Introduction

This chapter discusses information management at the workplace It includes the personal information management of individual workers and the organizational approach to internal information resources, as well as environmental scanning (i.e. the collection of information from the external environment). The concept of information management and related concepts are explained and the differences between them identified. We present core definitions and theories and explore the constituent parts of information management as an organizational activity. In each case, we try to demonstrate the relevance of these activities to workplace information. Finally, we will draw some conclusions and pro - pose a short bibliography for researchers.

Information management and the workplace

Information management can be viewed from different perspectives: those of information specialists, information system developers, business man - agers, human resource managers and employees. Each of these will have a slightly different view and use different terms for the same phenomena, or name the same things differently. Regardless of this, there is a common ground for information management in the workplace, be it a corporate, public or non-governmental organization. From the point of view of infor - mation in the workplace, we can identify two directions of research, one for ‘corporate information management’, and one for ‘personal infor mation management’.

Related to the concept of information management is a number of other concepts, which strive to identify what is managed in more precise or narrower terms. Records management, information resource management, information systems management, document and data management or similar concepts belong to this category. Others focus on the tools used in information management, such as information life cycle, information audit, environmental scanning, taxonomies, discovery systems or intranet. We are not going to give an exhaustive overview of these, but will outline the relevance of some of them to workplace information and we will illustrate some of these different concepts by the examples of Ann, Johan and Liila.

Ann, our cardiologist, will care most about the records of her patients. Following standard rules and using professional terminology, she will meticulously record her observations, such as pulse or temperature, and stories her patients tell, in the medical record. This record will include previous data about her patient recorded by other doctors: therapists, surgeons, ophthalmologists, etc.