Information Management in Project Management: Theoretical Guidelines for Practical Implementation

1. From Information Science To Information Management: Disciplinary Positioning

The practical epistemology has been so designated by Jayme Paviani to mean the articulation of epistemological and methodological problems within a common horizon and, in this sense, its function would be “to make explicit the assumptions and purpose of science in an articulated manner with the rules, the procedures and the research tools. Therefore, its contribution, as well as reflective, is programmatic” (Paviani, 2009, p. 21), and has been behind the effort at the University of Porto, Portugal, of the precise and synthetic delimitation (joining theoretical concerns with the practical dimension of research) of the Information Science (IS) field. Hence, the proposed definition for it: “social science that investigates the problems, issues and cases related to info-communicational phenomenon, perceivable and knowable through confirmation or denial of the inherent properties of the informational flow genesis, organisation and behaviour” (Silva, 2006, p. 141). It is also the science that, keeping alive the documentary tradition and practice inherited from previous disciplines such as librarianship, documentation and archivistics, studies the information cycle in its fullness and transversality: origin, collection, organisation, storage, retrieval, interpretation, transmission, processing and use of information.

Moreover, the question to ask is: How is the “information” defined? This has been defined in various ways and views. In the midst of such a variety of settings, we chose to take a definition that would allow the exploring of the fixed object: “Set of structured mental and emotional coded representations (signs and symbols) and modelled with/by social interaction, able to be recorded in any material medium and therefore communicated in an asynchronous and multi-directed way” (Silva, 2006, p. 150).

To be communicated, information takes the form of a document, but it does not become identical to it even though our senses (visual and tactile) allow us to perceive the document as an artifact, and as inseparable (and symbiotic) from the mentefact (information). Perceiving the subtle but crucial difference between the content and the container, between the medium and the “substance of meaning” recorded in it, gives IS epistemic legitimacy.

The 60s of the 20^th century pontificated the famous definition of IS exposed in the Georgia Institute of Technology conferences, that took place in October 1961 and April 1962, and summarised in an article by Harold Borko (1968), in which the reference to the information properties emerged, listed firstly by Yves-François Le Coadic (1994). In the definition exposed and used in the University of Porto, they appear and mainly have been specified in the book prepared to provide the theoretical and well-founded basis for the Bachelor in Information Science that began to be taught in the academic year 2001-2002 (Silva & Ribeiro, 2002). The properties of information, formalised as general axioms, are six and according to them, information: 1) is structured by an action (human and social) – the individual or societal act structurally establishes and models the information; 2) is integrated dynamically – the informational act is involved with, and results from, conditions and circumstances both internal and external to that action; 3) has potentiality – a statement (to a greater or lesser extent) of the act which founded and modelled the information is possible; 4) is quantifiable – the linguistic, numeric or graphic codification is capable of quantification; 5) is reproducible – the information can be reproduced without limit, therefore, its subsequent recording/memorising is made possible; 6) is transmissible – the informational (re)production is potentially transmissible or communicable. In addition, the properties are somehow intrinsic and “universal” characteristics of the info-communicational phenomenon. It is, moreover, in relation to this human and social phenomenon that the IS object (defined above) is (re)built.