ABSTRACT
What knowledge and information management should do for information products Here we are concerned with the domains of KM and IM, the managers with responsibility for them, and the resources they manage – all in relation to the organization’s information products. It does not appear to have occurred to many writers that such a relationship can or should exist. As in other respects, R S Taylor (1982) is an honourable and far-sighted exception, with his concept of organizational ‘information environments’, made up of variables which a≠ect the movement of information messages into, within and out of organizations, and which determine the criteria by which their value will be judged in the organizational context. Some of the variables have to do with the organization’s information flow patterns and channels, the context in which it operates, and what it seeks to do; others are concerned with the people in the organization and their ‘responsibilities, tasks, and problems as reflected in information terms’; and others again with its systems and technologies for generating, storing, organizing and delivering messages. Taylor defines information products – books, monthly accounting reports, or online displays, for example – as tangible outputs of information systems, on the same continuum as information services.
