Musings on the Nature and Value of Information

How Much Information Does $3 Billion Buy You?

When it comes to thinking about the value of information, and trying to understand the nature of the work it does, it seems to me there's no better laboratory than our US presidential election process. After all, an election process is really nothing more than an extended exchange of information, across millions of people and months of time, all leading up to a single decision.

In fact, some estimates place the total amount of money that will be spend on this election cycle at around $3 billion. This isn't just direct spend by candidates, but includes special interest groups, the parties themselves, and other folks with a vested interest in the outcome.

So let's play it out. $3 billion spend in large part on media or communications of various forms, ranging from TV spots to print ads to speech writing, videos, position papers and who knows what else. And add to that the communications that don't have a direct price tag, such as blogs, supporter-generated videos and the like and the scale of communication (aka information transfer) is enormous. According to Jack Myers Media Business Report, Barack Obama has nearly 900,000 Facebook friends alone. That's a truly massive amount of communication potential.

It's also interesting to consider what sort of information is actually being shared by this massive investment in time and money. You'd think it must be a lot of information, wouldn't you?  But in an objective sense, it's very little. Information specific to the candidate's views, voting records, funding sources and promises represents only a tiny fraction of the election effort. That information could be (and is) contained on a few key websites and news sources. Most of the effort and money spent around elections is about creating context-- trying to shape the context in which people will view that small set of facts, and thus influence which lever they'll pull in November. It might only take a paragraph to describe Obama's or McCain's voting record on tax increases. But I am sure that millions of dollars have been-- and will be-- spent in TV ads, radio spots, PR campaigns and other efforts to convince us all what the implications of their voting records will be for the future of the country. One paragraph of facts, and the equivalent of a thousand paragraphs of opinion, all trying to help construct the context in which we will each view that fact.

In a sense, what the election process is about is that creation of context-- determining the overall context (context in this case meaning the political and ideological landscape) in which a million decisions will be made over the next four years.

And maybe that gives us a clue on how think about this massive investment in terms of work performed. After all, in  the classic definition of work, this 15 month process and billion of dollars is all designed to help influence which lever an individual pulls, or which bubble they color in on  paper ballot. The physical world is not materially different the day after the election than it was the day before. Yet stock markets will go up or down, allies will feel good or worried, and millions of voters will be feel better about their future or worse, all depending on the information communicated by those pulled levers and colored ovals.

So why does it take $3 billion to make this collective decision? Maybe if classic definitions of work revolve around change in the state of something over time, the definition of work in this case can also be some form of change over time. But in this case, its the change of context over time. And just like changing the location of one pound of weight means pushing against forces of gravity, inertia and friction, changing a context in which information is viewed means fighting similar forces. Contexts or opinions, like objects, tend to stay the way they are unless acted upon by some other force. So the context in which we view a candidate for president will stay the same, unless pushed or pulled into a different shape. And that's what the $3 billion is spent to do- to shape the context in which we as voters will view that relatively small set of actual facts about a candidate and their views, to hopefully result is us coloring in the right oval.

If you are thinking about how to bring social media tools into your business, I'd encourage you to spend some time exploring how the candidate are using it in this election cycle. Social media is probably the most powerful transformational tool in politics since television. It's already pervasive in organizing field teams,  energizing fund-raising, and coordinating the efforts of thousands of people, in a combination of tops-down and bottom's up innovation and collaboration. In short, it's pretty much everything that most companies are trying to do every day.

As companies become more globally diverse, and individuals gain more autonomy for decisions-making, the idea of meta-contexts will be come pivotal. They exist today, and are called culture, or mission statements, or policies. But more and more, information systems will have to help amplify and shape those meta-contexts. Social media tools will be key to this transformation. The meta-contexts in which decisions are made will be shaped much like the presidential campaigns are; driven top-down by charismatic leaders, and bottoms-up from the ideas and passions of employees, partners and customers.

It's an exciting prospect, and one worth some significant investment.

When What Happens In Vegas Shouldn't Stay in Vegas

Just a few days from now, EMC World will go into full swing in Las Vegas. Nearly 10,000 IT and business professionals will sequester themselves in the Mandalay Bay conference center for three-plus days of intense learning, sharing and brainstorming. (I'm not entirely sure about the 'sequester' part, but that's what we all tell our significant others, anyway...).

