Leveraging an organization’s information assets to succeed in strategic goals

Information management is the ability of organizations to successfully leverage information to drive strategic results, such as increased customer satisfaction, higher productivity and revenue. It is a process involving information capture, management, analysis, preservation, storage and retrieval with the goal of delivering the right information to the right people at the right time. This applies to information contained in a variety of formats (physical and digital) and delivered in a variety of ways (mobile platforms, encrypted web interfaces, and print).

The iSchool conducts research in information management and the effectiveness of organizational structures and systems so that people can be more productive, make better decisions and support organizational values.

Applicability

The iSchool’s expertise and research in information management can assist organizations in the following ways:

• Assessing the impact of information management on an organization’s strategic and tactical decision-making goals
• Integrating information across multiple systems and digital platforms
• Determining access to information and implementing access protocols
• Analyzing the issues, experiences and decision-making involving cloud computing, content storage in the cloud, cloud collaboration and cloud governance
• Evaluating enterprise data and content management including strategies, methods and tools for managing information integrity, reliability and use
• Developing business process management systems including business analysis, change management and governance
• Implementing systems to manage information in multiple formats
• Developing data architecture standards

Projects and Research

Strategic Portfolio Management Initiative
A project to streamline a major retail company’s IT project pipeline to better evaluate new proposals, ensure resource capacity and create efficiencies to meet business goals.

Strategic Content Management
Building and training an information management group for a large academic institution to create systems that  collect, tag and deliver information about faculty research and to analyze information that is tied to enterprise success.

Online Collaboration
A study of Wikipedia focused on designing systems that support large-scale, collaborative action by evaluating the activities and roles that individuals and groups play in large systems.

Presentation of Information Architecture
A large retailer has highly complex information architecture that is difficult to demonstrate to various internal audiences. The iSchool is working to create an entirely new way of presenting complex information to executives, members of IT staff and other non-technical employees.