So here we are in the midst of the information age, or some of you might think that we're more toward the beginning of the information age. Anyway, the challenge is that many notions about information really haven't caught up to the information age. The story of infonomics starts with quite a sad chapter in American and global history. It starts with the 9/11 terror attacks. After the 9/11 terror attacks, some clients started contacting us lamenting not only the tragic loss of life, but also the loss of their data. You see, this was in the days before off-site backups and cloud, and so a lot of companies actually lost their data. Today when we talk about a company losing its data it's often it's been copied or something like that. Well, the data really still does exist it's just hard to get at it. But these were the days before a lot of these companies in the Twin Towers had off-site backups or had their data in the cloud, and so they actually lost their data, which became a bit of an existential event for some of these companies. Now, what do you do when you lose property or a property gets damaged or lost? Who do you call? Well, obviously you call your insurance company. Now, the insurers took a look at this situation and they said, "Well, we don't think that information constitutes property, and therefore we're not going to pay out on your property and casualty policies." Which was a bit of a surprise to a lot of companies and a lot of us in the industry, who had always figured information was property, information was an asset, and why wouldn't it be covered by some insurance policy? So what the insurance industry did in its infinite wisdom, because it realized it was a bit exposed not having been clear about whether electronic data was covered in Commercial General Liability policies, was they updated the Commercial General Liability Policy Standard to explicitly exclude electronic data from P and C policies. When did they do that? Barely a month after 9/11. So again, to add insult to injury, they made that change where now you can no longer claim electronic data losses on your standard property casualty policy. Not to be outdone, the accounting profession followed suit a few years later by updating the Key Financial Standard, FAS, or IAS 38 which discusses how to recognize and report on certain kinds of intangibles. And that standard has been updated to explicitly exclude or prohibit the capitalization of information assets. More explicitly, at the bottom of that policy it states that customer lists and the like can no longer be capitalized. So, even if you wanted to put the value of your data on a balance sheet and then claim it on an insurance policy, really today you can't do that at all. Enter the courts. Now, the courts remain thoroughly confused about whether information constitutes property or not, and whether and where property law should be applied to information assets. We'll look at a number of court cases later on that topic. All right. So let's introduce the concept of infonomics. Infonomics is the economic theory or concept of information as a new asset class, and the discipline of monetizing it, managing it, and measuring it just as any other business asset. Now, you often can't go a day or a week today without hearing somebody talking about information being one of their most critical corporate assets. But very often that's just lip service and so what we don't see is organizations actually really treating information as an asset. Again, we're in the information age, the data economy, whatever you call it. Organizations are thinking about how to digitalize or transform their organizations, and information is a required asset to be able to do that, or at least a required resource at this point. So really what we want to do is recognize and take advantage of information's unique economic properties and do this in a way that's a bit more formal than we've been doing in the past. So let's get to the three aspects of infonomics. Infonomics is about monetizing, managing, and measuring information. And just to clarify what we mean by each of the topics that we're going to drill into during this course, monetizing information is really just about generating economic benefits from available information assets. Now, a lot of people will think about monetization being about selling information. Well, I like to think of it a bit more broadly than that. I think that's a bit limiting to consider only the selling of information as monetizing it. We like to think more of monetization as being any way that you're generating a measurable economic benefit from that asset. Now, for managing information we're thinking about how to apply traditional asset management principles and practices to improve the way our organizations manage information. We as information professionals and businesses going back years or decades, really haven't done a good job of paying homage to the way that other assets are managed. The formalities, the standards, the methods, the processes for managing other kinds of assets like physical assets, or financial assets, or even other kinds of intellectual property. So the managing information part of infonomics is about how do we learn and how do we apply concepts from those other asset management disciplines. Third, is measuring information. And when it comes to measuring information, we're talking about gauging the various qualities, potential, the economic impact of information. There are a variety of ways where we can look at value in terms of its potential value or an asset's realized value, and we'll get into that with information as well. So what all this really comes down to is treating information as an actual asset. Whether it is an asset on the balance sheet or not, we think it really behooves organizations to actually treat it like an asset. And when we look at these three components of infonomics; monetizing, managing, and measuring information, for a lot of companies it's a vicious cycle. So ultimately, infonomics is about treating information as an actual asset. As the old adage goes, "You can't manage what you don't measure," and this has been a problem in the information management world for a long time. We haven't measured information as if it were an asset and therefore we're in a poor position to manage it like an asset, which leads to problems with monetizing it like an asset. You know, the old adage "You can't manage what you don't measure" also applies to not being able to monetize what you can't manage. So turning this vicious cycle into more of a virtuous one is really what infonomics is about, and it really impels us to do information work so that information will actually work for us.