EMC World is devoted to the discussion of digital information-- how to manage it, store it, protect it, and wring every drop of value from it. So, given that I try and use this space to explore ways of determining and expressing the value of information to our economy and society, EMC World is a perfect event to give me a bit of pause: after all, how does one calculate the informational value of a conference dedicated to discussing ways to maximize....informational value...?

How does one set out to calculate the amount on information that will be shared? What's the digital equivalent of 24,000 person-days of intense discussion, dissertation and diagramming (yes, that's 24,000 days) packed into three-plus calendar days? How much will be learned? Discovered? Captured and brought back to the thousands of organizations that participate?  A ton, that's for sure. Just looking at the time value of attendees and the physical costs associated with putting on such an event, including travel and such, it's easily a $50 million investment made by our industry on behalf of getting smarter at solving the challenges of information and information infrastructure.

A day at EMC World, or any similar conference, also teaches some important lessons about the nature of social media. After all, what medium is more social than a face-face, multi-day conference where attendees learn together, eat together, and socialize together for every waking minute? Could on-line social media replace that experience? I don't think so. And that's something worth remembering. The on-line social experience is no match for the physical one in many ways.

But here's where the physicality of EMC World falls short. After three days or so, all the attendees will make their way out of the Nevada desert  and back to the 20+ nations from whence they came. And unfortunately, a large part of what happened in Vegas will stay in Vegas-- the party will end and much of what's discussed and learned will be left behind. That's all the output of those 550 breakout sessions, over 100 different demo's , thousands of 1-1 white board sessions and tens of thousands of casual conversations.

So we're using on-line social media to try and keep the party going-- with discussion forums and networking tools that hopefully can extend and amplify the energy that's created at "EMC World The Event", and turn it into "EMC World, The never-ending experience". Our goal is to explore the synergies between the physical and digital social fabric. We want to bring together the best of both and create a seamless experience across all our interaction points, to leverage every second of every minute that EMC, its partners and its customers invested in those few days in Las Vegas.

We'll keep you posted on how it goes. If you have any thoughts on how we should proceed, we'd love to hear them.

The Librarians Will Inherit the Digital World

I had the incredibly good fortune a few months back to hang out with a room full of librarians. These were not your run-of-the-mill librarians however. They were the custodians for the Presidential libraries of several of our more recent presidents. Very impressive people.

During the discussion, Betty Flowers of the Lyndon Johnson Library and Museum highlighted a capability they have built into the website for the Library of President Johnson. It is called the Presidential Timeline and it doesn't just cover President Johnson-- it covers twelve presidents from Hoover to Clinton http://www.presidentialtimeline.org/. It is a compelling and insightful way to view the major events in the life of a president and even lets you overlap multiple presidents to see where they were in their lives at different points.

Cool enough by itself, but here's where it gets interesting.

One of the examples we looked at was the Gulf on Tonkin attacks during Johnson's presidency. We heard audio and saw documents related to this crisis, showing tremendous insight into the views and decisions of President Johnson. (If you want an amazing insight into what it's like to be president go to the timeline right now: Click 'Exhibits' then 'Lyndon Johnson' then 'Gulf of Tonkin'. Then click on numbers four and five at the bottom. It is incredibly compelling and moving content.)

We also discussed the Bay of Pigs crisis and content around that. The comment was made in the meeting that the team on this project was approaching the Russians to provide the same sort of information on the Bay of Pigs crisis,  to include documents and narratives from the Russian point of view. Imagine that-- in one place, the ability to see such a critical world event from multiple contexts, eliminating gaps in perception and revealing how the actions of these leaders and countries impacted each other in real time. For my mind's eye, it was the equivalent of the first time I saw a color television picture (yes I am old enough to remember that moment). The level of richness and clarity was almost a physical sensation. And that's what the folks at the Libraries of Congress and others are creating around the events that shaped our world as it is today.

Now imagine we could do that for every important world event. What leaps in human understanding would we gain? What insight would we get into the thousand of tiny misperceptions, miscommunications and blind spots that can often put nations on the brink of war-- or right into the throes of it?

That's the power of context-- and the potential of bringing together all the world's digital information. Information and context become completely transparent and totally dimensional.

