he information society is the objectiv reality. We cannot ignor this fact. The using of IS/ IT, the commucation equipment and new type of thinking of the global investors has critical influence for our daily life. We have to change our style of thinking. The change is now truly global. Never has this statement been more true it is today. The global market is  the real battle field and business is about war.

The information society call for important change of the thinking of the owners, developers, managers and workers, too. The information society call for important change of the thinking of the owners, developers, managers and workers, too.

Information is resource with specific attributes because it is renewable source. It is the resource what is not consumed. The key carrier of the changes in the information society is information. The carrier of information are: numbers data, text, sound, picture etc. Information source is databases and other sources of data. Data have no cost for managers, owners etc. whithout their interpretation of information.

Information and the knowledge in the information society are the source of the power and the fortune. Who is owner of the information sources, who is able to transfer information into knowledge is in the advantage, he has power.

Manager and The Fundamental Changes

The top management – top managers should focus strategically on “doing the right things”. They are response:

1^st  – to establish the destination that the company should be aiming for.

2^nd – to chart and then steer the corporate ship along a clearly defined way how reach a destination, way which:

      leads to the desired destination,

      is efficient in terms of scarce resources such as time, labour, customer comfort,

      does not expose strategy.

The main role of the top management should be to set the direction that the company should take, fully taking into account the oportunities and threats of the various external environments aas well as the strenghts and weakness of the company and its suppliers and distributors.

Due to fundamental changes connected with the transition to information society, some principles of managerial thinking and acting start not only to lose their importance  and competence but also to undermine the backing of professional qualifications of their holders.  When applying the procedures that are becoming more and more out of date, the conservative managers are step by step less successful, especially when compared to those who carry out a timely reassessment of any non-operational procedures and take advantage of the new and progressive pieces of knowledge.

That is why there is a rising demand for the management theory as well as practice to be able to “break with the past”. The changes in the paradigms of managerial thinking and acting in the 80s and mainly nowadays in the third wave of the 90s lead to a finding that managers are also required to be innovative as for their approach to information and ability to process it.

For competent entrepreneurs, managers and other professionals with economic education, the period of long-term boom has started recently. An important criterion of their competence appears to be individual ability to work with information on a large scale, based on the ability to learn and correctly interpret the information available. At present, managerial work is subject to considerable changes leading towards:

·   Complexity of problems needed to be solved. This issue deals with the growing system complexity of task solving with regard to greater number of items as well as the number and type of their mutual links.   

·   Dynamism and internal contradiction which influence the applicability of adopted resolutions and their appropriate implementation. This issue deals with considerably discontinuous changes that can not enable application of extrapolation methods and make other classic prognostic methods difficult to apply. 

·   Rate of uncertainty and risks of entrepreneurial activities, mainly with regard to competitors’ activities and the uncertainty of innovation policy.

The main principles of the management of thee changes are:

1^st There is the need to harmonise change measures and processes with normal activies and management of the company.The problem is particulary acute and delicate in the company undergoing major changes.

2^nd Management has to determine the specific change measures requiring its leadership. Management decide on the degree and form of its directinvolvement in such measures. The difficulty of the measures and their importance to the companies future is the main criterior.

3^rd Various change processes within the company needs to be harmonised with each other. While this may be easy in a small and simple company it may be quite difficult in a large and complex one. Often one department develops proposals and other departments will have to be convinced that they should give up their current systém and accept the best proposal developedby another unit. Top management has to intervene with fact.

4^th Managing change includes dealing with its various aspects f.e. financial, technological, procedural, political etc. This is the basic and most difficult management responsibility ralated to companies change. The change process involves experts who often try to impose their limited view of complex and multidisciplinary problem.

5^th Managing change involves decision on the use of various approches and intervention techniques that help to make a good start, proceed systematically, gain support andget the change implemented.

Information Management

Purposefully oriented data, information and knowledge are a key source of and condition for successful problem solving. Moreover, we have to presuppose that the interval of applicability or stability of certain solutions is becoming shorter and therefore all the solutions made can only be regarded as temporary.

In today’s turbulent and chaotic environment, the lack of relevant information and knowledge available at the right time and in the right place or incapability of taking advantage of it can be “fatal” for entrepreneurs as well as managers. Thus, the ability to acquire adequate working methods when processing data, information and knowledge dealing with current problems, forms an inevitable part of managers’ professional competence and qualifications.    

Securing of efficient managerial activities follows from continuously proceeding processes of timely identification of relevant information, its organised collection and transfer, purposeful processing and creative utilisation. In fact, all the information gathered should serve as a source for securing of the required analysis, decision-making and implementation processes of managerial work. In this respect, some well-approved methods can be provided by information management.

