Effective Information Management

Effective Information Management: developing information system strategies (1982), R. I. Tricker, Beaumont Executive Press, Oxford and (1984), Van Norstrand Reinholt, New York,

 

The need for information in the modern organization has never been greater. The provision of data has never been wider.  But whilst decision makers face a surfeit of data; there is a paucity of information.

Providing more data, more quickly and making it more readily accessible does not, of itself, provide more information; even less does it produce better informed executives.

For some, telecommunications and computers provide a solution to the information problem. But those organizations that are well advanced in this area find that the technical and operational answer can have dramatic strategic consequences. Technology has run ahead of management’s ability to use it. Opportunities in new organization structures and management styles, facilitated by modern information systems, have out-stripped managers’ ability to imagine the alternatives.

The time has come for managers to reassert control over their information and their organization.

Around the world, decision makers face growing complexity: there are more factors to be taken into account. The interests of more people have to be recognized: there are wider demands for access to information, accountability, and involvement.  Increasing scale and concentration, interdependence, and internationalisation add new dimensions to the problems of management co-ordination and control. Yet, in the midst of this, the executive has to act.

Management, which used to involve responses to the pressures of change, has become the process of causing change. No longer able to see the future as an outgrowth of the past, information has become crucial.  It is the link in organizational relationships, the basis of managerial control, and the stimulus for imaginative strategy.

This is not a book about computers. A manager does not have to be an electronics engineer to use the telephone. He does, however, have to appreciate the available services and know what is required of him.

The book emphasizes management’s responsibility for organization structure, management planning coordination and control, and the formulation of strategy in the light of the technological potential for handling information. It indicates many of the crucial questions that senior executives should be discussing and the knowledge that managers should have on the subject.

 

Contents

1. The strategic significance of information systems

2. The importance of information

3. Rethinking the systems organization

4. A technological perspective

5. A data-operations perspective

6. An organizational perspective

7. Developing an information systems strategy

8. Avoiding catastrophe

9. The informed organization