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Basic Principles of Information Management

Posted by Erik M. Hartman in Discussions, Presentations

May 6th 2009, Bob Boiko and Erik M. Hartman presented the ‘Basic Principles of Information Management’ at the J. Boye 09 Philadelphia event. These principles are the essence of The Information Management Association Framework.

Information Management (IM) is of course a big discipline. It encompasses a large variety of strategies, methodologies, technologies, and systems. However, across all organizational contexts and uses of IM, we think some principles always apply. We call these the ‘Basic Principles of Information Management’.

#1 Information is Communication

Information Management is there to help people ‘talk’ to each other.

#2 Information has Value

Information Management focuses on the exchange of value in communication.

#3 Information has Audiences

Information Management helps building knowledge about the needs of your audiences.

#4 Information has a Lifecycle

Information Management facilitates the lifecycle of your information, from creation to destruction.

#5 Information has Structure

Information Management helps delivering only those pieces of information that are relevant to your audiences.

We had great comments from the audience, with thought leaders like Lisa Welchman, Martin White, Lou Rosenfeld, Graham Oakes, Phil Kemelor, Seth Gottlieb and various practitioners. Every principle lead to very interesting discussions in which both thought leaders and practitioners gave great comments. This confirmed that we were right about setting up the TIMAF initiative.

Due to the lively discussions we took more time than the 45 minutes J. Boye had given us. Some attendees confessed: “If it was up to me, we could have gone on for the whole day”. The evaluation scores were great too.

Afterwards the audience asked us what they should do before we meet again at the next J. Boye event. Of course we all invited them to send in Best Practices and ‘sneeze’ the initiative to other people. Bob asked all of us to think about what we discussed. He claimed that if we kept on thinking about it, than that’s proof we had a good idea.

Some other attendees asked if we were going to use a Wiki to share our thoughts. These were comments we hoped to get. So now it’s up to us to facilitate the discussion. So we will setup a TIMAF LinkedIn Group and of course a Wiki. More news about these in short time.

We hope that you all can give us feedback on the principles. Do you think we should add one? Or can even skip one more? Because we started with 10, than we had 12, then 11 and after Bob and I having a good discussion we ended up with 5 eally information management inherent principles. At least, we think so.

So please download the TIMAF – Information Basic Principles (.pdf) and join the discussion.

NOTE: this presentation was updated July 15th, 2010.