An Assessment
The significance of the information age and its impact on the overall infrastructure of communication is enormous. Breakthrough advancements in technology have resulted in information now treated as a major asset solidifying an organization’s reach across horizons in wake of new business strategies as well as ensuring effective communication between functions of the organization itself.
While the use of this information is critical for both ensuring survival of the organization and being a frontrunner in its strategies for the future, there are large boulders in use of this information effectively, efficiently and in a timely, coordinated fashion so that this information remains with those responsible for managing and controlling it and, at the same time, ensuring that this information assists in strategic business decision making.
There have been a wide variety of metaphors that are used to describe the various aspects of information, communication, and the overall infrastructure of organizational communication. Information has been described as glue which keeps different component parts making up the information core, together. Contradictory metaphors also suggest that rather than binding the different functions of the organization together, that may result in frequent collisions in serving individual of interests of each; information rather plays the role of a lubricant that keeps all parts of the organization separate but smoothly functioning.
Both of the categorical and situational metaphors provide a different overview of the process of treating information in a rather mechanical, controlled fashion. Information has a far different role than this. At this very point, it would be useful to argue that as a matter of fact, information is a highly uncontrollable entity that has to be handled using a variety of methods. Information itself is uncontrollable; however, measures to control it are put in place to ensure integrity, timeliness and accuracy with which it is presented. Secondly, information is highly random in nature. It does not follow specific sequences or order in which it is received, processed and stored. Although processes are defined to make the flow of information as mechanical as possible, from various component parts of the organization, the actual nature of information is highly dynamic, consistently redefining in the wake of new business horizons, information requirements, and the changing global outlook.
Another metaphor for the treatment of information is highly interesting and poses a new set of challenges to the interpretation, treatment, and visibility of information across different parts of business, inside and outside to the organization. It is the metaphor of information as money, and focuses on the importance of this aspect of information, that is usually left unturned. Information, at any point of the organization, is very useful in determining the economic, political, environmental and other aspects of an organization’s performance in the region in which it operates. While some may view information as an entity solely internal to the organization, my personal view of information is one which comes both the external and the internal environments surrounding the organization. The IT infrastructure may receive information from various touchpoints of the organization; it has to be managed as an entity that is central to the operations of the organization and to ensure its competitiveness in its outreach across various parts of the globe.
At the very same time, this information becomes more useful when conjugated with the information received from the organization’s environment that controls various different forces impacting the organization.
Some may argue that the treatment of information as an economic asset or something of monetary value may be raising too many stakes on the phenomenon, keeping in view the nature of information, becoming soon outdated and unusable after a certain period of time. Also, the relevance of information may also be a highly debated point in the treatment of information as money.
In my personal opinion, information never becomes outdated. With the recent data mining models and warehousing techniques (StarSoft, 2008) that have made their way into the information management arena, it has become increasingly emphasizing for the information to follow the notion of ‘the more, the merrier.
Then comes the question of having to manage so much of information that might / might not be relevant to the organization. This has become a major stronghold for the argument that treatment of information as money is not valid. In view of competitiveness, I offer a rather different, compelling outlook to this question.
Communication of information is a resource of high availability to the organization. It is however the meaningfulness and the relevance of this information that is of question here. Instead of reducing the importance of information, we can ensure different means of managing information, making it more relevant, through the use of various data mining (Naxon, 2006) techniques available in various solutions today. Once an information management structure of the organization is in place, we must have large repositories of information to identify patterns or cycles which the business follows. At this very point, the amount of information becomes a point of major concern. We can ensure that information is relevant through infrastructure controls, and then we would be requiring large amounts of information for data mining to determine patterns of business activity, to assist in strategic decision making, using the organization’s decision making models while also receiving future directions based on the prediction models (Clementine, 2007) produced by the system itself. This is a highly valuable tool for planning the objectives of business. However, to run this engine of strategic visioning, lots and lots of information is the fuel. Information can hence be of high use as an economic resource and information into the organization can serve as a valuable input in future decision making.
This is just one part of the story dealing with information internal to the organization. The argument for validating the treatment of information as ‘money’ is equally enforcing on the information received from various channels outside the organization. Let’s now discuss the notion of the organization today. Foremost, organizations today are not a sole entity. In the competitive era of today, building partnership networks serves as the key to excelling in business operations covering the globe. It is in this view that organizations are simultaneously linked to various business partners that serve in differing capacities to the organization, strategic and operational. In such a case, information received is valuable for any ‘link’ in this chain to improve its efficiency. Secondly, information from the environment outside the organization, serves as a strengthening mould in ensuring the economic value of each transaction between businesses. Information, hence, as accurate and relevant as it may, is an asset to the organization that serves its monetary objectives.
It is therefore evident that the role of information as money is highly important to business today. An important point to note here is that information never gets outdated or obsolete. It is merely our view of this information that should change, with our strategy to deal with new and old information at the same time. Treatment of information as money can assist in developing IT systems and infrastructure strategies that can function more efficiently, in view of such importance, as well as assist in positive projections on how to deal with vast sums of information, turning it into a valuable asset to the organization and deriving economical, financial, environmental and global benefits from this. A slightly less prioritizing of organizational information and its importance in the overall communication can lead to significant human error, owing to the ‘ignorance’ factor, typifying the future decline of business and its overall operations.
Works Cited
Clementine. (2007). Achieve Better Insight and Prediction with Data Mining. Web.
Naxon, S. (2006). Importance of Data Mining in today’s business world. Web.
StarSoft. (2008). Data Mining Techniques. Web.