The purpose of this thesis is two-fold. First the researcher wants to investigate the gradation of information needs, in order to made a classification of important information and communication aspects of the focal organisation EnerSearch. Secondly, in order to state a classification of information, a vocabulary is developed that could help actors to understand the situation under investigation. Method The methodology used is partly an action research methodology, where the researcher plays an active role in interpreting and understanding the situation together with the actors of the focal organisation. The research exerts from a hermeneutic perspective, where activities in the focal organisation are interpreted and concepts are developed that can help actors of the investigation, to understand their situation. For the investigation a case study is taken and the researcher has an active role in the case study. Conclusion The found data is summarised by using ideal types that characterise persons in the focal organisation. The ideal types used are: clients (members of the management and financiers), involved and individualists (both operating core). These three groups have different needs of information, communication and objectives. With help of these groups a classification of information distributed in the organisation is made, based on a division between: information based on destination (to whom the message is sent) and content (what is the content of the information sent). This division is used in order to find the most suitable media that could be used for transmitting this information and this is done with help of the information richness theory of Daft & Lengel (1990). By distributing information and by communicating with each other, one could also state that co-ordination is party stimulated with these results. Furthermore, the results found can be implemented in an information system that is adjusted to the requirem ents of the participants of the focal organisation. For this reason a primitive design of an information system is proposed that could support the aforementioned classification and that could support communication and information distribution in the focal organisation.

In organisational science, new organisational concepts such as business process re-engineering and virtual organisations are developed. These new types of organisation have more advanced and different requirements on their information technology (IT) support, since the relation between the organisation and its IT system is much tighter for these organisation types. We disucss potential problems of traditional IT approaches in these organisations. As an alternative, we propose a different perspective on the role of IT, i.e., we view the organisation as consisting of a physical and a virtual layer that both are active, equally important and contain models of each other.