Evaluation of information management practices in Ghanaian organisations

Abstract

The relevance of information as a resource for achieving organisational objectives has attracted the attention of both practitioners and researchers, including this study which examined the state of information management practices in Ghanaian organisations. A descriptive survey design was employed, using scaled-items questionnaires administered to 939 randomly selected employees from purposively chosen organisations in Ghana. Descriptive statistics, independent samples t-test and factor analysis were used to analyze the views of the sampled units. The results established that more organisations in Ghana have information management strategy and policies which guide their operations, as evident in the presence of departments and staff responsible for information management, and databases. However, in general, heads of information management departments were not part of strategic management teams, while more of the organisations use a manual approach in handling their information issues. Despite these deficiencies, the respondents were satisfied with the current state of information management practices in their organisations, and that there were no differences between the public and private sectors with respect to information management practices. We therefore recommended that the organisations should focus on using technology to manage their databases, and include their information management heads in the strategic management teams.

Keywords: Access, information, management, policy, strategy.