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Part of defining and documenting an information model includes defining the useful information attributes for each IMSMA<sup>NG</sup> item. IMSMA<sup>NG</sup> comes with more than 1,000 data elements already defined as well as the capability to create additional custom-defined fields (CDFs). This makes it important to critically assess which data elements are useful to a programme for decision-making, analysis and reporting and to focus on those while ignoring data elements that don’t provide additional value. Limiting information to only that which is useful to the programme provides long-term benefits including reducing the data collection and data entry burden and improving system performance. And, while many data elements may be collected for each IMSMANG item, some elements may be more important for analysis than others. For example, whether a victim has been injured or killed may be more important for analysis than the victim’s nationality.
[[Image:Understanding IMSMA Information Model - Item Subcategories.png|center|500px|''Item Subcategories'']]<div align==="center">''Item Subcategories===''</div>
Each of the six categories of items can be divided into subcategories or types so users can collect information for each subcategory. For example, users can specify different types of hazards such as dangerous areas, confirmed hazardous areas (CHAs), minefields and battle areas and manage each kind of hazard differently. Using subcategories, information managers can: