledge” areas and four “process” areas:

This framework is the basis of organising the "Information Management Body of Knowledge" first made available in 2004. This version is adapted by the addition of "Business information" in 2014.

The information management knowledge areas:

The IMBOK is based on the argument that there are six areas of required management competency, two of which (“business process management” and “business information management”) are very closely related.[30]

The information management processes:

Even with full capability and competency within the six knowledge areas, it is argued that things can still go wrong. The problem lies in the migration of ideas and information management value from one area of competency to another. Summarising what Bytheway explains in some detail (and supported by selected secondary references):[34]

Summary

There are always many ways to see a business, and the information management viewpoint is only one way. It is important to remember that other areas of business activity will also contribute to strategy – it is not only good information management that moves a business forwards. Corporate governance, human resource management, product development and marketing will all have an important role to play in strategic ways, and we must not see one domain of activity alone as the sole source of strategic success. On the other hand, corporate governance, human resource management, product development and marketing are all dependent on effective information management, and so in the final analysis our competency to manage information well, on the broad basis that is offered here, can be said to be predominant.

Operationalising Information Management

Managing requisite change

Organizations are often confronted with many information management challenges and issues at the operational level, especially when organisational change is engendered. The novelty of new systems architectures and a lack of experience with new styles of information management requires a level of organisational change management that is notoriously difficult to deliver. As a result of a general organisational reluctance to change, to enable new forms of information management, there might be (for example): a shortfall in the requisite resources, a failure to acknowledge new classes of information and the new procedures that use them, a lack of support from senior management leading to a loss of strategic vision, and even political manoeuvring that undermines the operation of the whole organisation.[38] However, the implementation of new forms of information management should normally lead to operational benefits.

The early work of Galbraith

In early work, taking an information processing view of organisation design, Jay Galbraith has identified five tactical areas to increase information processing capacity and reduce the need for information processing.[39]

The matrix organisation

The lateral relations concept leads to an organizational form that is different from the simple hierarchy, the “matrix organization”. This brings together the vertical (hierarchical) view of an organisation and the horizontal (product or project) view of the work that it does visible to the outside world. The creation of a matrix organization is one management response to a persistent fluidity of external demand, avoiding multifarious and spurious responses to episodic demands that tend to be dealt with individually.

