Expanding the Strategic Role of Information Interactions in the Enterprise Environment: Developing an Integrated Model

Information Management In Enterprise Management

During the 1990s organizational management and the surrounding research have witnessed two key areas of revolutionary change: the realization of the central role of enterprise information asset management, and the renewed appreciation of the benefits of business process analysis (Teng, 1995). During the course of the last decade, there has been a dramatically marked shift in recognizing the importance of information sources and valuing those for their strategic role in enterprise management.

There has been much debate and discussion in the professional literature amongst theoreticians as well as practicing professionals as to what constitutes corporate information assets, how best to define those, and what are the direct and indirect values that can be attributed to those assets. These discussions inherently convey an important shift in perspective, and demarcate a new era of enterprise research; by stating that there is a critical relationship between information asset management and the overall success of enterprise management. While in the past most authors might have implied that any improvement in the efficiency of corporate information asset management could have resulted in improved overall corporate performance, the new research would draw a closer and more direct causal relationship between the two. Yet attaching values to these assets has appeared to be challenging and often cumbersome. Financial planning, prompted by increased attention to information assets as part of the enterprise, often continues to rely on technical measures of asset management such as data storage capacity and network throughput. Potential financial gains to be made through the improved efficiency of quick, reliable access to correct information remain elusive because they are hard to measure and report. Our model was developed in part to offer a way of measuring the use of information as an integral part of business processes.