In the beginning...

In the closing years of the 1980s, Aslib held a series of seminars on information resources management.  These were delivered by Forest W. Horton Jr. (Woody Horton) who, with co-author Cornelius F. Burk Jr., had published a book on the subject entitled InfoMap: A Complete Guide to Discovering Corporate Information Resources  (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1988).

Although not apparent at the time, these seminars fired the imagination of many of those who attended them.  It was the first time they had heard a coherent and cogent argument for treating information as a resource in its own right, a resource as worthy of serious management attention as financial and human resources.  But it wasn't to be until March 1992, when the first meeting of the Aslib IRM Network was held, that anything came of it.

One of the reasons Woody Horton's seminars had made such an impression was that the idea of IRM gave information - and along with it the information profession - a respectability those present felt they had fought for long and hard, but had never quite achieved.  It was doubly gratifying therefore when Nick Willard, one of the founders of the Network, shared his ideas on the principles he thought underlay IRM during a meeting of the Network Steering Committee on 18 March 1992.   Nick's model for IRM, based on traditional resource management principles, proved so powerful that it was agreed there and then that the Network would adopt it and promote it as a "significant part of the group's remit".  The model eventually became known as 'The Willard Model'.

The Willard Model

The Willard Model identifies five key elements of IRM:

Identification
	The discovery of information resources and the recording of their features in an inventory
Ownership
	The establishment of responsibility for the upkeep of an information resource
Cost and Value
	Assessment of the cost of an information resource and its value to the organisation
Development
	The further development of an existing information resource to enhance its value to the organisation
Exploitation
	The processes which may allow a resource to generate further value through conversion into an asset or a saleable commodity

A Framework for the Future

In 1993, the Network decided to devote a year to exploring each of these five elements.  From 1993 to 1998 therefore, the Willard Model served as the basis for invited speakers to talk to four or five open meetings each year.  Aslib IRM Network members may access the reports of these meetings in the Members' Area on this site.

After exploring the last element of IRM in 1998, it was again Nick Willard who provided the Network with its agenda into the new millennium, when he proposed an exploration of knowledge management as a natural extension of IRM.  That agenda is now well under way and is proving to be highly successful.

01-Jan-2002