Imagine having that for business decisions too-- being able to overlay the viewpoints, knowledge and conversations of multiple people to figure out how the good (and bad) decisions got made, and what contexts drove the process. Much could be learned, I think.

The means to do this exists today: the ability to digitize information in many forms; the ability to add metadata to enable creation of new contexts; and the raw computing and storage power to bring it all together, literally and virtually.

It truly will make planet earth a small world after all. And one brought together by the modest librarians to whom this sort of idea comes as naturally as does the Dewey decimal system.

If you want to know more about this project and the amazing people behind it, click here. http://www.presidentialtimeline.org/about.php

The Key to Information Safety? Share it All.

If you want to keep your information safe, the best strategy is not to share it at all, right? Keep it under lock and key, and let out only the dribs and drabs that are essential to paying your cable bill or buying that holiday gift. Won't that ensure that your identity is never misused or misrepresented?

Maybe not. The value of information lies in sharing it. That much I think everyone would agree with. In fact, EMC's security division (RSA) has recognized this, and put its focus on using security to set information free to add value and do work in all the ways you need it to.

Sharing information freely may in fact be the best way to prevent its misuse. And if you aren't sure that's true, just think about your mother. Imagine if someone who looked a lot like you was not only able to pilfer your social security number and bank information, but was actually steal your clothes and your car. Finally, they steal your high school yearbook to read up on your friends and early tastes. So relative to the average information thief, they've hit the mother lode. They could probably walk into any store and use your credit card. They may be able to walk into your bank and cash one of your checks. Who knows, maybe they could run into an old friend of yours who hadn't seen you in a few years and pass themselves off as you.

Then they run into your mother. What happens? Despite all that information about you, and their ability to represent your life pretty well, the fraud wouldn't even last a millisecond, would it?

Why not? Because despite all that information the thief has about you, your mother has more. She knows your appearance, your mannerisms, your walk and a million billion other things about you so completely that any attempt at misrepresentation, no matter how good, would fail.

Most fraud works because of an information imbalance. The perpetrator has enough information to claim to be 'you', and the victim doesn't have enough information to prove them wrong. The issue isn't that the stores you shop at, the bank you use, the travel agent you favor have too much information about  you. The problem is they don't have enough.

Now it would be nice if your mother could work at all the places you frequent (well maybe not ALL of them). She could use her knowledge of your habits, mannerisms and tastes to identify every suspect action taken by someone claiming to be you. But since she can't, what's the next best thing?

Share everything. Imagine if the digital equipment of your mannerisms, tastes and habits (never mind your appearance, and even the subtlest inflections of your voice), were known to every store you wished to enter, and every online retailer who's website you visited. Stores could spot suspect behavior in ways otherwise impossible (why is he buying this airline ticket when we know he's claustrophobic? Why would he purchase that jacket when we know he hates everything gray...?). With your digital life so well known, the best a thief could do would be to only try and buy the exact same things you buy, at the same stores you shop at, and ship them to your address or that of your friends or family. A pretty dull life for a thief no doubt. But a pretty safe digital life for you.

Advances such as cloud computing, and improvements in business intelligence and other disciplines start to make this world possible. All your interactions could be brought together in a digital 'fingerprint' of your life. The fingerprint itself can become a crucial part of your digital security. And the more information that feeds the fingerprint, the more nuanced it becomes.

EMC does something like that today. EMC's content addressed storage systems break down every image, file or document bit by bit, creating a unique fingerprint from the unique characteristics of each object. Change one bit, and the result is a different fingerprint.

Now none of us want all of our tastes, purchases and behaviors laid out for the world to see. But that's OK. because just as your fingerprint can identify you without being you, your digital fingerprint can be an abstraction-- one that can help identify unusual behaviors without actually saying what makes them unusual. The fingerprint ensure authenticity. But the fingerprint itself doesn't reveal the content.

So rather than focusing on keeping your information locked away to be safe, imagine a world where you can set it all free-- and that the freer it is, the safer you become. That would make the digital world as safe for you as your mother's kitchen.

Ice, clouds and the coming explosion of creativity.

Living creatures are among the most fascinating and complex information systems on our planet. During your life, nearly every cell in your body will be replaced many times over. But somehow, through a variety of processes (some well understood, others still a mystery) you remain a coherent information system, with your memories and form remarkably consistent over decades. And the mystery of how such complex systems arose is one that is still debated today.