See also

References

  1. ↑ Evans, C., 1979. The Mighty Micro, London: Victor Gollancz.
  2. ↑ Venkatraman, N., 1994. IT-enabled business transformation: from automation to business scope redefinition. Sloan Management Review, 35(2), pp.73–87
  3. 1 2 Cross, J. & Earl, M., 1997. Transformation of the IT function at British Petroleum. MIS Quarterly, 21(4), page 403
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 Ward, J. & Peppard, J., 2002. Strategic Planning for Information Systems (3rd Edition), Chichester: Wiley
  5. 1 2 Venkatraman, N., 1994. IT-enabled business transformation: from automation to business scope redefinition. Sloan Management Review, 35(2), pp.73–87.
  6. 1 2 Bytheway, A., 2015. Investing in Information: the Information Management Body of Knowledge, Geneva: Springer
  7. 1 2 March, J.G. & Simon, H.A., 1958. Organizations, Wiley
  8. ↑ see Opp, K.-D., 1985. Sociology and economic man. Zeitschrift für die gesamte Staatswissenschaft/Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics, pp.213–243
  9. ↑ Winter, S.G., 2000. The satisficing principle in capability learning. Strategic Management Journal, 21(10-11), pp.981–996
  10. ↑ Hedberg, Bo (1981), "How organizations learn and unlearn", in: Nyström, P.C. & Starbuck, W.H., Handbook of Organizational Design, Oxford University Press
  11. ↑ Mackenzie K.D. (1978), Organizational Structures, AHM Publishing Corporation
  12. ↑ Mullins, L.J (1993), Management and Organizational Behaviours, 3rd ed., Pitman Publishing
  13. ↑ Wigand, Rolf T., Picot, Arnold and Reichwald, Ralf (1997), Information, Organization and Management: Expanding Markets and Corporate Boundaries, Wiley & Sons
  14. ↑ Cyert, R.M. & March, J.G., 1959. A behavioural theory of organizational objectives. Modern Organization Theory, Wiley, New York, pp.76–90
  15. ↑ Morton, M.S.S., 1991. The corporation of the 1990s: Information technology and organizational transformation, Oxford University Press
  16. ↑ Senge, P.M., 1990. The fifth discipline, Doubleday
  17. ↑ Earl, M.J., 1989. Management Strategies for Information Technology, Upper Saddle River, NJ, USA: Prentice-Hall, Inc.
  18. ↑ Hammer, M. & Champy, J., 2009. Reengineering the Corporation: Manifesto for Business Revolution, A, Zondervan
  19. ↑ Nonaka, I. & Takeuchi, H., 1995. The knowledge creating company: how Japanese companies create the dynamics of innovation, New York, NY, USA: Oxford University Press
  20. 1 2 Belmiro, T., Gardiner, P. & Simmons, J., 1997. Business process re-engineering—A discredited vocabulary? International Journal of Information Management, 17(1), pp.21–33
  21. ↑ Henderson, J.C. & Venkatraman, N., 1993. Strategic alignment: leveraging information technology for transforming organizations. IBM Systems Journal, 32(1), pp.4–16
  22. ↑ Zachman, J. A. (1987). A framework for information systems architecture. IBM Systems Journal, 26(3), 590–616
  23. ↑ Cross, J., 1995. IT outsourcing : British Petroleum’s competitive approach. Harvard Business Review, 73(3), p.94
  24. 1 2 Ward, J. & Daniel, E., 2005. Benefits Management: Delivering Value from IS and IT Investments, Chichester: Wiley
  25. ↑ Ashbrook, D. & Starner, T., 2003. Using GPS to learn significant locations and predict movement across multiple users. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 7(5), pp.275–286
  26. ↑ Shirky, C., 2005. Shirky: Ontology is Overrated -- Categories, Links, and Tags. Clay Shirky’s Writings About the Internet. Available at: http://shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html [Accessed May 23, 2013]
  27. ↑ Noy, N.F., McGuinness, D.L. & others, 2001. Ontology development 101: A guide to creating your first ontology, Stanford knowledge systems laboratory technical report KSL-01-05 and Stanford medical informatics technical report SMI-2001-0880
  28. ↑ Chu, C. et al., 2007. Map-reduce for machine learning on multicore. Advances in neural information processing systems, 19, p.281
  29. ↑ IMBOK, 2004. The Information Management Body of Knowledge. Available at: http://www.imbok.org [Accessed May 12, 2015]
  30. ↑ Bytheway, A., 2015. Investing in Information: the Information Management Body of Knowledge, Geneva: Springer, p29
  31. ↑ Carr, N., 2003. IT doesn’t matter. In Wringing real value from IT. HBR OnPoint, pp. 3–10
  32. ↑ Davenport, T.H. & Short, J., 2003. Information technology and business process redesign. Operations management: critical perspectives on business and management, 1, p.97
  33. 1 2 Kaplan, R. & Norton, D., 1996. The balanced scorecard - translating stragegy into action, Boston MA: Harvard University Press
  34. ↑ Bytheway, A., 2015. Investing in Information: the Information Management Body of Knowledge, Geneva: Springer, p31
  35. ↑ Schwalbe, K., 2013. Information technology project management, Cengage Learning
  36. ↑ Scholl, H.J., 2005. E-government-induced business process change (BPC): An empirical study of current practices. International Journal of Electronic Government Research (IJEGR), 1(2), pp.27–49
  37. ↑ Saeed, K.A., Malhotra, M.K. & Grover, V., 2005. Examining the Impact of Interorganizational Systems on Process Efficiency and Sourcing Leverage in Buyer–Supplier Dyads. Decision Sciences, 36(3), pp.365–396
  38. ↑ Knights, D. & Murray, F., 1994. Managers Divided, Chichester: John Wiley
  39. ↑ Galbraith, J.R., 1977. Organization design, Addison Wesley

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