Investigating the influence of information management practices on IS governance

Abstract

Information technology especially through Internet applications provides tremendous possibilities to knowledge workers, in any domain, to get access to vast amounts of data. This is a development with great benefits but also some challenging implications. In other words, as the information available increases, the knowledge workers’ needs to make sense of information, i.e. for, prioritizing, organizing, and interpreting information intensify. Yet, the information management practices, which are based on the user’s characteristics, have not been studied extensively. In this paper we suggest the examination and explication of the information management practices used by knowledge workers today in order to provide useful insights to managers involved in IS governance in the organisation. We also introduce specific theories which can be used as a lens to analyse the knowledge workers’ practices and offer useful theoretical insights into the domain. We contend that such research could provide a set of guidelines that can be adopted by organisations in order to offer their employees a structured way to deal with information management which is supported by the information technologies and systems available. We argue that our results could be useful to knowledge workers looking to exploit available information while overcoming information overload.