Rediscovering the value of information

This incident has called into the question the entire legitimacy of the processes associated with managing sensitive government information. And here, the government isn’t alone.

In the corporate sector, the value destroyed by poor information management practices is often measured in fines and lawsuit payouts. But before such catastrophes come to light, what metrics do we use — or should we use — to determine whether a publicly traded company has their information management house in order? Who manages information more effectively — P&G or Unilever; Coke or Pepsi; GM or Ford; McDonald’s or Chipotle; Marriot or Hilton? When interviewing a potential new hire, how should we ascertain whether they are a skilled and responsible information manager?

Business historians tell us that it was about 10 years before the turn of the century that “information” — previously thought to be a universal “good thing” — started being perceived as a problem. About 20 years after the invention of the personal computer, the general population started to feel overwhelmed by the amount of information being generated. We thrive on information, we depend on information, and yet we can also choke on it. We have available to us more information than one person could ever hope to process.

The information narrative changed from being very positive to darker metaphors and analogies portraying information as “an unstoppable steamroller” or as “a river. A very polluted river.”

One of my pals from the futurist rubber-chicken circuit, new-media professor Clay Shirky, now vice provost at New York University, famously remarked, “It’s not information overload; it’s filter failure.” This begs the question of information strategy. Do you personally have a strategy for creating value with the information resources available to you? Does your organization have such a strategy?

Creating value with information

We are all information scientists. We may not have degrees from an i-school or be a member of a trade or professional organization focused on information management, such as the Association for Intelligent Information Management or ARMA, but each of us creates, organizes, manages, stores, retrieves, and uses information.

Some actors in the economy are thinking long and hard about information strategies. On April 12, 1994, Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel, a married team of Arizona lawyers, embarked on the first ever mass spamming when they posted to over 6,000 Usenet newsgroups an unsolicited commercial. They had an information strategy that generated over $100,000 in revenue and cost pennies. I am not condoning this information strategy, just acknowledging that if one wants to create value with information one better have a strategy for doing so.

An information strategy has to deal with several foundational challenges: how to prevent finite attention spans being overloaded with unwanted information and how to prevent personal and sensitive information from becoming public, just as a start.

The returns on crafting effective information management strategies are significant.