Information Organization and Storage

Organizing and storing information may be facilitated with the application of information technology. Traditional data processing technologies were first used to raise work efficiency, whether on the office floor or the shop floor. The operational use of computers generated an abundance of detailed information about transactions, customers, service calls, resource utilization, and so on.

While such systems are tuned to provide high through put performance, they are inefficient at and sometimes incapable of retrieving the information that decision makers need to have for planning and problem solving.

Organizations with significant volumes of transactional information could need to reorganize and unify operational data from several sources, and provide friendly but powerful analysis tools that allow decision makers to trawl the raw data for strategic insight, so that, for example, they can discover patterns and opportunities buried in the lodes of data about customer transactions or service calls. The information assets of an organization are not confined to the transactional; they vary from the highly ordered to the ephemeral, and some of the most valuable information may be hiding in sales reports, office memos, study reports, project documents, photographs, audio recordings, and so on.

The organization, storage, and retrieval of textual and unstructured information will become a critical component of information management. The learning organization needs to be able to find the specific information that best answer a query, and to collate information that describes the current state and recent history of the organization.

Well integrated archival policies and records management systems will enable the organization to create and preserve its corporate memory and learn from its history.

The potentially severe consequences of the loss or inability to find vital documents are driving organizations to seek more versatile information storage and retrieval systems that can capture, store and retrieve text and other unstructured data. Instead of efficiency, the overall system requirement now becomes flexibility—the system should capture hard and soft information, support multiple user views of the data, link together items that are functionally or logically related, permit users to harvest the knowledge that is buried in these resources, and so on. Because the same information can be relevant to a range of different problem situations, it becomes necessary to represent and index the unstructured information by several methods.

The development of automated indexing systems makes it increasingly feasible to adopt a user-centered approach to indexing, over and above document-oriented indexing that represents the document’s content. In the user-centered approach, indexing can be done on two levels: the first reflects topic and other predetermined features; the second is tailored to situational requirements such as the level of treatment, whether general or specific (Fidel 1994). User-centered indexing may also be request-oriented, in which case the index language is built from an analysis of user requirements and is then used as a checklist to index documents (Soergel 1985).

The underlying idea is to anticipate user requests and check each document when it is being indexed against a list of anticipated requests. A combination of document-oriented and user-oriented indexing approaches has the potential to significantly improve information retrieval performance as well as user satisfaction. Given the amount of textual material in any organization, text information management will become as important as database management, and text retrieval applications will one day be as commonplace as word processing or spreadsheets. Today’s text retrieval engines and development tools have attained new levels of functionality and versatility.

Some of the newer systems make use of semantic networks of word meanings and links derived from dictionaries and thesauri to allow users to search by querying in natural language, choosing concepts and specific word meanings, and controlling the closeness of match.

Other systems simplify the development of text retrieval applications across heterogeneous database environments using a common access and programming interface based on industry standards. http://www.InfosDemocracy.com

Information Acquisitio

Information acquisition has become a critical but increasingly complex function in information management. Information acquisition seeks to balance two opposing demands. On the one hand, the organization’s information needs are wide-ranging, reflecting the breadth and diversity of its concerns about changes and events in the external environment.

On the other hand, human attention and cognitive capacity is limited so that the organization is necessarily selective about the messages it examines. The first corollary is therefore that the range of sources used to monitor the environment should be sufficiently numerous and varied as to reflect the span and sweep of the organization’s interests. While this suggests that the organization would activate the available human, textual, and online sources; in order to avoid information saturation, this information variety must be controlled and managed.

A powerful way of managing information variety is to involve as many persons as possible in the organization in the gathering of information, effectively creating an organization wide information collection network. People, not printed sources or electronic databases, will always be the most valuable information sources in any organization.

People read widely; communicate frequently with customers, competitors, suppliers; work on a variety of projects; and accumulate specialized knowledge and experience. Unfortunately, information acquisition planning typically does not include human sources. This is a serious deficiency. Human sources are among the most valued by people at all levels of the organization: human sources filter and summarize information, highlight the most salient elements, interpret ambiguous aspects, and in general provide richer, more satisfying communication about an issue. Information acquisition planning should therefore include the creation and coordination of a distributed network for information collection.

Complementing the network could be a directory or database of experts: both the business and subject experts who work within the organization, and the external consultants or professional specialists who have worked with the organization.

A well maintained database of internal and external experts can become a prized information asset of the organization, as people seeking information use it to connect with the best available expertise. The database may also be used to locate knowledgeable experts who can assist in evaluating current information resources, recommending new materials, assigning priorities, and so on.

The selection and use of information sources has to be planned for, and continuously monitored and evaluated just like any other vital resource of the organization. Furthermore, incoming information will have to be sampled and filtered according to their potential significance. Such sampling and filtering is an intellectual activity best performed by humans—it requires human judgment based on knowledge of the organization’s business as well as the strengths and limitations of information resources. http://www.InfosDemocracy.com

Information Management Cycle

The basic goal of information management is to harness the information resources and information capabilities of the organization in order to enable the organization to learn and adapt to its changing environment (Choo 1995, Auster and Choo 1995). Information creation, acquisition, storage, analysis and use therefore provide the intellectual latticework that supports the growth and development of the intelligent organization. The central actors in information management must be the information users themselves, working in partnership with a cast that includes information specialists and information technologists.

Information management must address the social and situational contexts of information use—information is given meaning and purpose through the sharing of mental and affective energies among a group of participants engaged in solving problems or making sense of unclear situations. Conceptually, information management may be thought of as a set of processes that support and are symmetrical with the organization’s learning activities. Six distinct but related information management processes may be discerned (Fig. 2): identifying information needs, acquiring information, organizing and storing information, developing information products and services, distributing information, and using information (Davenport 1993, McGee and Prusak 1993).

Information Needs:

 The identification of information needs should be sufficiently rich and complete in representing and elaborating users’ true needs. Since information use usually takes place in the context of a task or problem situation, it is helpful to recognize that information needs consist of two inseparable parts (Taylor 1986, 1991): that pertaining to the subject matter of the need (what information is needed), and that arising from the situational requirements of utilizing the information (why is the information needed and how it will be used).

Asking questions such as, is the problem will or poorly structured? is the goals specific or amorphous, is the assumptions explicit and agreed upon, and is the situation new or familiar, will indicate the kinds of information that could be of greatest value to the user. Depending on the information use requirements, information could emphasize hard or soft data, elaborate existing goals or suggest new directions, help define problems or make assumptions explicit, locate historical precedents or provide future forecasts, and so on. Identifying information needs therefore not only involves determining the topics of interest to the user, but also the attributes of the information to be provided that will enhance its value and usefulness.

An accurate description of information requirements is a prerequisite for effective information management. Ironically, systems designer often take this for granted and assume that information requirements can be quickly determined by examining existing paper flows and data flows. Similarly, senior managers believe that it is the information specialist’s job to identify their information needs, and do not assume the ‘information responsibility’ of defining in detail what information they require (Drucker 1994). In reality, particular information needs will have to be elicited from individuals. Unveiling information needs is a complex, fuzzy communication process. Most people find it difficult to express their information needs to their own satisfaction. Personal information needs have to be understood by placing them in the real-world context in which the person experiences the need, and to the ways in which the person will use the information to make sense of her environment and so take action. http://www.InfosDemocracy.com

Rule-based Knowledge

It also provides for a kind of creative robustness—intuition and heuristics can often tackle tough problems that would otherwise be difficult to solve. Whereas tacit knowledge is implicit, rule-based knowledge is explicit knowledge that is used to match actions to situations by invoking appropriate rules. Rule-based knowledge guides action by answering three questions: What kind of situation is this?

What kind of person am I or what kind of organization is this? And finally, what does a person such as I, or an organization such as this, do in a situation such as this? (March 1994) Rule-based knowledge is used in the design of routines, standard operating procedures, and the structure of data records. Rule-based knowledge enables the organization to enjoy a certain level of operational efficiency and control. It also promotes equable, consistent organizational responses.

Background knowledge: The third kind of organizational knowledge is background knowledge. This is knowledge that is part of the organizational culture and is communicated through oral and verbal texts such as stories, metaphors, analogies, visions, and mission statements. Background knowledge supplies the mindset or worldview by which people in the organization understand particular events, actions, objects, utterances, or situations in distinctive ways (Morgan 1986). Background knowledge draws the cognitive context for the construction of reality and endows meaning on the organization’s actions and activities. It promotes commitment through the creation of shared meanings and values.

All three forms of knowledge can be found in any organization. The intelligent organization however, is skilled at continuously expanding, renewing, and refreshing its knowledge in all three categories.

The intelligent organization promotes the learning of tacit knowledge to increase the skill and creative capacity of its employees, takes advantage of rule-based knowledge to maximize efficiency and equability, and develops background knowledge to unify purpose and meaning in its community. In effect, the intelligent organization has mastered a fourth class of knowledge - a higher order or meta-knowledge - that it uses to create, integrate, and invigorate all its intellectual resources in order to achieve superior levels of performance.

Examples of intelligent knowledge creation may be found in Japanese companies like Canon, Honda, Matsushita, NEC, and Sharp. These companies are widely admired for their ability to innovate continuously, recognize and respond swiftly to customer needs, dominate technologies while they are still emerging, and bring new high-quality products to market with impressive speed.

For example, Canon reinvented the 35mm camera, pioneered the personal photocopier and color copier, invented the laser printer and inkjet printer, and is now working on using ferroelectric liquid crystals for large flat panel displays. Judged by the number of US patents granted, Canon can claim to be the world’s most consistently creative company - for a fifth of the R&D budget, Canon has obtained about as many patents as IBM.

Or consider Honda’s history of agile adaptiveness: it gained a late but successful entry into the highly competitive automobile market, won victory in the motorcycle war against an established leader (Yamaha), and developed its own automotive engine that set new standards in fuel-efficiency and pollution control.

Many regard Honda as one of the best managed companies in the world (Pascale 1990). A Japanese scholar explains the success of companies like Canon, Honda and Matsushita:

The centerpiece of the Japanese approach is the recognition that creating new knowledge is not simply a matter of “processing” objective information. Rather, it depends on tapping the tacit and often highly subjective insights, intuitions, and hunches of individual employees and making those insights available for testing and use by the company as a whole. The key to this process is personal commitment, the employees’ sense of identity with the enterprise and its mission. Mobilizing that commitment and embodying tacit knowledge in actual technologies and products require managers who are as comfortable with images and symbols. Read the full details here @ http;//www.InfosDemocracy.com

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.

http://InfosDemocracy.com