The most common picture of the birth of life on earth conjures up steaming seas, with a a hot broth of chemicals combining and recombining, fueled by the energy of their hot environment, until the magic of life emerged. But a new theory of life has been bandied about lately, positing that the complex molecules that underpin our existence formed in cold, not heat. Remarkably, the physics that could lead those simple particles of ice that form the clouds over our heads to become crafter of a living world sound much like the physics that apply to our early clouds of computing. And those physics could lead the new clouds of computing to perform a similar function, driving new levels of connection and innovation into the world of information.

So how do ice, clouds and the future of information come together? Let's explore.

The common wisdom is that cold is the enemy of chemical reactions. Cold temperatures mean less energy, slowing down the processes that could lead to the combinations of simple molecules into more sophisticated ones (and eventually to ones that could reproduce themselves and set the stage for life as we know it). But something interesting happens when water containing those simple molecules freezes. The molecules don't stay in the ice, but get forced into ever-smaller pockets of water trapped in the ice. And as they get forced into tiny spaces, the molecules come into closer and closer contact, pushed together more times, in more ways, than ever before. With the increased density of molecules comes more chances for interaction than was afforded by the relative isolation each had experienced dissolved in the open water. So, as temperatures dropped, the simple molecules spread evenly through the expanse of a primordial sea became high concentrations of molecules in confined spaces, creating unexpected but credible conditions for life.

Is my  point still seeming a bit cloudy? I don't blame you. But let's think for a moment about the physics in cloud computing. What computing clouds promise to do is take the vast volumes of information spread through the expanses of our digital oceans, and concentrate them more deeply than ever before. As they concentrate, we can only imagine the new combinations that will be attainable. Today's relatively simple combinations of information will have chances to join together to create more sophisticated ideas, insights and information systems than ever.

There's one difference between formations of ice over our heads and the sort of clouds of computing billowing on our horizon-- information clouds don't have to sacrifice energy to gain concentration. As security,  privacy and information management concepts continue to mature, even the most massive and informationally intense clouds will be able to inject new energy into their own systems. More energy and more concentration will further accelerate the fusion of information into new, sophisticated and unforeseen outcomes.

So while those scientists wresting over the birth of life have to choose between fire and ice, those of us witnessing the birth of the next revolution in information productivity are in a far better place. We get to have our ice cream cake, and eat it too.

How the Cloud Will Make Every Joke Funny

A man tells an off-color joke to a bunch of buddies while out fishing. They all laugh like crazy. Two weeks later, he tells the same off-color joke to an audience of couples while introducing the guest speaker at a black-tie dinner reception. He is greeted with silence and uncomfortable stares, and his wife refuses to speak to him for the rest of the evening.

What went wrong?

The information (i.e. the content of the joke) did not change. So why did he bomb at dinner? Obviously, the context changed. Information of any form, whether a joke or a scientific formula,  only acquires its full meaning in context. And conversely, one could argue, any set of data, given the right context, can acquire new meaning and therefore greater value. Just imagine the same unfortunate dinner speaker doing things in reverse: he tells his joke to audience after audience, greeted time after time with silence and reprimands, until he finally finds the right audience and gets the laugh he is looking for. After trying enough contexts, the same information finally found a place where it fit- and where it could perform some useful work (entertaining his buddies on a slow fishing day).

Cloud computing and the funny joke
The idea of cloud computing, promoted by Google, AOL and others, is to be able to create massive computing environments and with nearly unlimited information storage capacity. In fact, according to a recent Business Week article, one of Google's cloud architects asks prospective employees 'What would you do if you had a thousand times more storage?'

Of course the question behind that one is 'what would you do if you had a thousand times more information?'  That's the promise of cloud computing-- nearly free, nearly unlimited processing and information storage capacity, available to everyone.

But there's another phenomenon that will emerge from cloud computing. As more information gets amassed in a few massive cloud infrastructures, the real question will be 'what would you do if you had a thousand times more contexts?'

Think of every piece of information as a key. And every context as a lock, behind which lies value of some sort. Many keys open more than one lock-- and different keys can reveal different amounts of value behind every lock. Plus, keys can be tried in combination to yield even more positive results. With a billion keys, and a billion locks, the real challenge becomes how to try every key in every lock, to see which ones unlock the most value.

