Introduction

Abstract

“Information management” is an expression that needs, for the present purpose, to be carefully defined. A lay audience with no special interest in the merits of good information management would probably see the words, think nothing much about them and move their thoughts on to something of more obvious interest. A working professional seeing the words—a business manager , a travel agent and a doctor—might pause and wonder for a moment whether an understanding of information management (whatever that is) would be helpful; they certainly would agree that their work is intimately concerned with acquiring, processing and using information. An information technology (IT) specialist seeing the words “information management” would probably think of data acquisition and storage, database management challenges and (in some cases) the “users” who give him such a difficult time in defining, developing and delivering information systems that actually work well for those users.