  We introduce a general operational characterization of information-preserving
structures (IPS) -- encompassing noiseless subsystems, decoherence-free
subspaces, pointer bases, and error-correcting codes -- by demonstrating that
they are isometric to fixed points of unital quantum processes. Using this, we
show that every IPS is a matrix algebra. We further establish a structure
theorem for the fixed states and observables of an arbitrary process, which
unifies the Schrodinger and Heisenberg pictures, places restrictions on
physically allowed kinds of information, and provides an efficient algorithm
for finding all noiseless and unitarily noiseless subsystems of the process.
