Information Management

Lecture 2Introduction to Information Management.

Bibliography [1] Dave Chaffey, Steve Wood - Business Information

Management : Improving Performance Using Infomation Systems, 2005, Prentice Hall/Financial Times, (734 pages)

[2] Benson V., Tribe K. – Business Information Management, 2008, Ventus Publishing (83 pages)

[3] G. Somasundaram, Alok Shrivastava, Eds. - Information Storage and Management: Storing, Managing and Protecting Digital Information, 2009, Wiley Publishing, Inc (478 pages)

[4] Wikipedia

Overview Information in today’s world Information in today’s organization Fundamentals of business information management Information resources Technology resources People resources

Information. Technology. Both resources are increasingly important as organizations seek to improve their performance. Information and technology resources coupled with human resources help deliver value to organizations in many different ways. Applying information and technology offers new ways to do business, increases the efficiency of business processes, reduces costs, and provides the performance measures used to control improvement. [1,pg 6]

Effective information management requires careful control of three types of resource: information resources such as data, information and knowledge; technology resources such as the hardware and software that forms information and

communications technology and information systems; people resources such as the different types of employee and manager within a company

and also third parties such as suppliers and customers who also determine information quality. [1,pg 7]

Information economy - An economy that is highly dependent upon the collection, storage and exchange of information.

According to [1, pg. 8] the amount of the GDP spent on IM hardware and software, in many countries is up to 5%.

Many business services now deal exclusively with adding value to data and are selling information derived from data.

Possible starting points for the information age [1, pg. 9] 40,000 BC Clay tablets from ancient Mesopotamia, where Iraq now

stands, have a precursor cuneiform writing 1300 BC Basic Chinese characters, such as that for the horse, first

formed in bone 387 BC Plato founded his academy devoted to research in philosophy

and the sciences on land which had belonged to Academos. 1455 The printing of the Bible with movable type by Gutenberg in

Germany 1564 Graphite is discovered 1651 John Dury first describes the role of information manager (actually

a librarian at the University of Oxford, usually referred to as the first

modern library).

1860 First commercial typewriters use the QWERTY keyboard 1876 Alexander Graham Bell introduced the first telephone to

an audience at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia 1901 Marconi sends a radio signal of the Morse code letter ‘s’

across the Atlantic from Cornwall, England, to St John’s, Newfoundland

1937 Atanasoff–Berry Computer (ABC), the world’s first electronic digital computer built by John Vincent Atanasoff and Clifford Berry at Iowa State University

1947 First commercial computer – ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer). It weighed thirty tons and used 18,000 vacuum tubes

1953 IBM produced the first computer system that was widely adopted by organizations

1969 First node on the US ARPANET, forerunner of the Internet 1971 A computer engineer named Ray Tomlinson sent the first

e-mail message. He can’t remember the message, but he does remember choosing the @ symbol!

1991 First website (http://info.cern.ch) published by Tim Berners-Lee

Information overload [1, pg. 11] - The capacity of individuals and systems within an organization to derive value from information is exceeded by the volume and complexity of information

Knowledge worker [1, pg. 11] - A term referring to employees who spend a large part of their time searching, analyzing and disseminating information within an organization

To counter information overload is to improve the quality of information. Techniques used for improve information quality, are[1, pg. 11]: Aggregating – the ‘big picture’ is presented by summing up

individual data items. Summarizing – an abstract of a technical report is one form of

summarizing. Filtering – less relevant information can be removed, for example

only news items that contain the company’s name or competitors’ names are sent through to managers.

Alerting – messages are displayed on-screen or sent via e-mail to alert managers to a newsworthy piece of information.

Information overload How much information? Lyman and Varian (2003), researchers at the

School of Information Management and Systems, University of California, Berkeley calculated that in 2002, the world’s total yearly creation of print, film, optical and magnetic content would require 5 exabytes of storage. (1 exabyte = 10^18 bytes)

Annually 800 megabytes of recorded information is produced for each man, woman and child on Earth

The researchers provide these estimates of information flows across different media [2002 estimates] [1, pg. 12]: Telephone calls worldwide – on both landlines and mobile phones –

contained 17.3 exabytes of new information if stored in digital form; this represents 98 per cent of the total of all information transmitted in electronic information flows, most of it person-to-person.

Most radio and TV broadcast content is not new information. About 70 million hours (3500 terabytes) of the 320 million hours of radio broadcasting is original programming. TV worldwide produces about 31 million hours of original programming (70,000 terabytes) out of 123 million total hours of broadcasting.

