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For the papers discussing IIOs, most did not propose a straight and clear definition of what exactly is meant by the term IIO. However, Jones (1994) defines IIO as“an organization in which information is the primary resource utilised, shared, and integrated to normal workday routines to achieve a common vision or goal”.
For other researchers, although they did not define IIO strictly, the keywords of the definition are similar to Jones’s. Mendelson and Pilliai (1999) considers an IIO as “information-rich”, and suggests that the success of an IIO is based on effective operation of information in the dynamic market;Hansen and Javelin (2005) argues that in an IIO, information flow dominates the whole business process, including gathering, assimilation and creation of information.
Therefore, in an IIO, information is the input and output of the organisation, and the organisation itself could be treated as a mediator and processor. The organisation is responsible for collecting, processing and providing the valuable information to its suppliers and customers.
In the education industry, university is a typical IIO. Teaching is a type of service provided by schools or universities. Young (2002) presents the case that in modern universities with bureaucratic hierarchical structures, teachers and students can be treated as suppliers and customers. The main function of educational institutions is to integrate the information from suppliers-teachersprocess and then provide it to their customers-students (Joo et al., 2011;Verhoeven et al., 2010). Therefore, educational institutions are service sector IIOs. Admission and marketing in university are also a type of services(Forkosh-Baruch and Hershkovitz, 2012). The admission or recruitment department in a university gathers information and provide valuable ones to the applicants.
In analysing information, intensive educational institutions like modern universities, traditional hierarchical diagrams, which model the bureaucratic organisations rigidly, cannot reflect the features of information. Though they can model the lines of command and reporting throughout the whole organisation clearly (Menou, 1995), the reality is far more complicated.Information flows not only exist between leaders and their subordinates, but also among people at the same level. Moreover, informal communication cannot be shown in this model. Besides, it is hard to understand the function of each piece of information, neither what it does nor how it does it(Baranauskas et al., 2002). The traditional hierarchical diagram can answer who, where and why, but not what and when.
Therefore, methods to analyse an IIO in the modern education industry are required. The following section reviews key business modelling methods based on information flows.