Advanced Topics in Information Resources Management

Citation

Mason, D. (2003), "Advanced Topics in Information Resources Management", Online Information Review, Vol. 27 No. 4, pp. 291-292. https://doi.org/10.1108/14684520310489122

This book is intended to be the first in a series called Advanced Topics in Information Resources Management (IRM). It consists of 20 academic articles on issues associated with IRM, some written by widely known professors, others by relatively junior staff. Four of the articles have already appeared in Information Resources Journal and the others are original and unpublished. The editor provides a brief introduction to each article in the preface, but does not survey the field nor provide a definition of its scope. The articles themselves cover an eclectic mixture of themes: three are on Knowledge Management, three on IT investment, three on technology adoption and acceptance; two each on data quality and Internet usage; one each on BPR, EDI, IT issues, IS staff, uses of IT, and competitive advantage. The remaining paper stretches the boundaries of IRM somewhat, since it is about factors predicting the publishing productivity of academics. The articles are generally well written, of journal quality, mostly highly theoretical model building and statistical testing of those models. Most of the contributors are from US universities, but there are also articles based on experience in Norway, the UK, Taiwan and the EU.

It is probably safe to say that none of these articles is going to revolutionise thinking in the field of IRM. The subjects of investigation are all rooted in fairly standard IS and IT topics, although there is the academic publishing article for variety, and one paper looks at an esoteric naval application of knowledge management. The theoretical approach used in most of the articles is unlikely to appeal to managers in the IT industry. There are only two case studies and a high level of statistical knowledge is needed to follow most of the research presented. For academics there are some interesting uses of unusual methodologies, the Norwegian IT issues study using Qmethodology, for example, and the Internet experiments of Ho, but rather too many of them are me‐too examples of factor analysis applied to standard survey design. It is also fair to say that there are a few articles in which the significance of the survey results is at best questionable, with over‐generous interpretations of the data and not enough detail given for the reader to check how the numbers presented were derived.

Overall this collection does not fairly reflect the importance and relevance of IRM to industry. Most of the research findings will be difficult to translate into improvements in practice or to show organisations how to benefit from their information resources.