That's what data mining does (sort of). But data mining usually involves someone pre-supposing the value they are looking for. Image if instead of data mining, we started doing value mining-- simply bringing together various bits of information from these massive clouds, and trying them out in every conceivable combination, matched up with every possible context, to see what value can be unlocked.

That's one of the possibilities of cloud computing-- imagine if any researcher could somehow get access to all the information in those clouds, no matter what form it could be in, but without risk to the providers and individuals who provided it? Here's an example: a healthcare researcher who can compare every blog posting, medical report and prescription purchase in a given geographic area to spot concentrations of illness or environmental risks, without having to know what illnesses they were looking for in the first place. Or the songwriter who can spot themes emerging from the musings of a million teenagers on blogs, personal pages and videoposts, and who can capture those raw feelings in a new song that provides an anthem to this audience?

The computing clouds should not just be places where information is stored. Hopefully they will become places where information is allowed to create its own unique values and unlock new ideas and new views of our shared world.

Someplace in the world, there a context where every joke is funny. With cloud computing, we have a chance to find all those contexts. And when we do, we can all smile a bit more.

Will OpenSocial Light the Fuse?

I am increasingly convinced that the next explosion in IT is not around content-- it is around context. What's context? It is simply enabling one piece of information (one 'unit') to be related to other units of information (or entire systems of information) and some meaning or insight derived. Humans are great at context-- we can interpret nuances of speech, or even the meaning of words, based on the information systems that surround them.

Innovation and invention come from context-- from taking one system of information (an idea...) and juxtaposing it with as many others as possible, until some insight or meaning becomes clear. The system of molecules known as 'Viagra' failed miserably in its first context (treating angina), but placed in a new context... the rest of the story goes without saying...

Machines are getting better at seeing context (Amazon can start to guess which books you might like next based on the context of what you already bought). But nothing touches the ability of the human mind to see patterns and discern which context have value (based on the combined knowledge and experience of that individual) and which have none (for that individual)

Coupled with the idea (a generalization, I concede) that if you take the sum of all the people in the world, you pretty much have the sum of all human knowledge, then you get an interesting proposition. Namely, if you could take every unit of information and pattern of information (idea) known to every human, and enable every other human to see it in their own contexts, you could uncover every potential benefit for every idea. The millions of 'accidental' inventions just waiting for the right context would be brought to light. The million writers looking for one spark of innovation could find it in the stories (aka context) of some other individual. The million puzzles waiting for that one final piece could be completed somewhere, somehow, but the one person who has that piece, and who just has not seen the perfect context.

Social Media, I believe, will be the activation energy for this explosion. While databases connect units of information, they depend mostly on microprocessors to add value. Social Media connects people- and enables the power of a billion human context generators to come online, and share all those contexts simultaneously, for decision making, inspiration or problem solving.

Omigod! That looks SO good on you!

...this just in-- half way through writing this post, I come across Time Magazine's 'Best Inventions' feature. On the cover was (duh!) the iPhone. But on the list was a casual mention of a new idea that gave me chills, as it brings the whole context explosion to light. It was a dressing room area in a store where, but one where you could try on an item of clothing, and in real time let your friends online see an image of you in the item-- so they could immediately vote on how you look in it. Think about that-- instant perspective and context from all over the web to help you make that buying decision. Group think meets retail in a powerful way.  Now take that a thousand fold forward-- maybe it's not your friends who vote, but an anonymous sample of people that fit the demographic to whom you want to appear attractive. You get instant collaboration or feedback to help you make a decision- from the perspectives most important to that decision. Imaging taking that forward into other parts of your life, once the social networking world is organized and intelligent. A nearly infinite number of opinions and judgments (some sound, some off the wall) available to you on any subject. And a further blurring of where the individual context ends, and the group context begins.

OpenSocial and other approaches like it will start to bring together the social fabric of the web. Whether that means hemlines will go up or down next spring, I cannot guess. But the nature of decision-making will never be the same.

Information Is Getting Promiscuous- Are You Ready?

Every second of every day, information of every type is being ingested and stored in more ways than ever. Transactional records, health narratives, personal anecdotes, product reviews, skateboarding pigs...if it can be captured with digital media, it can be stored as a unit of information. And if it can be stored, it can be connected.

