Informing Systems in Business Environments: A Purpose-Focused View

Introduction "The purpose of Informing Science is to encourage the sharing of knowledge and collaboration among the wide variety of fields that use information technology to inform clients" (INSITE 2004). Informing systems should be cost effective. In mission critical applications, their systematic examination should be conducted from either the viewpoint of information users--the clients or information disseminators, whichever matters more. The examination should be performed for all the identified factors that are of operationally and potentially significant impact. Current MIS textbooks are deficient with regard to the role of end users and even more so about the information disseminators. The texts are overly technology laden, with oversimplified coverage of the fundamentals on data, information, and particularly the role of informing in business. A summary of research published by Huang et al., (1999 p. 4) supports this statement in the following manner: "Many best-practice reports witness that information technology alone is not the driver for knowledge management in companies today. Information and knowledge experienced by members of an organization should be the focus, not the system or technology per se.... Technology and systems are facilitators." This paper points out the lack of adequate exposure of business students to examining and analyzing informing systems that they certainly will face in their professional career. This analysis is not a technical task for IT personnel; it is a task mainly for information disseminators and informing clients. To address this gap a technology-independent rational inquiry into informing systems is presented. This inquiry focuses mainly on informing in business environments, where in more or less free-market conditions, business organizations operate. Depending on the primary concerns of the situation, informing systems need to be examined from either the viewpoint of information disseminators or information users. In Informing Science, the latter are referred to as informing clients. The clients' viewpoint is subject to extensive empirical studies within informing science and partially within the MIT Information Quality Program, where the principles of Total Quality Management (TQM) are broadly used (see the AIMQ methodology (Lee et al., 2002). This approach focuses on information products, services, users' preferences, and requirement specifications. On the other hand, the information disseminators' viewpoint is less emphasized or even ignored. This inquiry is based on an operations research approach--the modified purpose-focused framework for assessing information quality as presented at the 9th International Conference on Information Quality at MIT (Gackowski, 2004a). The paper consists of two major parts: (1) A short examination of the most popular MIS textbooks and the pertinent research in this domain, and (2) An outline of problems one encounters during examination of informing systems. It offers also a rationale for two modifications of the Informing Science Framework defined by Cohen (1999). Literature Review What do the most popular textbooks say? No author mentions the art and science of informing. The concept of informing systems is not discussed. Most authors mention some quality attributes of data/information in an eclectic manner. The best our MIS students can find are piecemeal references to some quality attributes of data/information. Usually they are discussed in a sequence with no underlying logical structure. O'Brien (2003, 2004 p. 15-16), the author of the two most popular textbooks on MIS as judged by the number of published editions, defines "Information as data placed in a meaningful and useful context" (glossary), and "Information quality as the degree to which information has content, form, and time characteristics that give it value to specific end users." He suggests an examination of 15 attributes of quality of information within a three-dimensional framework: (1) time, (2) content, and (3) form, with short comments, but with no reference to the informing processes or systems. …