Behavioral and organizational theories

It is commonly believed that good information management is crucial to the proper functioning of organizations, and although there is no commonly accepted theory of information management per se, behavioral and organizational theories help. Following the behavioral science theory of management, developed primarily at Carnegie Mellon University and prominently supported by March and Simon,[7] most of what happens in modern organizations is actually information management and decision making. A crucial factor in information management and decision making is an individual's ability to process information and make decisions under limitations that may arise from the context: a person's age, situational complexity, or the lack of required quality in the information at hand – all of which is exacerbated by the rapid advancement of technology and the new types of systems it enables, especially as the social web emerges as a phenomenon that companies cannot ignore. And yet, long before there was general recognition of the importance of information management in organizations, March and Simon[7]​ argued that organizations have to be considered as cooperative systems, with a high level of information processing and a vast need to make decisions at various levels. Instead of using the "economic man" model, as advocated in classical theory[8]​, they proposed "administrative man" as an alternative, based on their argument about the cognitive limits of rationality. Additionally, they proposed the notion of satisfaction, which involves searching through available alternatives until a threshold of acceptability is met—another idea that still has currency.[9]​.

Economic theory

In addition to the organizational factors mentioned in March and Simon, there are other issues that arise from economic and environmental dynamics. There is the cost of collecting and evaluating the information necessary to make a decision, including the time and effort required.[10]​ The transaction cost associated with information processes can be high. In particular, established organizational norms and procedures can prevent the most appropriate decision from being made, leading to suboptimal outcomes.[11]​[12]​ This is an issue that has been raised as a major problem with bureaucratic organizations losing economies of strategic change due to entrenched attitudes.[13]​.

Background

According to the Carnegie Mellon school, the organization's ability to process information is the core of organizational and management competency&action=edit&redlink=1 "Competence (human resources) (not yet drafted)"), and an organization's strategies should be designed to improve information processing capability[14]​ and as the information systems that provide that capability became formalized and automated, competencies were rigorously tested at many levels.[15]​ It was recognized that Organizations needed to be able to learn and adapt in ways that were never so evident before[16]​ and academics began to organize and publish definitive works on strategic information management and information systems.[4]​[17]​ Concurrently, the ideas of business process management[18]​ and knowledge management[19]​ although much of the early optimistic thinking about business process redesign has since been discredited in the business management literature information.[20]​ In the field of strategic studies, understanding the information environment, conceived as the aggregate of individuals, organizations and systems that collect, process, disseminate or act on information, is considered the highest priority. This environment consists of three interrelated dimensions that continually interact with individuals, organizations, and systems. These dimensions are physical, informational and cognitive.[21]​.

Alignment of technology and business strategy with information management

Venkatraman has provided a simple view of the capabilities needed by an organization that wants to manage information well – the DICAR model (see above). He also worked with others to understand how technology and business strategies could be appropriately aligned to identify the specific capabilities needed.[22]​ This work was paralleled by other writers in the world of consulting,[23]​ practice,[24]​ and academia.[25]​.

A contemporary portfolio model for information

Bytheway has compiled and organized basic tools and techniques for information management in a single volume.[6]​ At the center of its vision of information management is a portfolio model that takes into account the growing interest in external sources of information and the need to organize external unstructured information to make it useful (see figure).

An information portfolio like this shows how information can be collected and organized in a useful way, in four stages:.

Stage 1: Leveraging public information: recognize and adopt well-structured external schemes of reference data, such as postal codes, weather data, GPS positioning data and travel schedules, exemplified in the personal computing press.[26]​.

Stage 2: Labeling Noise on the World Wide Web: Use existing schemes such as zip codes and GPS data or more typically adding "tags" or build a formal ontology that provides structure. Shirky offers an overview of these two approaches.[27]​.

Stage 3: Sifting and analysis: In the wider world the generalized ontologies being developed extend to hundreds of entities and hundreds of relationships between them and provide the means to derive meaning from large volumes of data. Structured databases work best when that structure reflects a higher-level information model: an ontology or an entity-relationship model.[28]​.

Stage 4: Structuring and archiving: With the large volume of data available from sources such as the social web and from miniature telemetry systems used in personal health management, new ways to archive and then track data for meaningful insights. Map reduce methods, originated by functional programming, are a more recent way of obtaining information from large archival data sets that is becoming interesting for typical companies that have very large information resources to work with, but requires advanced multi-processor resources.[29]​.