I have proposed before that every one of those units of information adds exponential value to every other unit to which it can be connected. That's because every connection adds new context-- and every context is the chance for new meaning, and new innovation. In fact,  the most unlikely connections oftentimes yield the most valuable new meanings.

Think about it-- how many inventions that we take for granted today, from penicillin to post-it notes, were considered 'mistakes' or accidents when they came about?  I would contend these inventions were not really errors however, but simply good information systems waiting for a better context. In the context of gluing things together permanently, the organization of molecules that make up post-it glue had no value; in a different context (the temporary sticking needs of the office worker), that same information system had real value. Same information system, given new context. New context, new opportunity for value.

So how many other 'mistakes' are out there-- aggregations of information, in the forms of invention blueprints, drug molecules, screenplay ideas, or fashion thoughts, that are simply waiting for a new context to become complete, and relevant, to the world around them? Sometimes all its take is a 'magic bullet'- one new piece of information added to the system, to create the epiphany that turns work potential into real value-- much like the one unlikely piece of information that turns mystery into 'case closed' for Lieutenant Colombo in episode after episode (see my previous post if this makes no sense to you...).

But today, there is a growing imbalance in the systems we use to manage our digital information.  Classic IT approaches are much better at collecting information than they  are at connecting it. The results, both within organizations and between them, are massive silos of information, each valuable in its own right, but each segregated by technology, business practice and fear of theft or loss.  Information stays close to the 'hood in our current IT systems, hanging out only with its closest friends, never exposed to the wide wide world around it, and never realizing the context it is missing. The results are huge limitations in the creation of context. The marketing database in a company never gets to talk to the service database, so it does not learn new insights about customers. The protein database in a drug company never 'talks to' the blogs about recurring symptoms that live on a social networking site, so it never sees the patterns that its drugs could address. The movie screenplay idea on a student's FaceBook page never runs into the biography of the one director who would be perfect to develop it. Everyday in the apartheid of modern information systems, a billion new contexts don't get created. And thus a billion new innovations do not yet become reality.

The good news is, all that is changing. Social media platforms. Content management strategies. Metadata (information about information), built automatically into business data and appended organically (think tagging and reviews) to videos, audio files and  images. Search engines that can look inside a document (and inside a video) to create the metadata that makes relevancy-- and therefore useful context-- richer than ever. Information-centric security technologies that don't rely on locking information away to ensure safety, but instead can set if free in search of new contexts, with confidence and protection.

Information gets Promiscuous- and That's a Good Thing

As these new trends intersect we are soon to see an explosion, not of content, but of context.  And I believe this explosion will unleash a new step-function in innovation and invention. True invention, as they say in science, happens in the white space between disciplines. The same holds true in art, music and every other human endeavor. These new means of connecting information will drive right into those white spaces, enabling information of all different kinds to connect in all manner of ways, creating new structures, new patterns and new information systems of their own. The results will be an explosion of context-- seeing  new connections between information, and applying those connections to even broader contexts. As organizations and individuals feel safer and freer about sharing their information with the world, this trend will accelerate. Think of today's databases and content repositories as massive fuel rods in a nuclear reactor. Tremendous stored energy, only waiting for the lead shields between them to be removed for their potential energy to be unleashed, and massive power to start flowing down the networking lines that connect us all. Human being are the best creators of context- our minds are geared to make connections- to recognize patterns. We will be the one that turn that power into action. And as we teach our software programs and information systems to perform those same functions in even the simplest of ways, we will amplify our capabilities.  We will create a 'critical mass' of information that can feed on itself in positive ways, pumping out trillion and trillions of iJoules of energy, and transforming our world for the better.

Some theories of physics propose the idea that we are just one of an infinite number of parallel universes. All taken together, those universes represent every possible information system; every possible combination of atoms and energy exists somewhere in one of these universes. What does that mean? It means that somewhere across these infinite universes, every healing drug has been invented. Every stirring opus has been written. Every great painting has been painted. What do those other universes have that we don't? Nothing, other than some different contexts we have not yet found-- different intersections of information we have not yet understood. They have the same raw information, just put together in some different ways. So by unlocking the power of context, we unlock the secrets of those other universes. We uncover the contexts they already have found, and we gain the benefit of the inventions and insights they already made. The possibility of every conceivable innovation is within our grasp- all we need is to let the our information lead the way.

