Department level information resource management: A theoretical argument for a decentralized approach
✍ Scribed by Beath, Cynthia Mathis ;Straub, Detmar W.
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1991
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 791 KB
- Volume
- 42
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0002-8231
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
This article asks, "Why would the responsibility for information integration be located in an academic department instead of the centralized information utilities?" It proposes that the costs of locating information resource management tasks in academic departments may be overshadowed by the benefits of reducing agency costs.
Department level information resource management (IRM)-the location of information technology or information professionals in academic departments instead of the centralized information utilities-is a rapidly growing phenomenon in organizations today. The resulting dispersion of responsibility for the management of information is viewed by many as dangerous and inefficient. They predict that the functional departments will have to "learn about back-up and security the hard way," and that information professionals will be called upon to supply the inevitably missing skills and expertise. However, department level users of information technologies claim that moving information closer to the work it supports results in "improved quality, " "better control," and "lower costs" (Business Week, 1987). The purpose of this article is to explore this dispute and to propose a framework in which it can be understood.
We begin our examination of departmental level IRM by defining what we mean by information resources and IRM. Next, we propose a framework for understanding different allocations of responsibility for information resource management within and outside a firm. The framework describes four conceptual levels at which information resource management tasks might be carried out: individual (or task), department, institution, and market. Our discussion proposes that the al-