Information Management: A Consolidation of Operations, Analysis and Strategy

Information management as a discipline has become more prominent in recent times as enterprises seek effective ways to make use of corporate knowledge. It is now understood that this requires more than use of technology. Professionals with responsibilities in such areas as knowledge utilisation, strategic planning, records and archives systems, business analysis, libraries and data warehouses, have expressed information management strategies. They normally try to articulate approaches to dealing with organising and distributing information with attention to quality, or to determining needs of information users, or to analysing an environment that values the information and knowledge as resources and accordingly builds them into corporate planning. Most works have examined one of these areas without attending to the relationships between them. The principles have been confined to viewpoint of particular disciplines, or to particular levels of exploration. 'Information Management' extends the analysis from several perspectives. It consolidates material into a coherent framework of principles at operational, analytical and strategic levels that provides both an introduction to the field in general for students and a handbook for professionals. Michael Middleton teaches information management in the School of Information Systems at Queensland University of Technology; his research interests in QUT's Information Systems Management Research Group are in information use analysis.