Introduction

Information is a precursor to effective decision making; therefore information is one of the single most important aspects of social welfare practice. Indeed, the use of information in social welfare is so ubiquitous that practitioners give the concept of information per se little attention.

This chapter:

• • demonstrates that information is a product in its own right and has independent value to service users and staff, and then explores the issues flowing from this;

• • explores the concept of knowledge management and links it to the concepts of life-long learning and the learning organisation;

• • examines some basic models of information management: its gathering, management, storage and retrieval, and transmission;

• • identifies some common anxieties in relation to ICT in these processes; and

• • describes three information models.

The importance of information

Laming (1998, para 3.4, p 20) wrote in relation to social services: “Good information is essential to help users and the public in general find out about what is available and so make informed and rational choices”. The provision of information for service users is vital in the fields of welfare rights (for example, Walker, 2003), employment services (Ducatel et al, 2000b), and health – as was seen in the example of NHS Direct – and good information is part of good healthcare.

Information has value independently of the context from which it springs – as educationalists, librarians, marketers and the media well know. A helpful distinction here is that between information content and information carrier. Content can be defined as the information per se, while the carrier is the mechanism by which the information is stored and conveyed. In technical terminology, the term ‘channel’ is used for ‘carrier’. Thus, the same content can go via the different channels of book, radio, newspaper, and so on.

If it is accepted that information and knowledge have independent value, there is no reason why this understanding should not be applied to social welfare. Indeed, certain areas of social welfare devote considerable resources to using this insight. Public health promotion campaigns are perhaps the most visible, but recent campaigns highlighting new benefits (for example, the Working Families Tax Credit) (Sun, 2003) have also adopted an approach around the transmission of information.