Ready for the Revolution?

Information Revolution: It's for all those bright executives out there who desperately need a mental software upgrade – a better way of looking at, understanding, and then acting in and on the information-rich world in which we now operate, writes Thornton May about the newly released book, co-authored by SAS' Jim Davis, Gloria J. Miller and Allan Russell. Read more of the IT futurist's foreword below.

There are lots of books about leadership and lots of books about IT. There are very few books about IT leadership. This is one of them. There are lots of books about "work" and lots of very boring books about information management. There are very few books about making information management work. This is one of them.

The rarest book in the executive library is the one describing how to use information management strategy to create sustainable growth. This is one of them. This book will help you put in place the leadership frameworks and practices necessary to make information management work and work strategically for your enterprise.

Making information management work is not something clerks do (as was previously widely thought to be the case); it is a vital part of staying in business. New research being conducted by Prof. Thomas Davenport at Babson College (see related story) indicates that in a growing number of cases, information management is not just a question of "getting the numbers right." Information management lies at the center of strategy and competitive advantage. This very timely tome fills a huge vacuum in the management literature. It will put you at the cutting edge of best practice in the now-critical discipline of information asset management.

The very visual outlets of mass media would have viewers believe that the major changes in the world are contained in the polychromatic and rapidly changing images of wars, marches, riots and "photo ops" they beam to our television sets. In reality, scholars of social change have long understood that deep, fundamental and lasting human change is always enabled by ideas and mental models. This is first and foremost a book of ideas and mental models. This book sets forth – in a compelling and accessible manner – a mental model, a managerial framework that will change your world and, in so doing, give you the wherewithal to change our world.

When I put this book down, I was reminded of other books that fundamentally changed how people looked at the world. Who can forget Thomas Paine's Common Sense, written at the apogee of a cold and desolate winter, that remobilized radical sentiment in the early days of the American revolution; Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, which roused Northern antipathy to slavery prior to the Civil War; and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, which in 1962 exposed the hazards of pesticides and helped set the stage for the environmental movement?

You have in your hands a very serious bit of social change literature. Now, don't let that scare you. This book is brutally practical.

The information that has to be managed is changing
The first observation that leaps out at even a casual observer of the contemporary environment is the amount of information that has to be managed. Some of the finest thinking about "how much new information is created each year" goes on under the very able guidance of Hal Varian and his team at UC-Berkeley's School of Information Management and Systems (see www.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info/).

Using 2002 as a baseline, Varian and his team estimate that in a year, "Print, film, magnetic and optical storage media produced about 5 exabytes of new information." For those not familiar with the term exabytes: If digitized, the 19 million books and other print collections in the Library of Congress would contain about ten terabytes of information; five exabytes of information is equivalent in size to the information contained in half a million new libraries the size of the Library of Congress print collections.

And the pace of information creation is increasing!
Combine this with the fact that all this new information is moving around. Worldwide, 35 billion e-mails are sent each day (generating about 400,000 terabytes of new information each year). Instant messaging (a reasonably new kid on the info block and outside many enterprise document management, database or usage policies) generates 5 billion messages a day (750 GB), or 274 terabytes a year. An added information challenge involves moving work (and all the information necessary to "do" work) to the workers rather than having workers go to a central location. Already 20 percent of U.S. workers, some 25 million people, are telecommuting, with 40 million predicted to do so by year-end 2008. That trend will accelerate as a result of the convergence of voice, data and text in mobile devices – laptops, personal digital assistants (PDAs), cell phones – where they will operate based on software applications collaborating seamlessly, without effort on the user's part.

Not only is a huge amount of information being transported to a huge amount of people via a mind-boggling diverse array of devices, the truly transformational change happening is what people are doing with the information when they receive it. The days of opening something, reading it and storing it are way behind us.

The participation economy
Jonathan Swartz, president of Sun Microsystems, is spending a whole lot of time thinking about what he calls the Participation Economy. "We're entering an era in which people are participating rather than just receiving information."

Tom Friedman, in his recent best seller, The World Is Flat, uses the simple act of getting on an airplane to illustrate the information management component of his three phases of globalization. In Globalization 1.0, a ticket agent who was paid by the airline generated a ticket for us.

This transaction required the agent and the flyer to be in the same place at the same time. In Globalization 2.0, a ticket machine/kiosk generated a ticket for us. This required the flyer and the machine to be at the same place at the same time. In Globalization 3.0, the flyer prints out his or her own ticket at a time and place of the flyer's own convenience.

Information management is not only materially impacting the transaction processing part of the enterprise. Information management that allows extra-enterprise collaboration is now a critical differentiator in product design as well.

Nike.com sells approximately 200 styles of sneakers for men and women. The uninformed among us might think this is enough choice. You would be wrong. This is not enough. The convenience of being able to shop online for these 200 styles of sneakers isn't enough either. At NikeID.com, you can design a one-of-a-kind shoe using dozens of colors and fabrics. You can choose the color of the swoosh. You can choose to have your initials embroidered on the back. Just about whatever you can dream up you can design, click until you've got it right, and custom-made shoes can be delivered to your doorstep in about three weeks – for only $10 or so more than their noncustomized counterparts.

Are you ready for long-tail strategies?
The declining cost of technology combined with the increasing sophistication of information asset management tools has opened up a whole new area where profits can be made: the long tail.

Named and popularized in late 2004 by Wired editor Chris Anderson, the long tail school of strategy sets forth the idea that there is more aggregate value in the multiple smalls than with the few larges. The long tail comprises the technologies and businesses that are shifting consumers from the top, or "head," of the curve where a few blockbuster products, broadly popular, are sold in large numbers to a mass market, to the "tail" of the curve, where millions of different products can be sold in millions of niche markets, each serving small numbers of consumers.

The media business in particular lives "down the tail." "We're so stuck in a hit-driven mind-set, we think that if something isn't a hit it won't make money," said Anderson. In long tail businesses, "misses" make money, too. And with little or low sales costs, "a hit and a miss are on equal economic footing, both just entries in a database called up on demand, both equally worthy of being carried."

The combined impact of ...

• Processing power doubling every 18 months,
• Storage capacity doubling every 12 months, and
• Bandwidth throughput doubling every 9 months

Even in today's unenhanced environment, the declining cost of computation, storage, and communication is making all kinds of interesting information management applications possible. For example, alcohol-sniffing ankle bracelets are being advocated by a subset of jurists in San Jose. The SCRAM (Secure Continuous Remote Alcohol Monitor) allows recovering alcoholics to stay at home rather than in county lockup. The anklet tests for alcohol every hour through the skin, then reports back to headquarters with a wireless connect. The current version of the system doesn't electrically shock people if they drink.

The future is going to be full of information and innovative information management applications. The four critical dimensions of people, process, culture and infrastructure need to be managed as these applications come online. The point of this book is to help you to prepare for that future.

Bio: Thornton A. May is executive director and dean of the IT Leadership Academy. He is one of the premier "communicators" in the information technology industry today. He combines a scholar's passion for empirical research, an entrepreneur's capacity for identifying opportunities and a stand-up comic's gift for storytelling. He deftly uses all these skills to help executives figure out what comes after what comes next. May is responsible for sculpting executive education IT curricula at four major business schools: UCLA, UC-Berkeley, Arizona State and Ohio State.