The term ‘information management’ is relatively new. We can determined three stages of the information management:

1^st stage

The term ‘information management’ was first used as early as in 1966, by R. S. Taylor and his colleagues. It corresponded to their aim at applying the so called engineering efficiency in their technical solutions. The notion of information management is here oriented towards economical solutions of mainly ‘hard, structured’ technical tasks, i.e. special army projects, work efficiency when processing technical information. At the beginning of the 70s, the term of information management was also used in connection with application of computing machinery for mass data processing carried out for the purpose of evidence.  

2^nd stage

At the end of the 70s and especially during the 80s, the ‘information management’ term became commonly used mainly among the experts in informatics. They emphasised the necessity of paying attention to processes of efficient and economical implementation of projects dealing with creation and functioning of information systems (IS) based on the means of modern information technology (IS/IT). Later definitions of the term already indicated the tendency to regard information management first and foremost as management taking advantage of the means of information technologies (IT).

For example Michael J. Earl, explains information management as ‘management for application of information technology’, which first of all ‘requires mutually harmonised methods of planning, checking procedures and organisational securing’. Naturally, the economical aspect of the processes of creation and utilisation of IS/IT was not studied then. A typical feature of the time was that the prospective users of the IS/IT applications hardly ever took part in the project works.

 The implementation teams, to a great extent, used IS/IT in a rather passive way, only to work on assignments or partial modifications of assignments based on prior non-automated processing. Few people worried about how to take into consideration such aspects of information processes or systems that could not be formatted. In the second stage, the notion of information management put focus on its application in the technologically oriented information science.

Questions such as why and to what extent the automated information processes help to improve the quality and consequently secure the fulfilment of organisation’s objectives, i.e. the main purpose of managerial activities, were raised. Consequently, they led to creation of positions of the so called information managers and chief information officers, etc., who became responsible for conceptual and economical development of IS/IT applications in an company.               

Information management was perceived as a system of management-based recommendations for the processes of IT/IS applications. Its main supporters were IS/IT designers.

The goal was economy of processing, which can also be explained by means of an illustrative expression, common among managers – efficiency, or to use a popular slogan by P. F. Drucker, ‘doing things right’.

3^rd stage

At the beginning of the 90s, the notion of information management becomes more and more common in literature on management published in industrially developed countries. There is always a greater focus on making use of the means of computing machinery and information technologies in order  to secure the quality of managerial work, i.e. efficient fulfilment of  organisation’s mission  and goals.

The idea that information systems based on information technology IS/IT are an inevitable part of the tools of managerial work becomes more and more recognised in practice.

Yet, as a result of the influence of new possibilities provided by IS/IT, the goals of managerial work can be different from the original goals of the past. It is about finding a new sense, ‘rethinking’ and ‘redefinition’ of the goals. Some managers see the priority in managerial expedience, which tends to be expressed by means of a term ‘effectiveness’, i.e. ‘doing the right things’. Only then managers start setting the next logical objective – that the purpose should be secured in an economically effective way (‘doing the things right’).

Top management with its badly structured decision processes is not simply a science, but real art of working with information. For managers, the IS/IT applications are not perceived as the final goal themselves. They are to serve as an efficient tool helping to enable, facilitate, rationalise, but first and foremost improve their acting. Information management is a interdisciplinary system of knowledge, methods and recommendations concerning systemic approach and informatics which help to implement information processes of managerial thinking and acting in order to achieve the objective of an company (a firm, an enterprise, a factory, a plant, a division, a functional sphere, a working team, etc). Information management is understood as an approach penetrating the whole process of enterprising and the whole company. 

Conclusions

Purposefully oriented data, information and knowledge are a key source of and condition for successful task solving. Moreover, we have to presuppose that the interval of applicability or stability of certain solutions is becoming shorter and therefore all the solutions made can only be regarded as temporary.

 In today’s turbulent and chaotic environment, the lack of relevant information and knowledge available at the right time and in the right place or incapability of taking advantage of it can be ‘fatal’ for entrepreneurs as well as managers. Thus, the ability to acquire adequate working methods when processing data, information and knowledge dealing with current problems, forms an inevitable part of managers’ professional competence and qualifications.    

Securing of efficient managerial activities follows from continuously proceeding processes of timely identification of relevant information, its organised collection and transfer, purposeful processing and creative utilisation. In fact, all the information gathered should serve as a source for securing of the required analysis, decision-making and implementation processes of managerial work. In this respect, some well-approved methods can be provided by information management. 

First published by Journal of Administrative Sciences (Yonetim Bilimleri Dergisi), Vol. 3, No. 1, 2005, pp. 15-20. Re-published by USAK Journal of Turkish Weekly (JTW) with repmission of Canakkale Onsekiz MArt University YBD editors. 2007

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