Information products and presentation in organisations: Accident or design?

Organisations of all kinds depend critically on their information products in both their relationships with their outside worlds, and their internal communications, and they spend much time and money on creating them. The way in which they manage this aspect of their business has, however, been little studied as an entity; it has featured on the margins of research focused in other directions, such as organisational communication and typographic design, and has rarely been looked at in the context of information science, information management and organisational behaviour. The present research seeks to focus on it in that context. Interim findings from case studies undertaken in a range of commercial and public bodies suggest, among other things, that organisations do not see the creation of information products as a single process and do not manage it as they would the manufacture of other products; that there are high costs associated with low-quality and badly managed information products, though they are seldom quantified or taken into account; that little attention is paid to establishing a value for information products; that organisations often fail to relate their information products to their key objectives; and that they usually neglect to provide for appropriate skills in managing and executing their information products.