Information resource management—The information centre for local government: Position paper

Abstract

THIS topic requires careful definition in order to provide a basis for orderly discussion. The information centre as one of the functions of an organization’s information resource management effort may be difficult to describe in a manner that would be acceptable to all. The information centre is a relatively new concept and, probably, means different things to different information resource managers. It might be well to discuss first the term information resource management. This term of itself is comparatively new. People involved with computers since the history of that word began were originally just that-computers themselves or operator/users of computing machinery when compute implied a mathematical operation. It was eventually discovered that computing equipment, in addition to performing mathematical tasks, could sort, merge, store, retrieve and manipulate data as well as numbers. The terminology swung then to “data processing”. A few of us even went through an even earlier phase-“electronic accountancy”. The data processing organization received data in raw form from users, processed it, and returned it to the user in processed form-more commonly as printouts of various types. More recently we arrived at the “management information” state of the evolution. Many user departments of an organization enter data that originates or changes in their area. This data is merged with data from other areas of the organization and, by means of some form of database management capability, becomes a viable data bank about the total organization and is readily available as needed by management and others. Many data processing departments changed their names to “management information departments” or just “information systems departments”. The “management information system” was widely and highly touted as something that would rapidly approach that ultimate management tool--the total management information system. A chief executive officer would only need to ask the computer in simple, plain language any conceivable question about the organization and the big box would promptly spit out the answer. This great dream, of course, was not be be; at least not for quite some time yet. Following this disenchantment, we lumbered on trying to just provide more and better information a bit faster. Most recently additional forms of information were being incorporated into systems and access was being provided to vast outside data banks where large amounts of useful outside information could be obtained, such as texts of laws, national demographic data from Census reports, stocks and bond info~ation, airline and train scehdules, etc. Images and drawings and the like could be stored and retrieved in volume with ease. We had to change our name again. The current fad is “information resource management”. In our struggle to keep up with the demands of users for ever increasing amounts of automation, more, larger and better information systems, we found that the tools of our trade, as supplied by the various vendors of hardware and software, were very dynamic tools requiring constant learning and relearning of existing and newer system development technologies. These tools, the best that were available to us, we began to find, were not adequate to meet the more rapidly rising demands of our users. These tools (languages as well as system and application design techniques) are cumbersome, difficult and woefully inefficient. The result was that many organizations found they had a backlog of user-wanted and user-needed applications. Vendors and hardware and software designs were quick to point this out (it didn’t need pointing