What Is Information Management System (IMS)?

Information management systems are the backbone of any business. They allow you to store, organize, and retrieve information quickly and easily. You may be thinking: "Why do I need an information management system?" Let's say you're making a spreadsheet of all the products your company makes. You might have a column for each product's name, color and size. But when it comes time to update those products' availability or pricing, it will take some time if you have to go through the whole spreadsheet by hand. With an IMS, all that info is stored in one place—and it's easy for employees who need it to find what they're looking for when they need it. The information management system is the brain of your company. It handles all the information you need to run your business, from customer records to financial data and everything in between. It's a lot of work for one little computer brain! So, it's essential to keep it healthy—and well-stocked with the right tools for the job. For many of us, the name "IMS" brings back memories of a gigantic software program developed in the 1960s to support NASA's Apollo space program. This IMS version was the precursor to IBM's premier hierarchical database management system (DBMS). But for those who have been in the industry for more than ten years, IMS was also originally an acronym for Information Management System and it's this second meaning that is most relevant today—because it's what almost every company needs to manage their information effectively. IBM's relational database software, DB2, use a relational model to organize data. IMS databases use a hierarchical model where each piece of data is organized into segments or blocks. Each part has multiple fields (or portions of data). The root segment is at the top of the hierarchy, and its child segments are below it. The child segment order represents the order in which each entry is entered in a database. The hierarchical model is helpful because it allows you to organize your data to quickly find what you need.