Information Management

We live at the dawn of the information age; a time when the global village concept is rapidly becoming a reality. This is providing humankind with many exciting opportunities. Realizing these opportunities is requiring organizations to schange. It is also changing how people work, live and play. It is fuelling demand for the Internet and other networked information systems from all sectors of the economy - education, entertainment, healthcare, financial services, manufacturing, publishing, and retailing to mention but a few. 

The dawning of the information age is generating a strong demand for graduates with the expertise necessary to work in the exciting intelligent field of networked information systems.

The Intelligent Organization:

The intelligent organization is able to mobilize the different kinds of knowledge that exist in the organization in order to enhance performance. It pursues goals in a changing environment by adapting behavior according to knowledge about itself and the world it thrives in.

The intelligent organization is therefore a learning organization that is skilled at creating, acquiring, organizing, and sharing knowledge, and at applying this knowledge to design its behavior.

Organizational learning depends critically upon information management—the capacity to harness the organization’s information resources and information capabilities to energize organizational growth. Information management is a cycle of processes that support the organization’s learning activities: identifying information needs, acquiring information, organizing and storing information, developing information products and services, distributing information, and using information.

An analysis of each of these processes suggests new strategies for maximizing the value of information in organizations, and for a reinvention of the roles of information professionals, be they librarians, information providers, information technologists, or information scientists.

An organization behaves as an open system that takes in information, material and energy from the external environment, transforms these resources into knowledge, processes, and structures that produce goods or services which are then consumed in the environment. The relationship between organizations and environment is thus both circular and critical: organizations depend on the environment for resources and for the justification of their continued existence.

Due to the fact that the environment is growing in complexity and volatility, continuing to be viable requires organizations to learn about the current and likely future conditions of the environment, and to use this knowledge to change their own behavior in a timely way (Choo 1991, Choo and Auster 1993). An organization works with three classes of knowledge: tacit knowledge, rule-based knowledge, and background knowledge (Table 1).

Tacit knowledge consists of the hands-on skills, special know-how, heuristics, intuitions, and the like that people develop as they immerse in the flow of their work activities. Tacit knowledge is deeply rooted in action and comes from the simultaneous engagement of mind and body in task performance. Tacit knowledge is personal knowledge that is hard to formalize or articulate (Polanyi 1966, 1973). The transfer of tacit knowledge is by tradition and shared experience, through for example, apprenticeship or on-the-job training. Tacit knowledge in an organization ensures task effectiveness—that the right things are being done so that the work unit could attain its objectives.

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