Information Management
Lecture 2
Introduction to Information
Management.
Bibliography
 [1] Dave Chaffey, Steve Wood - Business Information
Management : Improving Performance Using
Infomation Systems, 2005, Prentice Hall/Financial
Times, (734 pages)
 [2] Benson V., Tribe K. – Business Information
Management, 2008, Ventus Publishing (83 pages)
 [3] G. Somasundaram, Alok Shrivastava, Eds. Information Storage and Management: Storing,
Managing and Protecting Digital Information, 2009,
Wiley Publishing, Inc (478 pages)
 [4] Wikipedia
Overview
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Information in today’s world
Information in today’s organization
Fundamentals of business information management
Information resources
Technology resources
People resources
 Information. Technology. Both resources are
increasingly important as organizations seek to
improve their performance. Information and
technology resources coupled with human
resources help deliver value to organizations in
many different ways. Applying information and
technology offers new ways to do business,
increases the efficiency of business processes,
reduces costs, and provides the performance
measures used to control improvement. [1,pg
6]
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Effective information management requires careful control of three
types of resource:
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information resources such as data, information and knowledge;
technology resources such as the hardware and software that forms information and
communications technology and information systems;
people resources such as the different types of employee and manager within a company
and also third parties such as suppliers and customers who also determine information
quality. [1,pg 7]
Information economy - An economy that is highly dependent
upon the collection, storage and exchange of information.
According to [1, pg. 8] the amount of the GDP spent on IM
hardware and software, in many countries is up to 5%.
Many business services now deal exclusively with adding value
to data and are selling information derived from data.
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Possible starting points for the information age [1, pg. 9]
40,000 BC Clay tablets from ancient Mesopotamia, where Iraq now
stands, have a precursor cuneiform writing
1300 BC Basic Chinese characters, such as that for the horse, first
formed in bone
387 BC Plato founded his academy devoted to research in philosophy
and the sciences on land which had belonged to Academos.
1455 The printing of the Bible with movable type by Gutenberg in
Germany
1564 Graphite is discovered
1651 John Dury first describes the role of information manager
(actually a librarian at the University of Oxford, usually referred to as
the first modern library).
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1860 First commercial typewriters use the QWERTY keyboard
1876 Alexander Graham Bell introduced the first telephone to
an audience at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia
1901 Marconi sends a radio signal of the Morse code letter ‘s’
across the Atlantic from Cornwall, England, to St John’s,
Newfoundland
1937 Atanasoff–Berry Computer (ABC), the world’s first
electronic digital computer built by John Vincent Atanasoff and
Clifford Berry at Iowa State University
1947 First commercial computer – ENIAC (Electronic Numerical
Integrator and Computer). It weighed thirty tons and used
18,000 vacuum tubes
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1953 IBM produced the first computer system that was widely
adopted by organizations
1969 First node on the US ARPANET, forerunner of the Internet
1971 A computer engineer named Ray Tomlinson sent the first
e-mail message. He can’t remember the message, but he does
remember choosing the @ symbol!
1991 First website (http://info.cern.ch) published by Tim
Berners-Lee
 Information overload [1, pg. 11] - The
capacity of individuals and systems within an
organization to derive value from information is
exceeded by the volume and complexity of
information
 Knowledge worker [1, pg. 11] - A term
referring to employees who spend a large part
of their time searching, analyzing and
disseminating information within an
organization
 To counter information overload is to improve the quality
of information. Techniques used for improve information
quality, are[1, pg. 11]:
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Aggregating – the ‘big picture’ is presented by summing up
individual data items.
Summarizing – an abstract of a technical report is one form of
summarizing.
Filtering – less relevant information can be removed, for example
only news items that contain the company’s name or competitors’
names are sent through to managers.
Alerting – messages are displayed on-screen or sent via e-mail to
alert managers to a newsworthy piece of information.
Information overload
 How much information?
 Lyman and Varian (2003), researchers at the
School of Information Management and
Systems, University of California, Berkeley
calculated that in 2002, the world’s total yearly
creation of print, film, optical and magnetic
content would require 5 exabytes of storage.
(1 exabyte = 10^18 bytes)
 Annually 800 megabytes of recorded
information is produced for each man, woman
and child on Earth
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The researchers provide these estimates of information flows
across different media [2002 estimates] [1, pg. 12]:
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Telephone calls worldwide – on both landlines and mobile phones –
contained 17.3 exabytes of new information if stored in digital form; this
represents 98 per cent of the total of all information transmitted in
electronic information flows, most of it person-to-person.
Most radio and TV broadcast content is not new information. About 70
million hours (3500 terabytes) of the 320 million hours of radio broadcasting
is original programming. TV worldwide produces about 31 million hours of
original programming (70,000 terabytes) out of 123 million total hours of
broadcasting.
