Information Ecology

"They don't know what they know or what they need to know."

"Obviously, the amount of human involvement increases as we move along this continuum of data-information-knowledge."

"While an ecological approach may be new to information management, it's quite familiar to business strategists and economists."

"So what's wrong with this eminently rational picture? First, while their primary objective is to facilitate interactions between information providers and users, these approaches usually end up creating barriers to communication."

"What we get from computers is usually dated information with little or no context or clues to meaning, devoid of sequence or causality, presented in impoverished formats, in much greater volumes than we care to sift through."

"To manage ecologically, we must first understand the overall landscape in which information is used."

"The effects of the personal computer revolution aren't always salutary for the broader information ecology."

"Ecologically minded managers will strategize about which information to focus on, what information activities to emphasize, and how information will help their organization meet its objectives."

"As with so many elements of information ecology, developing a strategy is part of a complex web of crisscrossing threads."

"If a firm emphasizes certain functions within the value chain as part of its business strategy, there are corresponding implications for information strategy."

"Consider the following combined approach to information strategy taken by the Exploration and Production business unit within a major UK oil company."

"Middle managers are notorious for filtering out negative information from their superiors, but this is a very primitive, and often harmful, form of selective dissemination."

"A variety of economic tactics can also reinforce desired information behaviors and attitudes."

"Consequently, when we manage information behavior, we're attempting to improve the overall effectiveness of an organization's information environment through concerted action."

"There are all sorts of barriers that prevent horizontal information flow."

"The process of developing information architectures inhibits change."

"Given that information often conveys power, rarity may make all the difference to a given piece of information's value."

"Here are some of the tasks staff might perform: pruning, providing context, enhancing style, and choosing the right medium."

"In the future, IT roles will be more easily outsourced, which will free up people to focus on information and content issues."

"Capturing information is really an ongoing activity, not something that can be dispatched once and for all."

"In fact, a survey of corporate managers found that CIOs were the least likely to get the information they really needed from a computer."

"The use of information is clearly the final step of any information management process; but even researchers and managers with a process orientation have largely ignored it."

"Despite all its problems, information engineering does have some value."

"From an ecological perspective, identifying what information is available today and where it can be found is a much better use of architectural design than attempting to model the future."

"The World Wide Web is also an excellent example of an emergent or bottom-up architecture."

"The best place to start at most organizations is with two components: information management staff and information mapping."

"In achieving any major change, it's not enough to focus on avoiding what might go wrong: it's also necessary to have a vision of how the organization might look if everything goes right."