Introduction
When I was a young boy, one sweltering night in Deerfield, Illinois, just as I was falling asleep my father burst into my room, “Douglas. Get up. It’s time. You need to see this.” Normally my mother would have protested, but not for this.
I followed my father down to the family room where we sat in silence in front of our 12-inch black-and-white Zenith television. He turned to me and said, “Don’t ever forget you saw this.”
We watched for several minutes while my father continued to adjust the rabbit-ear antennae. Eventually on our tiny TV, a little white blob emerged from a bigger grayish blob, descended a bit, and a crackly voice announced: “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.”
I’m sure my dad was choked up. I just thought this was neat, really neat, but of no surprise. Most nights I went to sleep in spaceman pajamas beneath solar system bed sheets, fully anticipating this moment.
Several hours earlier, the world had watched Neil Armstrong override a lack of sufficient information on the lunar landing site to avoid a field of boulders. With only seconds of fuel remaining he touched down the Eagle safely on the surface of the moon.
Dad worked for a global medical device manufacturer. With his black horn-rimmed glasses, flat top haircut, and white short-sleeve button down shirts often sporting a pocket protector, it occurred to me he could pass for a NASA mission control specialist. Instead, he was a world-class engineer with several patents to his name. In that moment, our excitement wasn’t because of the technology. Dad would have been able to coolly tell you how all of the transistors, circuitry, activators, compressors, and other electromechanical components in the lunar lander worked.
“Isn’t it incredible that we can see and hear this as it’s happening?” he exclaimed. What truly thrilled my father was not the fact that mankind had the technology to land a man on the moon but that multimedia information about it was streaming into our family room for his son, for him, and for a billion others around the world to witness—live.
Since then, it seems that information—a fascination with it, the pursuit of it, and ultimately a career producing and delivering information about information—has been a common thread for me. I have never been all that fascinated with technology or even software, but more so by what fuels them.
As a kid I memorized gravitational, size, and distance fact tables about the planets, and devoured books on and tried my hand at cryptology. As a teen I got into coding, developing table-based approaches to video game development, and at the University of Illinois, a differential equations class frightened me out of the mathematics program and into developing an independent degree in software engineering and business administration. This despite the protests of the engineering school administration: “Why would anyone want to use computers for business?”
As an IT industry analyst, first with Meta Group and now Gartner, I have a front row seat to witnessing and advising organizations in their ongoing tussle with the unrelenting onslaught and infinite opportunities of information. Technologies and techniques seem to be perpetually a half-step behind the increases in the volume, velocity, and variety of information. More disconcerting to me is that the overall perception of and approach to information has not kept pace with its economic significance.
Sure, many senior executives talk about information as one of their most important assets, but few behave as if it is. They spend more money tracking their company’s office furniture and PCs than their information assets. They report to the board on the health of their workforce, their financials, their customers, and their partnerships, but almost never the health of their information assets. They squeeze every drop of value out of employees, budgets, and raw materials, while allowing most information assets to languish.
Much of this oversight has to do with what is deemed to have meaningful value to the standard bearers of corporate measurement: the accounting profession. But in today’s Information Age, an antiquated regulatory prohibition against formally recognizing information on your balance sheet is a poor excuse for failing to monetize, manage, and measure information as a true asset.
This book is a call to such executives—for chief executive officers (CEOs) and business leaders to more fully wield information as a corporate asset, for chief information officers (CIOs) to improve the flow and accessibility of information, and for chief financial officers (CFOs) to help their organizations measure the actual and latent value in their information assets. More directly, this book is for the burgeoning force of chief data officers (CDOs) and other information and analytics leaders in their intrepid struggle to help their organizations become more infosavvy. This book is a set of new ideas, frameworks, evidence, and even approaches adapted from other disciplines to help them transform their organizations.
Infonomics is a broad concept I conceived and first mentioned around the turn of the millennium to express information’s increasing behavior and importance as an economic asset. Over the years I have continued to research and develop the concept—exploring, relating, and integrating the disciplines of information theory, accounting, asset management, property ownership and rights, measurement, innovation, and economics. This has taken me from working with and interviewing clients, colleagues, information consultants, valuation experts, accountants, economists, and academics on these topics—to the depths of reading hundreds of pages of accounting standards body discussion papers on the recognition, and valuation and reporting of intangibles.
As such, infonomics is at once a conjecture and a construct. Each of these above ideas I have endeavored to recast in the context of information itself, and render practicable. Whatever your role, I hope you find each of the three parts of this book (monetizing, managing, measuring) beneficial to you. Certain readers will find one part more useful or interesting to them than another. Regardless, I appreciate you joining me on this infonomics journey. And a journey it is. I’m anxious to learn about the new ideas, methods, and achievements this book inspires.