The World Wide Web contains about 170 terabytes of information on its
surface; in volume this is seventeen times the size of the Library of
Congress print collections.
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Instant messaging generates five billion messages a day (750 GB), or 274
terabytes a year.
E-mail generates about 400,000 terabytes of new information each year
worldwide.
Person-to-person (P2P) file exchange on the Internet is growing rapidly. 7%
of users provide files for sharing, while 93% of P2P users only download
files. The largest files exchanged are video files larger than 100 MB, but the
most frequently exchanged files contain music (MP3 files).
 Business intelligence [1, pg. 14] - Internal
information about the performance of an organization
reviewed at either a detailed or summary level
 Business performance management - A process for
improving the performance of organizations based on
performance metrics
 Market intelligence - External information about a
specific market which is used to understand a company’s
competitive position
Information quality
 Means how well it supports the tasks
performed by individuals and the
decisions they take
 Features that increase information
quality:
 Relevance
 Accuracy (can be affected by data replication)
 Timeliness – the delay from data collecting and data
processing
 Presentation form
Data-to-information
transformation process
 Information systems take inputs (business data) and
transforms them into outputs (business information)
 Within an organization, information transformation
follows these stages [1, pg. 25]:
1
2
3
4
5
Capture or input of data.
Routing of data to location for processing.
Processing of data to produce information.
Distribution of information to its users.
Analysis and interpretation of information by users coupled
with their knowledge (skills and previous experience) to take
actions which give results.
 Activities involved in processing information can be
summarized by using the 4 Cs of:
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Context – displaying a data item relative to other data items, such
as in a time series or trend graph. Sorting data alphabetically or
numerically is another example of contextualization.
Calculation – producing derived metrics such as calculating a
percentage capacity utilization.
Classification or categorization – grouping information into
different categories, for example, all flights into a particular
country.
Condensation – aggregating or totaling information is always
important in presenting business event data as summary
information – for example, total sales on a route. Filtering is also
used to summarize information, for example, ‘show me all flights
that were delayed by at least two hours’.
The information lifecycle [1, 31]
Forms of information
Records management
 Consists of activities involved in managing structured,
formal information.
 Records are stored traditionally on books, documents,
photographs, microfilm. More recently appeared
computerized records.
 Records management is also of value since it can reduce
costs through [1,pg. 33]:
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Better use of physical storage space and computer server
resources within an organization;
Better use of staff time since information is easier to access;
Improvement of control and security of value information
resources.
Knowledge conversion to
information
 Knowledge involves human expertise
in a domain but for communicating it
to other humans, it needs to be
transformed into verbal information.
 Knowledge management implies that
an organization has adopted a
structured approach for utilizing
knowledge.
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The European Knowledge Management Framework identifies
five core knowledge process activities. These are [1, pg. 37]:
1 Identify knowledge. The requirements or reasons for knowledge management are
assessed and an analysis is undertaken of what knowledge is available and what
knowledge is lacking (the knowledge gap).
2 Generate (new) knowledge. Practices are developed to create new knowledge. Heisig and
Iske (2003) mention training and learning by joint problem solving at the team or
individual level at the department or organizational level through research and
development, establishment of expert groups which are sometimes called ‘communities
of practice’, recruitment of experts and buying another company.
3 Store knowledge. Knowledge assets are built up by finding ways of embedding knowledge
in the organization of its employees. This does not necessarily mean storing it in
databases, since most tacit knowledge will remain in the heads of people.
4 Distribute knowledge. A method must be found of transferring knowledge to particular
employees of teams as they need it. Heisig and Iske (2003) identify the Stock method of
distribution where knowledge is made available through databases and the Flow method
where knowledge is transferred directly from person to person through collaboration,
workshops or mentoring.
5 Apply knowledge. All the other KM activities will be wasted if the knowledge sources are
not utilized.
Technology resources
 Information Technology (IT) refers to hardware,
software and telecommunication networks used to
manage information.
 Software resources include applications software and
operating systems software.
 The management issues with applications software
include [1, pg. 43]:
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Do we select best-of-breed applications or enterprise-wide
systems?
How do we select the most appropriate portfolio of
applications?
How do we manage projects to implement new
applications?
 The management issues with technology
infrastructure resources include [1, pg. 43]:
 How do we select the most appropriate technology
for the organization?
 How do we assess when we should upgrade our
technology?
 Which technology standards should we adopt?
 How do we reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO)?
(TCO includes the purchase and maintenance costs
for a technology resource such as a PC)
 How do we ensure a good quality of service?
People resources
 The people or human resources involved
in business information management
include:
 internal staff
 staff at other organizations such as:
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customers,
suppliers,
distributors,
government organizations
the media.