Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)
Information infrastructure
An information infrastructure is defined by (Hanseth, 2002) as "a shared, evolving, open, standardized, and heterogeneous installed base" and by (Pironti, 2006) as all of the people, processes, procedures, tools, facilities, and technology which supports the creation, use, transport, storage, and destruction of information. [Wikipedia]
To build and deploy a successful information infrastructure, several factors need to be taken into consideration:
- People - having the staff, needed to run a technologically-based business - personnel selection, training and assessment
- Processes & Procedures - establishing policies and guidelines for operation and management (ref. CMMI), selecting and deploying the most efficient methodologies, evaluation and optimization of processes
- Tools - selecting or creating software applications, implementing digital repositories and support services (groupware and collaboration, management applications, computer aided support, etc.), managing information security
- Facilities - designing, implementing and supporting network infrastructure, servers and computers, mobile and wireless devices, managing infrastructure security
- Technology - implementing state-of-the-art technologies in the business field, optimization of existing processes, tools and infrastructure, research and development (R&D)
Information management
Information management deals with the whole information lifecycle - acquisition, categorization, storage, accessing, analysis, maintainance and security of information.
- Data Creation - obtaining data from different sources and creating new data - business intelligence, document management, etc.
- Data Storage - categorizing, describing (metadata, tagging) and enabling access to data - digital repositories, data warehouse, data transformation
- Data Analysis - searching, retrieving and analyzing data in order to obtaing structured and generalized information - data mining, data processing, data drilling
- Data Maintainance - managing information integrity and controlling access - versioning, security
Communications
Communication technology is a very broad field, including but not limited to:
- Wired and Wireless networking
- Internet, e-mail, world wide web
- Voice-over-IP (VoIP)
- Multimedia
- Web 2.0 and Web Services
- Mobile communications
- Mobile access to information
Communication technologies enable more flexible, more convenient and cheaper communications, information exchange and interconnection of processes and services.