Content area
Full Text
G.D. Swash: Liverpool Business School, Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool, UK
Information technology has played a major part in raising expectations and broadening awareness of what information is or could be available, almost at the push of a button. The rapid proliferation of electronic information products and resources, including the rapid expansion of the Internet, have done much to promote this. Information, in its many forms, has become pervasive. It is processed by large numbers of people across all types of organization. Peter Drucker (1993) has pointed to the fact that productivity is no longer exclusively associated with manufacturing and distribution and, unlike in the 1880s when productive work was achieved by making and moving things, in the 1990s productivity is as likely to be the result of the output of "knowledge workers" who process information rather than raw materials. Drucker also confirms that to do their jobs effectively, knowledge workers must have the right tools to work with, which means giving them the information they need to do the job. Information has become acknowledged as a powerful resource for businesses in their efforts to gain competitive and strategic advantage and the central role played by information management in promoting corporate profitability is becoming widely accepted, although its systematic implementation to date is far from universal.
The costs of acquiring, storing and processing information are high. The purchase and maintenance costs of information technology have been a major force driving organizations to adopt a more focused approach to the management of their information resources. Useful information, does not, however, exist only in the form of databases; it exists in filing cabinets and in the analytical skills and capabilities of company experts. It also exists externally as information about markets and competitors in both published and unpublished forms. Such information resources are valuable but can frequently remain "hidden" or perhaps only partially exploited because organizations do not have the built-in mechanisms or expertise to capitalize on them. The costs of handling information for some organizations may also continue to be unnecessarily high because they have become technology led and have failed to make an appropriate distinction between the information which the company needs and the information technology which is needed to process that information.
The defects...