Skills to manage information well

The Information Management Body of Knowledge (IMBOK) was made available on the World Wide Web in 2004[30] and sets out to demonstrate that the management competencies required to realize real benefits from an investment in information are complex and multi-layered. The framework model that is the basis for understanding the competencies comprises six "knowledge" areas and four "process" areas:

The IMBOK is based on the argument that there are six areas of required management competency, two of which ("business process management" and "enterprise information management") are closely related.[31]​.

Even with full capacity and competence within the six areas of knowledge, it is argued that things can still go wrong. The problem lies in the migration of ideas and the value of information management from one area of ​​​​competence to another. Summarizing what Bytheway explains in some detail (and supported by selected secondary references):[36]​.

Summary

There are always many ways to look at a business, and the information management point of view is only one way. It is important to remember that other areas of business activity will also contribute to strategy – it is not just good information management that moves a business forward. Corporate governance, human resource management, product development and marketing will have an important role to play strategically, and we should not see a single domain of activity as the sole source of strategic success. On the other hand, corporate governance, human resource management, product development and marketing depend on effective information management, and so, in the final analysis, our competence to manage information well, on the broad basis offered here, can be said to be predominant.

Manage the required change

Organizations often face many information management challenges and issues at the operational level, especially when engendering organizational change. The newness of new system architectures and lack of experience with new information management styles requires a level of organizational change management that is notoriously difficult to deliver. As a result of a general reluctance of the organization to change, to allow new forms of information management, there could be (for example): a shortfall in the required resources, a failure to comply with the new kinds of information and the new procedures that use them, the lack of support from top management leading to a loss of strategic vision, and even to a political maneuver that undermines the functioning of the entire organization.[40]​ However, the application of new forms of information management should normally lead to operational benefits.

Galbraith's early works

In early work, taking an information processing view of organization design, Jay Galbraith") has identified five tactical areas for increasing information processing capacity and reducing the need for information processing.[41]​.

The matrix organization

The concept of lateral relationships leads to an organizational form that is different from simple hierarchy, the "matrix organization". This brings together the vertical (hierarchical) view of an organization and the horizontal (product or project) view of the work that it makes visible to the outside world. The creation of a matrix organization is a management response to a persistent fluidity of external demand, avoiding multiple and false responses to episodic demands that tend to be dealt with individually.

Behavioral and organizational theories

It is commonly believed that good information management is crucial to the proper functioning of organizations, and although there is no commonly accepted theory of information management per se, behavioral and organizational theories help. Following the behavioral science theory of management, developed primarily at Carnegie Mellon University and prominently supported by March and Simon,[7] most of what happens in modern organizations is actually information management and decision making. A crucial factor in information management and decision making is an individual's ability to process information and make decisions under limitations that may arise from the context: a person's age, situational complexity, or the lack of required quality in the information at hand – all of which is exacerbated by the rapid advancement of technology and the new types of systems it enables, especially as the social web emerges as a phenomenon that companies cannot ignore. And yet, long before there was general recognition of the importance of information management in organizations, March and Simon[7]​ argued that organizations have to be considered as cooperative systems, with a high level of information processing and a vast need to make decisions at various levels. Instead of using the "economic man" model, as advocated in classical theory[8]​, they proposed "administrative man" as an alternative, based on their argument about the cognitive limits of rationality. Additionally, they proposed the notion of satisfaction, which involves searching through available alternatives until a threshold of acceptability is met—another idea that still has currency.[9]​.

Economic theory

In addition to the organizational factors mentioned in March and Simon, there are other issues that arise from economic and environmental dynamics. There is the cost of collecting and evaluating the information necessary to make a decision, including the time and effort required.[10]​ The transaction cost associated with information processes can be high. In particular, established organizational norms and procedures can prevent the most appropriate decision from being made, leading to suboptimal outcomes.[11]​[12]​ This is an issue that has been raised as a major problem with bureaucratic organizations losing economies of strategic change due to entrenched attitudes.[13]​.

Background

According to the Carnegie Mellon school, the organization's ability to process information is the core of organizational and management competency&action=edit&redlink=1 "Competence (human resources) (not yet drafted)"), and an organization's strategies should be designed to improve information processing capability[14]​ and as the information systems that provide that capability became formalized and automated, competencies were rigorously tested at many levels.[15]​ It was recognized that Organizations needed to be able to learn and adapt in ways that were never so evident before[16]​ and academics began to organize and publish definitive works on strategic information management and information systems.[4]​[17]​ Concurrently, the ideas of business process management[18]​ and knowledge management[19]​ although much of the early optimistic thinking about business process redesign has since been discredited in the business management literature information.[20]​ In the field of strategic studies, understanding the information environment, conceived as the aggregate of individuals, organizations and systems that collect, process, disseminate or act on information, is considered the highest priority. This environment consists of three interrelated dimensions that continually interact with individuals, organizations, and systems. These dimensions are physical, informational and cognitive.[21]​.

