The generic information business model

Today, businesses have to cope with rapid environmental changes, which are mainly driven by technological innovation. In order to gain a sustainable advantage, they need to effectively manage their intellectual capital, leveraging the data they possess to information that can be acted upon to facilitate knowledge creation. As it was soon established, effective organisational information management is hindered by the lack of structure that pertains information use. The information audit is a management technique that provides the necessary structure by identifying the way in which employees use information in order to perform their tasks. However, even though the technique succeeds in capturing the entities that affect organisational information use, it is accepted that it fails to effectively map the complex many-to-many relationships existing between those entities and to effectively guide the auditors during synthesis between the audit stages. The present paper introduces the generic information business model that overcomes these problems, providing a complete and clear picture of organisational information use. © 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.