In the current turbulent business environment, quality information is required to ensure that companies achieve competitive advantage by using such information to make decisions more rapidly than their rivals. Scorecard models are employed increasingly to translate the mission and strategy of a company into a comprehensive set of performance measures, providing the framework for a strategic management system.
Presented here are the results of a British Library Research and Innovation Centre funded project which examined the role of information in the strategic management of UK retail banks. All the banks surveyed used scorecard models of some description, principally to ease blockages in information flow. Information gathering and analysis activities were perceived as necessary elements of the work of all managers, especially when viewed in conjunction with the trend towards bottom-up strategy formulation in companies.
In the contemporary competitive economic climate, companies must harness information effectively to ensure optimum performance in the market. A 1996 research project (Owens, et al., 1996) which studied information systems and services in twelve high performing companies, concluded:
Information is seen as a valuable asset by the majority of the companies surveyed.
and
The creation of an information ethos is seen as an important step towards ensuring continued success by the majority of the companies surveyed.
Similarly, as the Library and Information Commission (1998) noted, information is an international commodity and knowledge underpins all successful economic activity. Thus, it is imperative that such a valuable resource is harnessed effectively by the business world, particularly in the current turbulent and extremely competitive environment, which Tyson (1998) views as indicative of a move from an information age to an intelligence age. In this new age, companies need to build both a knowledge base of their competitive environment, and a perpetual strategy process to ensure it is updated continually. Hence, the information advantage for companies no longer lies in simply storing and retrieving information, but in matching information to specific strategic processes. Therefore, companies are increasingly measuring the value of their information assets on the basis of their ability to utilise such assets to react to market demands more effectively than their competitors (Frappaolo, 1998).