ABSTRACT
The story of this book goes back many years – to a consultancy assignment in an organization which wanted to set up an information service and appoint a professional manager to run it. My job was to analyse their information needs, define what the new service should do to meet them, and advise on the appointment of the manager. When the main work was done and the manager had taken up the post, a few days of consultancy time remained for us to do some joint planning. Reckoning that, although the organization had taken a commendable initiative about information, it was entering new territory of which it knew comparatively little, we decided to use the time in working out what we called an organizational information policy and getting top management to sign up to it. We both knew from experience that organizations are liable to take initiatives and then, as time goes by and other concerns become important, or new fashions take their fancy, fail to go on supporting them. We wanted to protect this one from such a fate, and to ensure that the service and its manager received continuing understanding and support from above, and guaranteed resources to develop the work that had been agreed on.
