Talk:Information management

A major revision has been completed
This page has languished for about 10 years and was appallingly bad (IMHO). I could not stand it any longer, and so I completely re-constructed it eliminating redundant and irrelevant material and extending it significantly. I believe that it is CRITICAL to take a fully strategic view of information management in organizations, and now you can see my views more clearly. I have preserved all the original material that (IMO) had even marginal merit, and the references and external links that still work (two of them gave me 404s). There are now 40 references to a wide range of IM and related literature.

I marked up the wikipedia links without regard to whether they exist and so there are some red words and phrases for anyone with more to add (or take out the braces if you believe it is not a legitimate topic to link).

Let's talk, people? AndyB (talk) 14:18, 13 May 2015 (UTC)

It's been a few days now, and no comments. But then it has been a long time since this page received any attention. Happy to chat, but I'm going on to other projects right now. I'll check back periodically. AndyB (talk) 14:43, 22 May 2015 (UTC)

(Below is all HISTORY)
The "Information Management Concepts" section seems disconnected and somewhat irrelevant, unless it is linked back to the definition.

I quite like the article on IM with its brief history. It carefully avoids the usual pitfall, that IM is intrinsically to do with the IT upon which the information resides or travels, but still recognises its importance.

I often describe what information managers ought to worry about - in summary:

IM should be concerned with two things: accurate delivery of information, and efficient creation of that information.

Information is in effect, data with meaning. For example, a single piece of information might be the capacity of a pump. to contextualise that, you need to know which pump, the unit of measure, exactly whch capacity (maximim design or operating value), and also the status of that value (is it actual, design, theoretical, and so on).

Accurate delivery means timely, to the right people, of known status.

Efficient creation is to do with cost effectiveness or minimum effort.

I work in the engineering industry - multiply this effort several million times and you get an idea of the scale of this task.

Significant Edit of Topic "Information Management"
I am considering a major edit to the topic Information Management. Before I do so, I was wondering if many people actively track this topic. See http://imbok.blogspot.com/ for a general idea (it would not be a copy & paste though!). My intent is to convey that Information Management is a management discipline and should be covered accordingly. Comments welcome. Fidelis 03:37, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

I have been an IM practitioner and consultant for many years now and the revolution in information use that we are witnessing is bringing with it a step change in the evolution of the traditional IM discipline. It would be really useful to identify the clear differences between the largely 'librarian' disciplines that have existed previously and the 'personal content' disciplines that rewrite (and in many ways undermine) those historical practices.

Yutt245 14:38, 5 June 2006 (UTC)

The subject of Information, Information Management (IM) and Informational Management (IaM) is very close to my heart and to those of my users. I also would like to break away from the 'librarian' image that hijacked the IM phrase many years ago. Maybe IaM can assist to refocus. I welcome a colloquy. Prof_7

--Thulemanden 18:12, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

I suggest different definitions are described, like this one from the U.S. Army Field Manual 3.o:

Information management The provision of relevant information to the right person at the right time in a usable form to facilitate situational understanding and decisionmaking. It uses procedures and information systems to collect, process, store, display, and disseminate information.

https://atiam.train.army.mil/soldierPortal/atia/adlsc/view/public/6903-1/fm/3-13/glos.htm&sig=__voMCVMk6Fx6ky7yYAMwvdmsboGo=

or do in google: define:information management

I could ammend "operational" to that:

The provision of relevant information to the right person at the right time in a usable form to facilitate situational or operational understanding and decisionmaking. It uses procedures and information systems to collect, process, store, display, and disseminate information. --Thulemanden 18:12, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

The mission of information management is to secure predictibility of operations or create knowledge and insight supporting decision making and company objectives by establishing the best possible information level based on already available data in the company.Information management encompasses document management, records management, imaging, and knowledge management systems.Information is an asset to an organization and the management of this information is a means to plan, budget, manipulate, and control a document, analog or digital, during its entire life cycle.The objective is the provision of relevant information to the right person at the right time in a usable form to facilitate situational understanding and decisionmaking or an operational foundation by applying procedures and information systems to collect, capture, process, catalog, register, classify, index, store, locate, display, retrieve and disseminate information.The management of information applies the theories and techniques of information science to create, modify, or improve information handling systems to support the mission.

--Thulemanden 19:12, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

What seems to be missing from this discussion of Information Management is the context of the LIFE CYCLE of information. Information is managed within its life cycle. Typically, the life cycle of information is described as: Creation or receipt (also called Capture within a software application), Use, Storage, Retention, and Disposition.

