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Information Management

As a professional term, Information Management is associated with Project Management and the management of information as a business process. Practitioners often complete studies in Management Information Systems.

According to the Association for Project Management,

Information management is the collection, storage, curation, dissemination, archiving and destruction of documents, images, drawings and others sources of information. https://www.apm.org.uk/resources/what-is-project-management/what-is-information-management/

Management in this context means the organization of and control over the structure, processing, and delivery of information.

Although sharing some similarities, the practice of Information Management focuses primarily on oversight, distribution, and control, whereas Knowledge Management is more concerned with the effective strategic application of knowledge to accomplish organizational objectives (knowledge being defined as the information, data, and expertise accumulated within an organization).

Information management developed during the seventies and eighties and is usually understood as a subset of the larger information technology and information science world. Information management is a body of thought and cases that focus on how information itself is managed, independent of the technologies that house and manipulate it. It deals with information issues in terms of valuation, operational techniques, governance, and incentive schemes. “Information,” in this context, generally means documents, data, and structured messages.
[KMHistory, p.1005]

Information technology focuses, for instance, on how many bits an electronic pipeline can carry; information management and knowledge management focus more on the quality of the content and how much it benefits the recipient and the organization for which he or she works. Information management discovered that not all information is created equal, that different types of information have different values and need to be handled differently. This insight—which is more true of knowledge—remains at the heart of knowledge management today.
[KMHistory, p.1005]

For our purposes, Information Management is an umbrella term covering the creation, description, and application of information, in the form of content, data, and metadata, regardless of organizational environment or context.

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