Introducing information management : an information research reader (2005)
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- Footnote
- Rez. in: JASIST 58(2007) no.4, S.607-608 (A.D. Petrou): "One small example of a tension in the book's chapters can be expressed as: What exactly falls under information management (IM) as a domain of study? Is it content and research about a traditional life cycle of information, or is it the latter and also any other important issue in information research, such as culture, virtual reality, and online behavior, and communities of practice? In chapter 13, T.D. Wilson states, "Information management is the management of the life cycle to the point of delivery to the information user" (p. 164), yet as he also recognizes, other aspects of information are now included as IM's study matter. On p. 163 of the same chapter, Wilson offers Figure 12.2, titled "The extended life cycle of information." The life cycle in this case includes the following information stages: acquisition, organization, storage, retrieval, access and lending, and dissemination. All of these six stages Wilson labels, inside the circle, as IM. The rest of the extended information life cycle is information use, which includes use, sharing, and application. Chapter 3's author, Gunilla Widen-Wulff, quoting Davenport (1994), states "effective IM is about helping people make effective use of the information, rather than the machines" (p. 31). Widen-Wulff, however, addresses IM from an information culture perspective. To review the book's critical content, IM definitions and research methodology and methods reported in chapters are critically summarized next. This will provide basic information for anyone interested in using the book as an information research reader.
The chapter by Wilson and Maceviciûtè should have been the first in the book, as it offers an informative, clearly laid out, research-based picture for IM. The chapter offers IM definitions, as mentioned earlier, and also covers a couple of major studies concerned with mapping diversity of content and topics studied in the IM field. RefViz, a visualization tool and an addition to EndNote, was used to map 462 articles published between 1999 and 2004 that had the term information management in their title. Figure 2.1 (Visualization of the IM literature), presents the map's 18 groups or clusters of documents. Two studies by Wilson also are presented. A study completed in 2004 covered the years 2000 to 2004 and reviewed five journals with articles about information activities. The 2004 study analyzed 190 articles from 383 authors. Wilson developed a number of categories about information activities as part of the 2000 and 2004 studies that indicate the scope of the articles analyzed and IM's diversity of subject matter. The remainder of the chapter presents comparative data between the 2000 and 2004 research studies. Joyce Kirk provides a hierarchy of five IM definitions. "IM as IT systems" and "information resource management" are two of these definitions. While it is difficult to clearly recognize any of the hierarchy statements as a definition for IM, what can be had from this hierarchy is the realization, as cviu te' and Wilson state in chapter 2, that IM "is used as an abbreviation for the management of IT, information systems management, management information systems, etc." (p. 20). Perhaps, the critical usefulness of the chapter resides not so much in that it offers any ready to apply definitions for IM but rather in that it provides an overall review about information. The latter can be helpful for a book intended as an information research reader and as an introduction to IM. WidenWulff examined 15 Finnish insurance businesses and developed scales for the measurement of open and closed organizations, and also presented learning organization attributes in different information environments. A 1999 study by Aiki Tibar about critical success factors (CSF) and information needs of successful Estonian companies is the centerpiece of the chapter. The study's findings are presented in relation to previous and more recent research on CSF. The study's methodology was qualitative in nature, involving semistructured interviews with managers and engineers from 25 of the most successful companies in Estonia; these companies were selected in a contest in 1998 as being included in the top 50 most successful companies. In terms of findings, IM was a CFS that was mentioned the most frequently.
Chun Wei Choo focused on environmental analyzability and organizational intrusiveness in an effort to theorize and to highlight intricacies in scanning as managers attempt to deal with uncertainty and complexity in their environment. Correia and Wilson used a case-study approach to examine managerial scanning in 19 companies; 47 semistructured interviews were performed in an effort to develop a grounded theory of scanning. Because of the grounded theory approach, the authors did not use statistical sampling but rather utilized principles of maximum variation sampling and theoretical sampling. Categories and relationships that emerged from the grounded theory approach were utilized to build a model of the environmental process. Judith Broady-Preston presents an interesting discussion on balanced scorecard as a way to keep track of successful strategies and their impact on various areas of organizational performance, including finances, innovation and learning, and customer perceptions. Yet, although there have been three efforts to clarify the purpose of a balanced scorecard, the concept remains unclear, along with a role that information professionals can play in its successful application in organizations. France Bouthillier and Kathleen Shearer set review case studies of five private and five public organizations to bring out elements, practices, and benefits associated with knowledge management (KM). As stated by the authors: "generally speaking, IM involves the integration of a variety of activities designed to manage information and information resources throughout their life cycle" (p. 150). The authors say that the focus of KM initiatives, as opposed to the focus in IM initiatives, tends to be on "knowledge-sharing methodologies such as communities of practice, virtual collaboration and expert databases" (p. 150). In the chapter "The Nonsense of Knowledge Management" revisited by Wilson, he states that communities of practice are at the heart of methodologies for KM. And natural arenas for KM and communities of practice are various disciplines in education and departments in the medical field because of the collaborative spirit in these two fields. But, he also repeats his criticisms that beyond these arenas, there is no such thing as KM in business where competition is the norm rather than collaboration. He emphasizes that a common problem in the KM community is the treatment of knowledge as a thing or a commodity, when in reality, knowledge is a complex and dynamic process. The chapter also provides additional evidence from analysis of various publications that show KM as a fragmented field and as a business fad, according to Wilson.
Allen strikes a realistic note of the institutional importance of trust across teams of academics and administrators, and subsequently of the political behavior of academics and computer services administrators/ managers and the relation of the latter to information strategy formulation. Research was conducted at 12 university sites, information strategy process documents were analyzed, and 20 informants were interviewed at each site. The study's research focused on cross-case analysis (instead of an iterative approach to collection and analysis of data), research was longitudinal, and a grounded theory approach was employed. According to the author, findings confirm a similar position taken by Pettigrew (1977): "development of information strategy is the outcome of negotiated political relations" (p. 177). And for such negotiated political relations, the author concludes, trust is a necessary ingredient. It is important to reiterate that IM's scope requires a diversity of study methods and methodologies to address all issues involved. A multiplicity of information and IM definitions and the number of local and global issues that must be addressed, along with information's significance as resource and/or commodity in different types of organizations, necessitate diversity in information research. Each chapter has demonstrated a need to cover many aspects of IM and to ensure that there is as much clarity in that effort as possible, and yet differentiation of IM from other related fields such as KM clearly remains a top issue. As with any other effort to define a field's boundaries, the task at hand is not easy, but while definitions and boundaries are being worked out, there is always an opportunity to engage in fruitful discussions about scope and critical issues in information research."
