Information Proficiency: Your Key to the Information Age (Industrial Engineering) [Hardcover]

Thomas J. Buckholtz (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 25, 1995 | ISBN-10: 0471286753 | ISBN-13: 978-0471286752 | Edition: 1

This practical guide to using information in today's business world offers advice on how to: manage and use information sources effectively; integrate information technology personnel into the strategic future of the company; analyze and increase the usefulness, range and reliability of data; design effective, flexible information and communication systems; and make the best choices when selecting new products or services.

Editorial Reviews

From the Author

Information Proficiency: Your Key to Information Age (John Wiley & Sons, plus Chinese and Korean editions) provides a roadmap for the Information Age and features techniques for, and inspirational successes at, enhancing decision-making, leadership, processes, teamwork, learning, and the contributions of information systems and technologists. The title topic captures the essence of the Information Age for business and government.

Reviewers state that “Information Proficiency has the potential to launch the next management revolution” and “With the publication of Tom Buckholtz’s book, we have moved into a New Information Age.”

From the Inside Flap

Information Proficiency Your Key to the Information Age Thomas J. Buckholtz The Information Age has generated an explosion of information and technology. Currently, executives and empowered employees create a wealth of good ideas. But, how can you sharpen your focus and seize the best opportunities? In Information Proficiency: Your Key to the Information Age, author Thomas Buckholtz shows you how to thrive in these challenging times and put your good ideas to work using information proficiency: the effective use of information to define and achieve goals. Dubbed "the information wizard" by InfoWorld, Tom Buckholtz has led the deployment of information resources and systems for the world’s biggest buyer of information technology, the U.S. Government. In this engaging book, he shares the groundbreaking concepts and techniques he developed while serving as the Commissioner of the Information Resources Management Service, U.S. General Services Administration, where he directed the implementation of computing, telecommunications, and records management throughout the Executive Branch. Buckholtz shows you how to avoid the common trap of focusing too much on technology. Instead, he concentrates on the crucial products of all organizations-decisions and the implementation of those decisions. "Information proficiency provides the power to accomplish your objectives. The components of this power are quality decision making and incisive implementation." In Information Proficiency, you’ll learn how to succeed in the Information Age by first focusing on your goals and then maximizing your proficiency when working with people and fostering teamwork, understanding and using information, and benefitting from information technology. This book provides a wealth of tools to put you over the top: the Information Proficiency Rating Scale; Peer Paradigm for Organizations, Information, and Accomplishments; and All A’s Program. Using the guidelines and techniques in this invaluable book, you’ll not only enhance the overall proficiency of your organization, but you’ll also increase the value of its information technology functions. Information Proficiency offers sage advice on how to:

• Integrate technologists into the strategic future of the organization
• Help employees build bright futures for themselves and the organization
• Manage and use information resources effectively
• Analyze and increase the usefulness, range, and integrity of data
• Design systems that are truly capable and flexible
• Make optimal choices and deals when selecting new products or services

Information Proficiency gives executives, middle managers, empowered employees, information resources and systems professionals, technologists, educators, and students the techniques they need to survive and thrive in this challenging era.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 340 pages
• Publisher: Wiley; 1 edition (April 25, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0471286753
• ISBN-13: 978-0471286752
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,520,231 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Quite Extraordinary--Handbook for Creating Wealth Though Information, November 26, 2005

By 

Robert D. Steele (Oakton, VA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Information Proficiency: Your Key to the Information Age (Industrial Engineering) (Hardcover)

The publisher has done a very poor job of communicating the value and depth of this book. It is superb. Easy to read, clear-cut concepts, well-defined chapter order, and above all, solid gold thinking.

As someone who specializes in fostering effective public intelligence and reducing wasteful ineffective secret intelligence, I could not help but marvel at how useful this book is in evaluating two completely opposite approaches to decision-support: Google, and the U.S. Intelligence Community.

The author's chapters run logically from developing a framework to setting goals to improving personal information proficiency and then organizational learning, and thence to managing information as a resource to help make better decisions that yield profit, cut costs, and result in mission accomplishment.

This is a book that should be read by every leader of any type of organization, large and small. What I like most about the book, even though the author is partial to maximizing investments in information technology, is his dual understanding that 1) the point is to make better decisions not buy more technology; and 2) information and information technology that are considered out of context and in isolation from other relevant information, are inherently flawed.

Wow. Google fails this test, and so does the CIA. Google gives you a million hits on "Colombia," without any visualization, synthesis, etc., while CIA tells you either that they don't know, or what they know is too secret to tell you.

The heart of the book is about actually measuring information proficiency along multiple scales. I will not belabor the point, and will only stress this once that on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being ignorant incompetence, 2 being ad hoc isolated processes, and 5 being fully integrated and optimized data collection (including historical and parallel data), processing, analysis, decision, AND implementation, both Google and the CIA got an average of 2. That's a 40%, folks, a failing grade in any school district. Now, since the U.S. Intelligence Community costs $70 billion a year and serves only the President, and Google costs nothing to the end-user and serves hundreds of millions, we give them the advantage. We're betting Google will grow faster than CIA and the IC can reform.

It merits comment, in passing, that this book is a very elegant recycling of earlier work by the author within the U.S. Government, subsequently published in earlier versions. This version is the best, and potentially revolutionary. I recommend that it be read in conjunction with Robert Buckman's Building a Knowledge-Driven Organization and if you really want to get into it, Margaret Wheatley's Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World; Thomas Stewart's The Wealth of Knowledge: Intellectual Capital and the Twenty-first Century Organization Barry Carter's Infinite Wealth: A New World of Collaboration and Abundance in the Knowledge Era my own Information Operations: All Information, All Languages, All the Time as well as Alvin and Heidi Toffler's new book, Revolutionary Wealth: How it will be created and how it will change our lives, and the work praised by Lawrence Lessig among others, Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom.