"Information Engineering" was originally developed by Clive Finkelstein in Australia the late 1970's. He collaborated with James Martin to publicize it in the United States and Europe.

Information Engineering is an integrated and evolving set of tasks and techniques for business planning, data modeling, process modeling, systems design, and systems implementation. It enables an enterprise to maximize its resources - including capital, people and information systems - to support the achievement of its business vision.

Business-driven Information Engineering is one of the dominant systems development methodologies used world-wide, as organizations position themselves to compete in the turbulent 1990s and beyond.

Its focus is on data before process, which ensures that organizations identify "what" is required by the business before analysis of "how" it will be provided. IE provides a rich set of techniques for strategic business analysis not reflected in "process first" methodologies.

Information Engineering guides the organization through a series of defined steps that allow it to identify all information important to the enterprise and establish the relationships between those pieces of information. As a result, information needs are defined clearly based on management input, and can be translated directly into systems that support strategic plans.

Most information systems development during the past 25 years has been done from a "stovepipe" or application-specific perspective. The result is that many organizations have separate systems that are incapable of sharing data. In this situation, systems cannot begin to meet their potential and can actually become a burden on the business. IE clearly identifies data sharing requirements throughout the organization so that systems can be integrated accordingly.

Using IE, organizations have a stable yet flexible framework on which subsequent development activities can be based. This eliminates redundancy and leads to the reuse of program modules and the sharing of data required throughout the business, which helps alleviate the maintenance burden.

Modeling data consists of identifying management objects (entities) and the associations or relationships between these objects, considered significant for representation of company activity.

I.E. is used to produce a graphical information model which represents the structure and semantics of information within an environment or system or a company. Use of this standard permits the construction of semantic data models which may serve to support the management of data as a resource, the integration of information systems, and the building of computer databases.

The basic constructs of an Information Engineering data model are: