Information Use

Information use is a dynamic, interactive social process of inquiry that may result in the making of meaning or the making of decisions. The inquiry cycles between consideration of parts and the whole, and between practical details and general assumptions. Participants clarify and challenge each other’s representations and beliefs. Choices may be made by personal intuition, political advocacy, as well as by rational analysis.

Managers as information users, for example, work in an environment that has been described as information ally overloaded, socially constrained, and politically laden. As new information is received and as the manager reflects and acts on the problem situation, the perception of the situation changes, giving rise to new uncertainties. The problem situation is redefined, the manager seeks new information, and the cycle iterates until the problem is considered resolved in the manager’s mind.

The organization’s information structures and processes will have to be as open, flexible, and vigorous as the processes of inquiry and decision making they support. Information managers and specialists should be participants in decision processes so that they have a first-hand understanding of the information needs that emerge as the process unfolds and the extent that these needs are satisfied.

In organizational learning, information is used by individuals to create knowledge, knowledge not just in the sense of data and facts, but knowledge in the form of representations that provide meaning and context for purposive action.

People in organizations therefore behave as sense makers who use information in action (Weick 1979), and information use becomes a hermeneutic process of inquiry, in which understanding is realized through interpretation and dialogue (Winograd and Flores 1987, Boland et al 1994). The theory of hermeneutics (Gadamer 1975) describes the interpretive process by which an individual gives meaning to organizational experience, while the theory of inquiring systems (Churchman 1971) describes how a community of inquirers builds and test knowledge through dialogue.

The hermeneutic interpretive process is interplay of the part and the whole in a hermeneutic circle (Gadamer 1975): we depend on our comprehension of the whole to identify and understand the parts, but at the same time, we depend on our knowledge of the parts to validate our comprehension of the whole (Boland et al 1994). As a result, we continually move back and forth between theory and details, and between vision and specifics, in our attempt to construct interpretations.

How is the validity of these interpretations to be judged? Churchman (1971) portrays human inquirers as producers of knowledge who test their interpretations through dialogue and debate. In a community of inquirers, individuals see the same situation through different weltanschauung shaped by their beliefs and values. Inquiry then proceeds by vigorous debate as thesis and antithesis confront each other.

The inquiry changes its direction and style frequently as new concepts and elements are introduced from outside the presently accept ways of understanding a situation. Like the hermeneutic circle, there is constant movement between views of a situation that simplify and views that complicate, between close-up examination of details and reflection about general assumptions, categories and concepts (Boland et al 1994).

Organizational information continuously vacillates between the fine-grained and the broad-brushed, between components and the whole, between immediate instances and general policies. In the act of knowledge creation, organizational information weaves through layers of tacit, rule-based, and background knowledge that stitch the cognitive fabric of the organization.

In summary, information use for the making of meaning and understanding requires information processes and methods that provide for a high degree of flexibility in information representation and that facilitate the vigorous exchange and evaluation of multiple representations among individuals. Labeling or naming of concepts and categories has to be relevant to the users’ interpretive discourse, and be flexible and easy to change. Information is needed about specific events and instances as well as about new theories and frameworks that dispute current norms and beliefs. Assumptions made should be surfaced for review. Information is to be shared easily but without loss of cognitive richness.

Through the exchange and interpretation of information, the organization blends its tacit and explicit knowledge to extract new meanings for action.  http://www.InfosDemocracy.com

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

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