What will be the impact of this sharing on art? on science? On our sense of community? I think it will be enormous. I hope it will be unpredictable. And I am betting it will be here sooner than we think.

 

 

The iJoule and the Murder Mystery

Two of the hardest things in the information management space are figuring out how to think about the value of information, and how to make information more productive. One key to sorting out this riddle, in my mind, is to get a structured view of what constitutes 'work' for information, and how to know when you have enough work potential  to get done whatever task you've set out for yourself. In past posts I've brought up the idea of the 'iJoule' -- a unit to measure energy or work potential of a unit of information. The iJoule concept is based on the 'Joule' which, roughly, is a measurement of the amount of work it takes (and therefore energy required) to move one kilogram of mass one meter. Since moving a one-kilogram mass one meter is a simple but clear example of work, the the joule is a pretty basic concept to master. But how does this concept apply to the iJoule? And how do you figure out how many iJoules it takes to do information-based work?

It's a big mystery, and to solve it, I'll call upon Lieutenant Colombo-- he of the famed and eponymous detective series. What Colombo did was truly information work-- he collected units of information about an event (usually a murder), and somehow piece them together to create an accurate model of what had occurred-- so the killer could be apprehended.

The work at hand for Colombo was typically identifying the killer, who was usually a very clever individual able to cover his/her tracks and who had typically committed the crime in a very creative (and hard-to-decipher) manner. Colombo stumbled and bumbled his way around in order to be under-estimated by his brilliant but egotistical antagonist, collecting seemingly disparate units of information. Each new unit of information was, in his brilliant mind, connected with each other unit, building greater and greater context, until he reached his moment of epiphany, and the crime was solved.

So how many iJoules did it it take for Colombo to do his work- to cover the distance from 'no idea who committed the crime' to 'case closed'? Without putting a number on that question yet, let's delve into the physics of this a bit more. When we do that, I think we see that the 'work' done to move that one kilogram mass one meter, and the work done to solve the murder, are not all that different. And seeing that connection may get us a little closer to calculating the work potential for a unit of information.

Let's go back to the one-kilogram block for a minute. Let's suppose a random ant were to march up to that block and push as hard as it could. Would the block move at all? No. The valiant ant would be exerting force, and using energy, but not nearly enough to do any real work-- the block doesn't move any closer to the finish line (does that remind you of large parts of your working day..?). Now as more and more ants join their comrade in the push, eventually there's enough force applied to for work to occur- for the block to actually begin to move. Eventually, enough ants are in the fray, and pushing long enough, to move that block one meter and presto! They reach the one Joule mark and their job is done...

Colombo's task is the same. Early on in each episode, he's collecting seemingly random units of information. At the beginning stages, there are not enough units of information-- or perhaps not enough context-- to move him any closer to identifying the killer. He is expending energy in his own shuffling way, but not 'moving the block' at all. But then he hits a threshold; he accumulates enough units of information, all connected to each other in the pattern recognition system of his brain, to start to create a theory... he get a 'hunch'-- and the block starts to move. But he does not yet have enough iJoules to get to the finish line-- if he stops accumulating information-- or creating new contexts and connections-- he will not complete the task. However, as we know (at least those of us over 40) Colombo is relentless-- he continued to accumulate units of information, place them in his ever-richer context, and eventually he crosses the finish line, closes the case and lights his victory cigar.

Now the number of iJoules required for Colombo to be succesful may have been in the thousands or perhaps millions; many units of information, each adding exponentially to the amount of informational energy applied to the problem. But it seems to me that if we can carry the logic this far (assuming you are still buying the idea) then we ought to be able to carry it a bit further, and put some real math around these concepts. Imagine if Colombo knew as soon as he walked onto the crime scene how many iJoules would be needed to solve the case,  and how quickly he could accumulate the units of information and create all the possible contexts? And imagine if we could do that for the myriad of other kinds of information problem solving we do every day? How many iJoules does it take to invent a drug? To solve a customer support question? To figure out the best target audience for a new flavor of Soda? I don't know-- but I think we could figure it out.

