Environmental audit: III. Improving the management of environmental information for toxic substances

Abstract

ABSTRACT/Environmental programs have been commonly driven by a preoccupation with the collection of data in the mistaken belief that data is synonymous with information. The distinction between data (that is, the quantified and qualitative attributes of a particular environment) and information (specifically, data processed so as to focus upon a particular environmental problem) will become far more important to environmental managers. They will increasingly manage their information through use of what has become known as information resource management (IRM) and the attendant use of critical success factors methodology. Environmental managers wilt thereby move away from concerns about data and specific EDP hardware and applications toward managing information as a valuable agency resource. In applying IRM, they will find it helpful to include a number of planning elements and to resolve early a number of issues critical to its successful use.Just as environmental managers in the 1970s emphasized the collection of environmental data, in the 1980s they are being influenced to improve the management of environmental data-information (Vincent 1983). In parallel fashion, environmental programs are slowly moving away from media-specific laws and regulations toward a "total systems" view of the environment. Far less effort will be spent in coping with the regulatory maze (Schaeffer and others 1980a). Far more will be exerted in actively managing the environment using information developed from an environmental audit (Schaeffer and others 1985a). The use of the term environmental audit is deliberate; differing from the usage by Deland (1982), it denotes a planned characterization and interpretation of measurements of environmental attributes.The first step of an environmental audit is specification of management objectives. In the second step, these are translated into a series of environmentalquality-oriented statements, of which the hypotheses to be tested and the decision criteria to be used in making the test are a part. Subsequent steps lead to the determination of a theoretically defensible data base (steps 3-5) and the data-collection activities of program-specific monitoring (step 6). Previous articles (Schaeffer and others 1985a, Perry and others 1985, Novak and others 1985 have focused on steps 2-5. This article addresses the parallel management activi- ties associated with the need for, and use of, data in steps 1 and 6. The suggested direction is the use of information resource management (IRM) (Diebold 1979, Sinnott andGruber 1981) within the context of an environmental audit. Using the IRM approach will ease the transition from reactive, piecemeal data collection to integrated information management. Any comprehensive set of environmental improvements (as distinct from control programs) is only as good as the data and the resulting information that describes them. Just as monitoring is a tool (not a program goal) used in conducting an environmental audit, so too is data analysis a tool for developing inf...

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