For information on how to participate into PrimaVera, please contact us.

"The ultimate contribution of ICT will not be in its direct business application, but in the way in which it influences our information, communication and knowledge patterns".

Rik Maes, Program Director of PrimaVera

Philosophy

The philosophy of PrimaVera is considered vital for its success.

• PrimaVera's spirit is imaginative, unconstrained by prevailing opinions or management practices
• PrimaVera's work is collaborative, both with researchers from different national and international faculties, universities, institutions, and with professionals from practice
• PrimaVera's thinking is interdisciplinary, convinced that monodisciplinary thinking more often leads to the refinement of existing ‘solutions’ rather than the invention of creative new ones
• PrimaVera's approach is a combination of fundamental, theoretical developments and empirical, fieldwork-based testing
• PrimaVera's purpose is to advance our insights into information-based organizations and to provide guidance for organizations in becoming knowledgeable
• PrimaVera’s dream is to become a vivid and international forum of imaginative thinking in information management

To gain fundamental insights into information-based organizations, PrimaVera develops a common frame of reference. This Information Management Enneahedron illustrates that a full comprehension of information management entails that it has to be studied interdependently at the strategic, (infra-)structural and operational level as well as from the point of view of business, information and technology.

Information Management Defined

Traditionally, research in information management has paid (and is still paying) a lot of attention to ICT as such and to the direct business-ICT link, for instance in terms of strategic alignment. Recent research, however, indicates that these approaches miss two crucial linking pins for ICT to add value to business and for business to exploit the dematerialization of economic activity:

1. 'information and communication' as intermediary, mediating concepts bridging business and ICT, and

2. 'architecture and infrastructure’ as similar concepts bridging the strategic and operational level of organizational attention.

We see these two linking pins as the core fields of attention in information management. Hence, most research done in PrimaVera is focused on ‘information and communication’ and/or ‘architecture and infrastructure’.

Information and Communication
The importance of the ‘information and communication’ has recently been augmented by ICT being put at a cer­tain distance of the business (e.g. by outsourcing), as a result of what the organization of the in­formation ‘demand side’ has become paramount. A con­sequence of explicitly including the ‘information use side’ into information management is that immaterial concepts such as imagination, emotion, learn­ing, sense making, knowledge, experi­ence, identification, and trust are gaining importance in information management as they do in economic activities in general.

Architecture and Infrastructure
With regard to ‘architecture and infrastructure’, it can be said that organizations are increasingly discovering that information management is not exclusively aimed at the support of busi­ness strategy, yet at least as much at that of business operations. The volatility of pre­sent-day strategy and the observation that strategy is only indirectly influencing operations further add to the importance of ‘infrastructure and architecture’ as linking pins between ‘strategy’ and ‘operations’, both in a theoretical and a practical sense.

In short
The PrimaVera research program is focused on the conceptual and practical development of ‘information and communication’ and ‘architecture and infrastructure’ as the core concepts defining information management. It aims at the codification and testing of a specific information management language, which is capable of articulating and addressing the traditional gaps between business and information technology as well as between strategy and operations in a novel way. Put differently, the program participants use a common frame of reference stating that a full comprehension of information management entails that it has to be studied interdependently at the strategic, (infra-)structural and operational level, and from the point of view of business, information/communication and technology, whereby ‘information and communication’ and ‘architecture and infrastructure’ are considered to play pivotal roles.