INFORMATION MANAGEMENT

Possible Approaches To The Problem Of Information Management



Possible Approaches To The Problem Of Information Management

Introduction

Improving information management ways is a focal point for many organisations, across both the private and public sectors. This is being driven by various possible approaches, together with a need to perk up the competence of business processes, the requirements of agreement regulations and the desire to bring new services. This paper will be reporting a project in which the implementation of an information management system was tried for the library of a large bank. The library is responsible for getting information for all employees of the bank. For this purpose, they maintain a collection of books of interest for finance, but also yearly reports of many companies and reports from agencies

Because the amount of information and number of information sources have increased dramatically in recent years, it becomes increasingly difficult for individual professionals to filter out the right information. The advent of Internet availability within companies discloses a vast amount of information directly to professionals. While the information filtering was first done by special departments in the hierarchical structure of a company, nowadays the individual stands the difficult task to perform the filtering himself.

Many attempts have been made to provide Internet and Intranet users with tools that aid them in finding valuable information in the many gigabytes of data they have access to. Most of these attempts have resulted in content-based search engines like Alta Vista, Excite, and Infoseek.

However, these tools are geared towards finding as much information that is related to the keyword for which a search is performed as possible. This means that a search on, e.g., the keyword "Java” on the WWW leads to almost 10 million answers. A way to filter these answers is by using user profiles. A user profile is usually nothing more than a set of keywords in which the user is interested. These keywords are ""added” to any search of the user to filter out only those items that are of interest for the user. The user profiles can be static or dynamic. In the first case, they are defined once and can only be changed by an explicit update from the user. The dynamicuser profiles use some type of learning algorithm to update the profile, either through explicit feedback of the user or through observing the behavior of the user (see Billsus & Pazzani, 1998 ; Duda & Hart, 1973 ; Lang, 1995) for some examples of algorithms that learn user profiles.) Most of these filtering mechanisms only work when all the information comes from the same source and is compatible according to some metric, like texts from the WWW. Within companies, this almost never is the case. Usually other sources such as company databases, reports, and special services like Gartner, Forrester, and NewsEdge are also used. Because the items within these sources are usually not directly accessible for the search and profile programs, the information that is taken from these sources cannot be ...