Information Management

There are many definitions of information management (IM). Some of them are presented here:

Information management is the management of organizational processes and systems that acquire, create, organize, distribute, and use information. According to a process view of information management, IM is a continuous cycle of six closely related activities:

• identification of information needs;
• acquisition and creation of information;
• analysis and interpretation of information;
• organization and storage of information;
• information access and dissemination;
• information use (http://choo.ischool.utoronto.ca/IMfaq/)

Wilson (2002) notes that the term 'information management' is used ambiguously in the literatures of several fields: in computer science and its applications it is used as a synonym for information technology management (Synott and Gruber 1981) or as identical to 'data management', where the emphasis is on the structures underlying quantitative data and their relationship to the design of databases.

In business or management studies it has similar connotations to technology management, with an emphasis on the relationship of information technology to business performance and competitiveness (Synott 1987 as cited in Wilson, 2002).

In the field of librarianship and information science it is identified with the 'emerging market' for information workers (managers), whose perception of information embraces data, organizational intelligence, competitive intelligence, external information resources of all kinds and the associated technology (manual or machine) for handling these different sources. Compared with the other areas, information management in this latter context is more widely concerned with the meaning of information for the information user and with information retrieval issues (Wilson, 2002).