Information Products and Services

In developing information products and services, the objective is not only to provide information that is relevant to the users’ areas of interest, but also to provide information in a form that increases their usability.

 In other words, information products and services should deliver and present information so that their content, format, orientation, and other attributes address the situational requirements which affect the resolution of the problem or class of problems. This represents a value-added approach to the design of information products and services. The potential usefulness of messages is enhanced by increasing their ease of use, reducing noise, improving data quality, adapting the information to increase its pertinence, and saving the user time and money. Information services need to be constantly innovating, in a continual effort to move closer to satisfying the many facets of the users’ information needs.

To stay well-informed and build up its knowledge base, the intelligent organization needs to feed on a balanced diet of high quality information supplied through a varied menu of information products and services. These products and services should cover a range of time horizons and provide different levels of focus or detail (Fig. 3). Some information products disseminate urgent news that require immediate attention; others report developments that would take time to unfurl over the short term; while others still peer into the more distant future. For each of these time horizons, the information provided may be sharply focused; describing particular events, objects or organizations; or the information may be general and broad, surveying the terrain on which the organization’s future will make its course.

The guiding principle is that each information product must be of value to the end user. Information products or services should not rely only on information that happens to arrive in ‘convenient’ packages—where it adds value to the user, incoming information may have to be reassembled, summarized, cross-referenced, and compared, and so on.

Fig. 3: A Topology of Information Products and Services

Users want information not just to give answers to questions (‘what is happening here?’) but also to lead to solutions for problems (‘what can we do about this?’). Moving from questions to problems means moving from a subject-based orientation in which knowing is a sufficient end state to an action orientation in which information is being used to formulate decisions and behaviors. To be relevant and consequential, information products and services should therefore be designed to address not only the subject matter of the problem but also the specific contingencies that affect the resolution of each problem or each class of problems. 

Information Distribution

The purpose of distributing information is to encourage the sharing of information. A wider distribution of information promotes more widespread and more frequent learning, makes the retrieval of relevant information more likely, and allows new insights to be created by relating disparate items of information. The delivery of information should be done through vehicles and in formats that dovetail well with the work habits and preferences of the users.

The separation between information provider and information user should be dissolved: both ought to collaborate as partners in the dissemination and value-adding of information to help ensure that the best information is seen by the right persons in the organization. To encourage users to be active participants, it should be made easy for them to comment on, evaluate, and re-direct the information they have received.

How might information distribution be designed to induce the creation of new knowledge? One answer may be to dismantle the wall between information providers and end users, to co-opt users themselves into the distribution network as active, contributing participants. For a model of how this could work, we might look at a hugely popular form of information sharing—Usenet newsgroups on the Internet.

In newsgroups, information is posted onto what is essentially an electronic bulletin board that is seen by everyone in the group. Each article has a subject heading, and users can scan these titles quickly to pick out items to read. After reading, users themselves participate by posting new messages that answer questions, add commentary, suggest interpretations, and so on. Related messages are sewn together into threads of discussions about particular topics. From time to time, replies and discussion threads may be summarized and then re-posted.

 It is tempting to consider a similar model for organizational information dissemination. New items are given informative subject titles and broadcast promptly. Users scan, read, and discuss each other’s messages. Multiple perspectives and representations are likely to emerge that reflect users’ different experiences and knowledge. Discussion threads may then be summarized by a user or moderator with special knowledge or interest. Information digests of the discussion threads may be posted electronically, or packaged into information products in their own right. Electronic exchanges may occasionally lead to face-to-face focus group discussions or the forming of special interest groups.

The electronic bulletin board serves as the shared collaboration space in which participants actively create shared understandings (Schrage 1990).

Unlike meetings and formal gatherings, the electronic collaborative space and its tools are interactive and responsive, many participants have equal and voluntary access, conversations are spontaneous, multiple conversations develop in parallel, and the focus is on the content of the messages on the communal space rather than a competition of personal egos. As a medium for information distribution and sharing, well managed discussion groups of motivated users seem capable of adding considerable depth to the knowledge base of the organization. http://www.InfosDemocracy.com