The World Wide Web contains about 170 terabytes of information on its surface; in volume this is seventeen times the size of the Library of Congress print collections.

Instant messaging generates five billion messages a day (750 GB), or 274 terabytes a year.

E-mail generates about 400,000 terabytes of new information each year worldwide.

Person-to-person (P2P) file exchange on the Internet is growing rapidly. 7% of users provide files for sharing, while 93% of P2P users only download files. The largest files exchanged are video files larger than 100 MB, but the most frequently exchanged files contain music (MP3 files).

Business intelligence [1, pg. 14] - Internal information about the performance of an organization reviewed at either a detailed or summary level

Business performance management - A process for improving the performance of organizations based on performance metrics

Market intelligence - External information about a specific market which is used to understand a company’s competitive position

Information quality

Means how well it supports the tasks performed by individuals and the decisions they take

Features that increase information quality: Relevance Accuracy (can be affected by data replication) Timeliness – the delay from data collecting and data

processing Presentation form

Data-to-information transformation process Information systems take inputs (business data) and

transforms them into outputs (business information) Within an organization, information transformation

follows these stages [1, pg. 25]:1 Capture or input of data.2 Routing of data to location for processing.3 Processing of data to produce information.4 Distribution of information to its users.5 Analysis and interpretation of information by users coupled

with their knowledge (skills and previous experience) to take actions which give results.

Activities involved in processing information can be summarized by using the 4 Cs of: Context – displaying a data item relative to other data items, such

as in a time series or trend graph. Sorting data alphabetically or numerically is another example of contextualization.

Calculation – producing derived metrics such as calculating a percentage capacity utilization.

Classification or categorization – grouping information into different categories, for example, all flights into a particular country.

Condensation – aggregating or totaling information is always important in presenting business event data as summary information – for example, total sales on a route. Filtering is also used to summarize information, for example, ‘show me all flights that were delayed by at least two hours’.

The information lifecycle [1, 31]

Forms of information

Records management Consists of activities involved in managing structured,

formal information. Records are stored traditionally on books, documents,

photographs, microfilm. More recently appeared computerized records.

Records management is also of value since it can reduce costs through [1,pg. 33]: Better use of physical storage space and computer server

resources within an organization; Better use of staff time since information is easier to access; Improvement of control and security of value information

resources.

Knowledge conversion to information

Knowledge involves human expertise in a domain but for communicating it to other humans, it needs to be transformed into verbal information.

Knowledge management implies that an organization has adopted a structured approach for utilizing knowledge.

The European Knowledge Management Framework identifies five core knowledge process activities. These are [1, pg. 37]:1 Identify knowledge. The requirements or reasons for knowledge management are

assessed and an analysis is undertaken of what knowledge is available and what knowledge is lacking (the knowledge gap).

2 Generate (new) knowledge. Practices are developed to create new knowledge. Heisig and Iske (2003) mention training and learning by joint problem solving at the team or individual level at the department or organizational level through research and development, establishment of expert groups which are sometimes called ‘communities of practice’, recruitment of experts and buying another company.

3 Store knowledge. Knowledge assets are built up by finding ways of embedding knowledge in the organization of its employees. This does not necessarily mean storing it in databases, since most tacit knowledge will remain in the heads of people.

4 Distribute knowledge. A method must be found of transferring knowledge to particular employees of teams as they need it. Heisig and Iske (2003) identify the Stock method of distribution where knowledge is made available through databases and the Flow method where knowledge is transferred directly from person to person through collaboration, workshops or mentoring.

5 Apply knowledge. All the other KM activities will be wasted if the knowledge sources are not utilized.

Technology resources Information Technology (IT) refers to hardware, software

and telecommunication networks used to manage information.

Software resources include applications software and operating systems software.

The management issues with applications software include [1, pg. 43]: Do we select best-of-breed applications or enterprise-wide

systems? How do we select the most appropriate portfolio of

applications? How do we manage projects to implement new

applications?

The management issues with technology infrastructure resources include [1, pg. 43]: How do we select the most appropriate technology

for the organization? How do we assess when we should upgrade our

technology? Which technology standards should we adopt? How do we reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO)?

(TCO includes the purchase and maintenance costs for a technology resource such as a PC)

How do we ensure a good quality of service?

People resources

The people or human resources involved in business information management include: internal staff staff at other organizations such as:

customers, suppliers, distributors, government organizations the media.