Towards a Wider Scope of Using Information in Organization

Information plays a crucial role in organizational life. We may say that no organization can exist without information. However the current use of information in organizational life is restricted mainly to serving planning, control and operation activities. The paper proposes to extend the scope of using information (1) to organizational diagnostics (2) to promote learning in organizational, and (3) to manage culture. The organizational metaphors associated to these three uses are organizations as organism, brain and culture respectively. For different uses of information, the desired features of information are different. Correctness is desirable when information is used for organizational diagnostics while relevance and pertinence are more important when information is used in a learning context.