SLA 2024 Annual Conference & Expo

Information overload has always been a challenge. And today with search algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI) such an ever-present part of daily life and media consumption, the challenges in learning how to filter information for oneself for effective processing, interpretation and analysis have only increased. This session will present several frameworks that were created for instructing students to assist with addressing this. They were tested and refined over four years in a core MBA course focused on decision making and project-based work. They include ways to conceptualize the broad areas of information available for decision making as well as how to identify information by thinking about who is producing it, why they are producing it and who their key customers are. Other frameworks presented deal with ways to identify pertinent information and how to process and work with it as part of a research investigation. The frameworks covered in this session are in the article by Ann Cullen and Patrick S. Noonan entitled “Who Owns and Cares about the Data? A Method for Identifying and Gathering Information for Business Research Investigations.” Business Information Review, vol. 38, no. 1, 2021, pp. 21–27.