All organization must manage information, just as all businesses must make a profit, but for a chief executive to tell you to improve your information management, like telling you to improve profits, is no help at all. What you need is more specific direction on the route to those overall goals.
Is it fair to suggest that managing information is as important as making profit? However well you manage information, without profits your business will fail. But profits depend upon good decisions based on accurate information.
Decisions are impossible without information and manager are constantly seeking more and better information to support their decision making. Hence the growth of information systems – a term that generally means networks of computers, but strictly speaking should also include non-computerized channels or communication such as regular meetings, the in and out trays full of memos and reports and of course the phone.
To survive, every organization must have an information system. All organization must be able to collect information, communicate it internally and process it so that managers can make decisions quickly and effectively in pursuit of organizational objectives in a changing, competitive environment.
The information system is the nervous system, which allows an organization to respond to opportunities and avoid threats. To be effective it must reach every part of the organization, and beyond, into the furthest extremities of the extended enterprise.
Managing Information