Alignment of technology and business strategy with information management

Venkatraman has provided a simple view of the capabilities needed by an organization that wants to manage information well – the DICAR model (see above). He also worked with others to understand how technology and business strategies could be appropriately aligned to identify the specific capabilities needed.[22]​ This work was paralleled by other writers in the world of consulting,[23]​ practice,[24]​ and academia.[25]​.

A contemporary portfolio model for information

Bytheway has compiled and organized basic tools and techniques for information management in a single volume.[6]​ At the center of its vision of information management is a portfolio model that takes into account the growing interest in external sources of information and the need to organize external unstructured information to make it useful (see figure).

An information portfolio like this shows how information can be collected and organized in a useful way, in four stages:.

Stage 1: Leveraging public information: recognize and adopt well-structured external schemes of reference data, such as postal codes, weather data, GPS positioning data and travel schedules, exemplified in the personal computing press.[26]​.

Stage 2: Labeling Noise on the World Wide Web: Use existing schemes such as zip codes and GPS data or more typically adding "tags" or build a formal ontology that provides structure. Shirky offers an overview of these two approaches.[27]​.

Stage 3: Sifting and analysis: In the wider world the generalized ontologies being developed extend to hundreds of entities and hundreds of relationships between them and provide the means to derive meaning from large volumes of data. Structured databases work best when that structure reflects a higher-level information model: an ontology or an entity-relationship model.[28]​.

Stage 4: Structuring and archiving: With the large volume of data available from sources such as the social web and from miniature telemetry systems used in personal health management, new ways to archive and then track data for meaningful insights. Map reduce methods, originated by functional programming, are a more recent way of obtaining information from large archival data sets that is becoming interesting for typical companies that have very large information resources to work with, but requires advanced multi-processor resources.[29]​.

Skills to manage information well

The Information Management Body of Knowledge (IMBOK) was made available on the World Wide Web in 2004[30] and sets out to demonstrate that the management competencies required to realize real benefits from an investment in information are complex and multi-layered. The framework model that is the basis for understanding the competencies comprises six "knowledge" areas and four "process" areas:

The IMBOK is based on the argument that there are six areas of required management competency, two of which ("business process management" and "enterprise information management") are closely related.[31]​.

Even with full capacity and competence within the six areas of knowledge, it is argued that things can still go wrong. The problem lies in the migration of ideas and the value of information management from one area of ​​​​competence to another. Summarizing what Bytheway explains in some detail (and supported by selected secondary references):[36]​.

Summary

There are always many ways to look at a business, and the information management point of view is only one way. It is important to remember that other areas of business activity will also contribute to strategy – it is not just good information management that moves a business forward. Corporate governance, human resource management, product development and marketing will have an important role to play strategically, and we should not see a single domain of activity as the sole source of strategic success. On the other hand, corporate governance, human resource management, product development and marketing depend on effective information management, and so, in the final analysis, our competence to manage information well, on the broad basis offered here, can be said to be predominant.

Manage the required change

Organizations often face many information management challenges and issues at the operational level, especially when engendering organizational change. The newness of new system architectures and lack of experience with new information management styles requires a level of organizational change management that is notoriously difficult to deliver. As a result of a general reluctance of the organization to change, to allow new forms of information management, there could be (for example): a shortfall in the required resources, a failure to comply with the new kinds of information and the new procedures that use them, the lack of support from top management leading to a loss of strategic vision, and even to a political maneuver that undermines the functioning of the entire organization.[40]​ However, the application of new forms of information management should normally lead to operational benefits.

Galbraith's early works

In early work, taking an information processing view of organization design, Jay Galbraith") has identified five tactical areas for increasing information processing capacity and reducing the need for information processing.[41]​.

The matrix organization

The concept of lateral relationships leads to an organizational form that is different from simple hierarchy, the "matrix organization". This brings together the vertical (hierarchical) view of an organization and the horizontal (product or project) view of the work that it makes visible to the outside world. The creation of a matrix organization is a management response to a persistent fluidity of external demand, avoiding multiple and false responses to episodic demands that tend to be dealt with individually.