But even without the actual number, this thought process (at least to me) teaches us something important about information and work. Just like energy comes in discrete 'packages' that are assembled to create heat and do work, information is accumulated in discrete 'packages' that can be assembled to do work. And like energy, information works in step functions-- one more unit can let us cross the threshold from 'no invention' to 'invention' just like one more unit of energy can get the pot of water from liquid to gas. And with the exponential power of information (remember the information network effect: the value of information grows exponentially with every other unit of information to which it can be connected) adding one unit of information to what you have today-- as long as you have the means to try it out in every available context-- offers massive additional opportunity for insight, invention and every other type of imaginable work. All that limits the work potential for a unit of information is a limit to how many other units of information to which it can be applied to create new contexts.

And what Detective Colombo understood was that every unit of information --no matter how irrelevant it seemed on the surface-- was precious. He collected every unit, and searched for every context, never sure if the scratch on a bottle of whiskey, or the books on the floor next to the record player, would be the unit of information that, when added to the context engine of his mind, would break the case.

Thinking this way, to me, will be the next revolution in information management. The managers of information will transform themselves and their IT environments from repositories of data to facilitators of context. They will learn to trust in the exponential power of information, applied to ever-richer and more varied contexts, to deliver unimaginable insights and value for their organizations and their customers. They will find ways to break down the barriers that keep information from connecting and that today, keep the Detective Colombo in each of us from solving every mystery and defeating every villain that confronts us in work, society, education and across the entire landscape of human endeavor.

And when that occurs, we can all smoke a victory cigar.

 

The Exponential Power of Context

Information has value. We all know it intuitively. I have begun exploring on this blog some ways to describe that value in terms of the work that information can do, and dubbed this unit of potential the iJoule.

But the secret sauce to making information more powerful-- increasing its potential for work-- is context. Information is made more valuable by connecting it to more and more other units of information. All this other information is potential context.  And information put in context is information made more powerful.

Most folks in technology are familar with Moore's Law- articulated by Gordon Moore- the idea that the the power of microprocessors will double about every 18-24 months . There's a similar concept called the network effect, described by Robert Metcalfe, which says that the value of a product is increased by the number of other owners or users of that product. He used it first to articulate the value of an Ethernet network, in that the network was made exponentially more useful with every user added to it.

Information itself behaves the same way. I propose that every unit of information is made exponentially more valuable by every other unit of information that can be connected to it. Said differently, this exponential value is the result of the increasing number of contexts into which that information can be placed, creating new contexts, new insights, and increased power to do work.

I am a marketer, so I'll use a marketing example. Assume you ran a company that sold life insurance. Provided with a list of phone numbers and no other context, I could do work-- I could call those numbers and try and sell life insurance to whomever answered the phone. I may have some success, but would obviously meet with a lot of failure and frustration as I knew nothing about who was answering, what their situation was, or what might interest in  Lets call that one iJoule worth of work for now. Then imagine I had that same list of phone numbers, but now also the names of the head of household behind each of those numbers.

I would argue that those two pieces of information are easily twice as valuable as either alone. Each now has a context that lets it do far more work. So now I can do two iJoules worth of work. I would be able to ask by name for the right person and not wind up trying to sell life insurance to the babysitter who happened to be there for the evening. But I would still have a lot of frustration, I suspect. Now let's add one more piece of information-- the number of children that head of household has. I would propose that those three units of information together don't give us three iJoules worth of work but something far greater-- after all, now I have the information (the context) to make a much more compelling case for life insurance. And every additional unit of information (age of children, family income, life goals) that I add to this context has exponentially greater value, since each unit of information adds work potential to each other unit of information. The information system I have created now around that telemarketing list has its own network effect, adding massive potential to the work I can do.

if a classic Joule is the amount of work needed to move one kilogram of mass one meter, then how many iJoules are needed to do the work of selling one person a life insurance policy? That's an intriguing question-- but one I suspect could be answered with some degree of accuracy. And knowing the answer (even just roughly) would now tell me and my company how much potential work our current database can do...and how much added work potential we'd get by adding one more unit of information.

Now to me,  the information added only adds value to the work at hand if it adds to the relevant context (as one commenter pointed out on a previous post). But don't be deceived-- the more macro the information system becomes-- meaning how many units of information can be connected and how many potential contexts they can be applied to-- the more potential value ANY unit of information has in an information system.

So here's my version of the network effect-- the value of any unit of information is a function of the square of the number of other units of information to which it can be connected. If you want to make information exponentially more valuable, focus on increased the connections.

Next post-- the iJoule and the Murder Mystery