Session 7 - What is IT?

This week I began to think seriously about the impact of the structure of our thinking on the problems that we face within the field of information management. There's a book that I skim past each time I go to the library. It's on the outskirts of the technology section, on a shelf that blends into books on sociology and maybe cookware. But the book deals with the effect of biology on thought, essentially arguing that thoughts are theoretically unbounded, but are in the real world bound by biological restrictions. We are therefore we think -- and what we are is a flesh-and-blood creature subject to the laws of gravity. We cannot create something from nothing. We eat and sleep and breathe. It is these elements of our existence that shape our thoughts.

This week, I continued research on our great group project and the question of backlogs. I stumbled upon research from the Industrial Engineering field, and found that IE has a different structure for considering information and therefore a different system of information management. IE considers information to be an asset similar to capital and staff. Have you ever heard of a staff backlog or a private enterprise capital backlog? Backlogs seem very normal and unavoidable when you discuss information management as a department like human resources, accounting or sales. Those offices all have backlogs of paperwork to fill out or applications to review. They all have long to-do lists to occupy their time.

However, it is not required that information technology management be structured along the same lines as the accounting department or human resources. Information can be considered as a resource like capital and dealt with according to basic principles of resource management. Look Ma, no backlog! Of course, there are a host of other issues that must still be addressed as companies develop IT strategy, but the underlying point remains sound. Just think, every department could use an extra $100,000 dollars, but no manager feels free to bombard the company execs with demands for more capital. The execs would expect a detailed accounting of how the money would be used, and the benefits it would bring to the company. "Well the other guys got money last year" would not be a good enough excuse to dole out significant amounts of capital. "Studies show that money is useful" would not suffice as a rationale for handouts.

In short, I always thought of information technology management as part of the IT field, but information is everywhere, and the answers to many business IT management questions can be found outside the IT field. The field of industrial engineering brings a much more mathematically-based edge to the study of IT. Their paper actually contained an equation with a sigma and lots of squiggly subscripts!

Similarly, when I continued researching ways for minimizing the burden on IT staff in terms of application backlog and maintenance load, I found that the field of library science has great suggestions for participatory IT management. Research in teh library science field is in-depth and detailed, because of their special collections management. Libraries often receive monetary donations in conjunction with donations of special collections. The donors want to see these collections maintained and utilized, and they can cut off their funds when disappointed. Libraries have a vested interest in reducing the backlog of archiving, maintaining and cataloguing their special collections. In fact, their responsibilities are very similar to those of IT staff who are responsible for developing and maintaining applications. Like IT departments, libraries have limited employees, and they are unlikely to have guardian angels who pour funds into their projects to help resolve problems of poor management. In short, libraries face a problem of livelihood, and they have developed very creative solutions to maintain their collections and their cash flow.

The fields are very different, but there is much to be gained by examining them.