Within this context, the task of Information Management is to ensure that information created and used is stored in a manner such that the information can be easily retrieved for later use. This task entails the association of Metadata with the information, without which retrieval is difficult, if not impossible, and costly. How the information is stored, once saved, affects its retrievability. Retention and disposition pertain to how long a period the information will be kept and how the information will be disposed of at the end of that period.

Retention and disposition are important because some information qualifies as a Record --Information created, received, and maintained as evidence or information created by an organization or person in pursuance of legal obligations or in the transaction of businessJts-tnr 02:59, 22 November 2006 (UTC) (ISO 15489). Retention is either Temporary or Permanent; that is, either kept for a period of time or kept for the life of the institution or enterprise. Temporary information is disposed of through destruction when its retention period is exhausted. Retention and disposition are also important because in many settings information kept longer than necessary may become a legal and financial liability to the institution or enterprise.

Information management, in this sense, is the set of policies, procedures, and systems for ensuring that information passes through its life cycle in a planned and efficient manner. The failures in information management that make headlines can usually be ascribed to failures to manage the life cycle stages of the information.


 * I agree that the article could benefit from an extension regarding Information Life-Cycle Management. However, this issue also requires a distiction between 'data' and 'information' to be established first, since these terms are frequently mixed up and used as synonyms. Data can be stored, retrieved, transferred, etc. Information, and subsequently knowledge, is something being created by an individual within a formative context, i.e. that the same data can result in different information depending on the recipient. I know that this kind of discussion tends to become academic, but the issue should be included as part of a conceptual discussion. --Kai a simon 08:59, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

I find that the definition and discussion of information management is essentially useless, quite dated and unrelated to many current information management issues of wide public concern. The article on information management relies on sources that are THIRTY YEARS OLD! Surely knolwedge and experience with information management has progressed in the past 3 decades beyond Galbraith's 1977 conception. To name only a critical difference, the Internet has transformed information management since 1977 in ways that Galbraith could not have imagined. For example, a key issue today in information management is privacy, protecting the rights of individuals in "the organization of and control over the structure, processing and delivery of information." Protection of individual privacy in the Internet world where new tools capture and store every keystroke for potential commerical exploitation is a pressing information management concern. Another key issue is digital rights management or digital access management, the intellectual property aspects of information management. How does one protect the rights of authors and limit unauthorized distribution of their works? To pose the issue a different way, the Information Management Concepts in the current article are outmoded. Why is there no discussion of the relationships between Information Management and Knowledge Management? Between Information Management and Web Content Management? Between Information Management and Enterprise Content Management? Between Information Management and Records Management? How does Information Management relate to Security and Risk Management? In short, the Information Management article requires a fresh start and an entirely new approach.Jts-tnr 16:13, 24 June 2007 (UTC)


 * I agree with you- so what there is to do is add updated sources- please go to it. That will vastly accelerate the evolution of the article.  Don't knock old sources- librarians and data people have been working on information management issues for a LONG LONG time!  If I get some bretahing room form other projects I iwll try to add some more modern content and thinking. Alex Jackl 05:58, 25 June 2007 (UTC)

I have quickly reviewed this page and was pleased to find http://imbok.blogspot.com/ - are you still tracking this topic here in Wikipedia, Fidelis? I agree that the content here needs work. I have a very broadly based "Information Management Body of Knowledge" framework at http://www.imbok.org, derived from a quite extensive research project originated in the UK (at the Cranfield School of Management) and continued here in South Africa (at the University of the Western Cape and the Cape Peninsula University of Technology). I have also added the link below; there is a 170pp examination of the subject there (as it is seen from out of that research) that has been adopted by a number of postgraduate and undergraduate programmes, freely available under a Creative Commons licence.

