The barriers to improving information management in engineering organizations: A study of small to medium-sized enterprises

The use of information and the development of more effective strategies for its management is one of the most important issues facing today's knowledge dependent engineering organisations. For these reasons, considerable work has been undertaken to understand and improve information management within larger organisations. However, where small to medium-sized organisations are considered little empirical work has been undertaken. To address this, a detailed study of the issues concerning information management across ten engineering SMEs from the Advanced Engineering sector has been completed. This paper presents an overview of the study and includes a discussion of the research method and in particular, the important tasks of data collection and data filtering. Following this, the processes of characterising the generic issues and the assessment of causality and dependency between the issues are described. Using the empirical data, a set of fundamental issues is proposed which may be considered to represent the key barriers to improving information management within engineering SMEs. These barriers and their implications are then discussed and a number of important considerations are highlighted. It is also clear that the findings of this study and the understanding gained are not only critical for improving information management but also for the development and planning of an effective information systems strategy within this class of organisation.