Information Wants to Be Free, But at What Cost?
Businesses want information to flow cheaply, easily throughout organizations, but information management is absurdly expensive.
Everyone has heard the quote: "Information wants to be free."
Print
Ever since Stewart Brand uttered it in 1984 at the first Hackers' Conference, this quote has been a rallying cry for those who staunchly believe in the power of unimpeded and free information flow.
For businesses, however, adoption of the slogan has proven to be a complex, perilous endeavor: To many, it connotes a total lack of control over information, data and intellectual property. (The most glaring example is the media industry's ongoing struggles.)
As wiki guru Stewart Mader points out in a recent blog post, the quote, on its own, without the context of the rest of his statement, makes "those first five words sound naive and utopian." Here's Brand's full quote:
Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine—too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, 'intellectual property,' the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better.
It's still a fascinating and vexing line of thought, even some 25 years later. Just look at the precarious state of information and "knowledge" management, data analytics and "business intelligence" inside most companies today: No doubt businesses want information to flow freely (both cheaply and without digital encumbrances) throughout their entire organizations—so that business managers in their offices, sales guys visiting customers' businesses, supply chain partners in China, and finance personnel at headquarters can unleash the value of the corporate data that's been so easy to accumulate but so difficult to unlock.
As any CIO or business manager knows today, information management is absurdly expensive. And not without risk. And the more information—the data flows from ERP software, supply chain systems, customer relationship apps, social networking sites, mobile devices, and on and on—that companies continue to exponentially collect, the more difficult and expensive it's going to be for companies to understand and disseminate that information.
My inner Debby Downer can't help but mention that Gartner predicts that the amount of enterprise data will grow 650 percent during the next five years, and the vast majority of that data will be unstructured, meaning that it won't be included in or specifically attached to any one database. (For more on this challenge, see The Future of ERP.)
This growth "is going to cost us dearly if we don't pay attention," David Cappuccio, chief of research for the Infrastructure teams at Gartner, recently said. And to manage all of this data, Cappuccio contends, will require companies to embrace new methodologies (such as data de-duplication and automated tiering of storage) and to make crucial decision based on risk management and future business strategies on the potential value of their data.
Paradoxically, then, the free flow of information throughout society and the world has made it even more expensive for businesses that want to make sense of it all. I don't think there's any one thing or person to blame. It's just that an information tsunami was unleashed and no one's really been able to deal with the data deluge.
Previous Post: Leo's Letter to Larry: SAP 'Olive Branch' to Oracle Turns into a PR...Next Post: Cloud Computing's Messiah: Marc Benioff's Cult of Personality
Most Discussed Posts
Cloud computing has emerged as one of the most significant game changers to hit the technology landscape in the past 20 years. With this massive expansion of the cloud, the perception of the IT organization is shifting from a utility player to a change agent. This eBook breaks down five ways progressive organizations are using cloud-based IT Management solutions to help drive innovation and become more strategic, including: adding visibility and analytics, speeding up time-to-value, lowering costs, improving prioritization, and providing a blueprint for future cloud deployments.
Read the white paper to see how IBM helped Citigroup deliver new services and enhancements to their 200 million customers faster.
There are 3 ways to modernize legacy applications: rewrite completely, acquire packaged solutions or migrate existing code. This paper explains why it's best to migrate and how IBM® Rational® software can help.
Accommodating specific lines of business can result in a hybrid ecosystem of applications and servers. The resulting complexity of this architecture makes for an environment that is costly to maintain and difficult to change when addressing new challenges.
This whitepaper will help you to define a mobile device passcode policy. Security managers must attempt to reconcile two opposing goals. They must: 1) create a passcode policy that is strong enough to protect the device if it is lost or stolen, while: 2) not annoying users with needless length or complexity.
This whitepaper, authored by The Radicati Group, looks at the key reasons organizations should consider moving to a cloud-based archiving solution. Email archiving solutions enable organizations to store, monitor, and collect electronic data exchanged by their users to comply with internal policies and regulations.
ATERNITY will showcase a 30-minute demo on how Fortune 500 companies are leveraging its award-winning FPI Platform to deliver a user-centric approach to Proactive IT Management.
For businesses to move forward and tap into the ever-expanding universe of Internet users and network-enabled devices, it's critical to learn how to make the transition to IPv6. Learn the critical steps your organization must take to make a seamless transition-and keep your business world connected.
Learn how IT teams can protect against spear phishing tactics. Harry Sverdlove, chief technology officer of Bit9 offers a frank discussion about spear phishing - the most common technique used in today's advanced attacks.
Learn how to build a solid business case for your migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux so you can run leaner, innovate faster, be more flexible and own the New Now.
Social media isn't about you; it's about everything around you. As you consider how your customers want to communicate with you, social media is something that can't be ignored. But what should your strategy be? Is social media "just another channel?" What kind of a plan makes sense for your contact center and for your customers? Join our experts as they share their insight and research results.
Hardware tokens were a popular method of strong authentication in past years but the cumbersome provisioning and distribution tasks, high support requirements and replacement costs have limited their growth. The additional log-in steps that hardware tokens require and the resulting user frustrations have limited adoption and make them impractical for larger scale partner and customer applications.
Sponsored Links