The IMBOK framework divides the domain of IM into: Information Technology, Information Systems, Business Processes, Business Benefits, Business Strategy. The idea of this five-layer division is that different management competencies are required (VERY different!) at the different levels, and there is a 144-competency survey instrument that we have used to operationalise this very broad perspective on what IM is (or could be seen to be!). I want to bring the IMBOK web site to life (I have been busy doing different things for a while) and would be interested in any comments and expressions of interest (and potential involvement). Specifically, I would like to open the site to interaction, collection of papers and contributions, discussion etc etc, and the IMBOK could be the basis of a new version of this Wikipedia page (170pp boiled down to two or three?!). Any interest out there, folks? AndyB 08:15, 5 July 2007 (UTC)

AndyB and others: I agree that this page on IM desparately needs updating, in fact it has been pretty poor from the very start. I have been watching for some time to see if anyone has been willing to do something about it, but it never seems to get much better. I am very busy, so I do not know if I have time for this, but I guess that I am going to have to pitch in myself to help make some improvements. No promises though. I agree with the earlier comment about needing to link to knowledge management, and we also need to link to data management, and make some clear distinctions, because there is a lot of "loose language"on this subject. I know one of the key people (a leading thinker) helping to update the knowledge management entry, so perhaps I can help with making these two entries more coherent. AndyB - I have read your IMBOK - and my personal opinion is no sorry, I do not think that your IMBOK is a suitable structure for the new page. However, this does not mean that there are not some ideas we can cull from it. Interestingly, some of your thoughts on the 5 layers do have some some similarity to ideas I have been developing on measurement for IM. I also agree with Jts-tnr that the new piece needs to accomodate new ideas such as DRM, web content etc. and I don't see those immediately coming out of your framework.

Perhaps a better piece on an information life-cycle would help, yes I know this is not new, but it could form part of the structure for a new page e.g. at the start of the lifecycle you might have something like information extraction and information accessibility that would include topics such as NLP, text processing, video and image extraction, automated metadata tagging etc. Information storage management for example might include  topics such as intelligent cacheing, distributed storage management, DRM etc. So perhaps a useful start would be to discuss what the elements of a lifecycle would be and what terms to use to describe them, and also what key technical topics and approaches need to be included under these. In addition to this, there are other subjects that span the lifecycle - such as information governance, strategy, policy and practice, education and training, standards, information architecture and engineering etc. that also need to be included in  a separate framework. I hope this paints a picture of how large a discussion on IM could eventually be i.e. very large indeed. Foak 00:42, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

Foak: Good comments, thanks for collecting these very useful thoughts. I like the lifecycle idea and will respond. (How time passes - is it really three or four years since we wrote these comments?) AndyB (talk) 11:09, 24 August 2011 (UTC)

Info about Corporate information management...
--222.67.216.199 (talk) 04:26, 19 April 2010 (UTC)
 * http://scholar.google.com.au/scholar?as_q=corporate+information+management&num=10&btnG=Search+Scholar&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&as_occt=title&as_sauthors=&as_publication=&as_ylo=&as_yhi=&as_sdt=1.&as_sdtp=on&as_sdts=5&hl=en

This link is just a rubric - did you think that it has some significance for the Information Management page? AndyB (talk) 14:23, 13 May 2015 (UTC)

Matrix Management...

 * There is no citation listed for the purported advantages of matrix management. — Preceding unsigned comment added by MacShimi (talk • contribs) 00:55, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

Critiquing the page
There are no sources, other than wikipedia, listed for the entire first section of the defining paragraphs of the term "information management". A recognizably credible wikipedia article has atleast one source per paragraph, according to the wikitraining on citations. Each paragraph is also supposed to be of a proper lenght, definitely longer and bulkier than the multiple three sentence paragraphs produced in the first section, which will be most used by the public from the page to define the term. Huntermckibbin (talk) 05:15, 22 June 2017 (UTC)
 * The lead of the article seems to reflect the sections of the article, which in turn seems properly sourced—see WP:CITELEAD. If there are some controversial passages in the lead that are not backed by sourced article content, feel free to tag them with cn templates. - DVdm (talk) 15:00, 24 June 2017 (UTC)
 * "Information management embraces all the generic concepts of management, including the planning, organizing, structuring, processing, controlling, evaluation and reporting of information activities, all of which is needed in order to meet the needs of those with organisational roles or functions that depend on information." => I found 0 book or proper research paper explain those 7 stages. PassByGhost (talk) 23:17, 15 September 2022 (UTC)

External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified one external link on Information management. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20070626203826/http://www.managing-information.org.uk/summary.htm to http://www.managing-information.org.uk/summary.htm

When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.

Cheers.— InternetArchiveBot  (Report bug) 21:45, 13 November 2017 (UTC)

Recent lead addition / terminology
I have moved the recently added lead content into the main text as separate section. Not really sure how to integrate this content in a good way, but it was far too detailed for the first lead sentence(s). All tweaks and improvements welcome of course. GermanJoe (talk) 21:43, 16 November 2017 (UTC)