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Today, businesses have to cope with rapid environmental changes, which are mainly driven by technological innovation. In order to gain a sustainable advantage, they need to effectively manage their intellectual capital, leveraging the data they possess to information that can be acted upon to facilitate knowledge creation. As it was soon established, effective organisational information management is hindered by the lack of structure that pertains information use. The information audit is a management technique that provides the necessary structure by identifying the way in which employees use information in order to perform their tasks. However, even though the technique succeeds in capturing the entities that affect organisational information use, it is accepted that it fails to effectively map the complex many-to-many relationships existing between those entities and to effectively guide the auditors during synthesis between the audit stages. The present paper introduces the generic information business model that overcomes these problems, providing a complete and clear picture of organisational information use.

Traditionally, companies are operating in a constantly changing environment. New products are introduced, the needs and expectations of customers are amplified, the laws and regulations are becoming stricter. Today, they have to cope with an even faster changing environment driven by technological innovation and environmental pressure. In order to predict those changes and react in a timely manner, companies need to have the appropriate information at their disposal and be able to manage it effectively, creating value both for themselves and their customers. During the first four decades of the information evolution, companies accumulated and managed vast amounts of data. Already in the year 2000 it was estimated that a typical large company possessed more than 400 trillion characters in its computerised databases requiring 400 terabytes of mass storage (Bedford, 1998). However, data is not enough to support decision making. As Davenport (1998) states, “humans prefer a richer information diet—contextual, synthesised from multiple sources, implications and interpretations rather than mere facts”. Achieving innovation by transforming the vast amount of data, already available within the companies or just one mouse-click away, into products and services poses as the ultimate corporate goal. Order and structure are sought to facilitate the transformation of chaos into usable information that can be acted upon and cater for the creation of knowledge. Nonetheless, knowledge is accepted as the best sustainable advantage of today companies (Boisot, 1998).

The generic information business model proved to be complete, incorporating the core information entities and their respective associations, generic, since it does not refer to a particular business, business area or information audit technique, and extensible, since the core entities are self-contained. Its potential for facilitating both the “what-should-be” and “what-is” stages of the information audit, as well as for supporting the discovery of information management problems was demonstrated. Both information resources and information flows are captured and, in contrast with Burk and Horton (1988), the definition of information resources in different abstraction levels is accommodated. However, it can be argued that the attributes used are not suitable for the auditing of every organisation and that wider audit support could be offered. Due to its generic and explicit nature, though, the model allows for modifications to be made in order to suit the particular needs. In conclusion, the generic information business model demonstrates adequacy in modelling the complex many-to-many relationships existing between the core information entities and provides a navigational tool that simplifies synthesis between the different steps of the audit. In its current state it is equivalent to a conventional geographical map requiring the effect of a human brain in order to be processed. Exploiting the potential of current technology, the development of an automated tool based on the model would enhance its capabilities, further facilitating data collection and analysis.