Articles

.
Information Management
Information Management (IM) involves data processing, automation activities, systems analysis, information services, management services, the new skills and techniques needed by the information managers to deal with the information technology (IT) and strategies for developing a corporate information plan. Martin White (1993) gives a working definition of IM as the efficient and effective co-ordination of information from internal and external sources. As Peter Vickers (1985) puts it, management of information is not concerned simply with documents, message and data, but with the entire apparatus of information handling. He identifies the characteristics of information management as follows:

• Information has to be treated as a resource requiring proper management, like money, manpower, and materials.

• At the simplest level, information management involves planning and coordination (if not direct control or use) of the following:

-- information handling skills

-- information technology

-- information sources and services

• Information management requires a careful “watch on” new developments that can contribute to the better management of information resources

• Information management requires an understanding of the patterns of information flow within the organization and then it demands a systematic means of mapping and monitoring such flows.

Information management is thus a means by which a centre maximizes the efficiency with which it plans, collects, processes, controls, disseminates and uses its information and through which it ensures that the value of that information is identified and exploited to the fullest extent 
Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA)

Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) estimates and totals up the equivalent money value of the benefits and costs to the community of projects to establish whether they are worthwhile. These projects may be dams and highways or can be training programs and health care systems.

The idea of this economic accounting originated with Jules Dupuit, a French engineer whose 1848 article is still worth reading. The British economist, Alfred Marshall, formulated some of the formal concepts that are at the foundation of CBA. But the practical development of CBA came as a result of the impetus provided by the Federal Navigation Act of 1936. This act required that the U.S. Corps of Engineers carry out projects for the improvement of the waterway system when the total benefits of a project to whomsoever they accrue exceed the costs of that project. Thus, the Corps of Engineers had created systematic methods for measuring such benefits and costs. The engineers of the Corps did this without much, if any, assistance from the economics profession. It wasn't until about twenty years later in the 1950's that economists tried to provide a rigorous, consistent set of methods for measuring benefits and costs and deciding whether a project is worthwhile. Some technical issues of CBA have not been wholly resolved even now but the fundamental presented in the following are well established.

Cost-benefit analysis (CBA), sometimes called benefit–cost analysis (BCA), is a systematic approach to estimating the strengths and weaknesses of alternatives that satisfy transactions, activities or functional requirements for a business. It is a technique that is used to determine options that provide the best approach for the adoption and practice in terms of benefits in labour, time and cost savings etc. (David, Ngulube and Dube, 2013). The CBA is also defined as a systematic process for calculating and comparing benefits and costs of a project, decision or government policy (hereafter, "project").

Broadly, CBA has two purposes:

1. To determine if it is a sound investment/decision (justification/feasibility),
2. To provide a basis for comparing projects. It involves comparing the total expected cost of each option against the total expected benefits, to see whether the benefits outweigh the costs, and by how much.^[1]

CBA is related to, but distinct from cost-effectiveness analysis. In CBA, benefits and costs are expressed in monetary terms, and are adjusted for the time value of money, so that all flows of benefits and flows of project costs over time (which tend to occur at different points in time) are expressed on a common basis in terms of their "net present value."

Closely related, but slightly different, formal techniques include cost-effectiveness analysis, cost–utility analysis, economic impact analysis, fiscal impact analysis, and Social return on investment (SROI) analysis.