Intelligent information comes of age

Intelligent information comes of ageBy Tom Glocer, chief executive of Thomson Reuters

Published: June 6 2008 13:43 | Last updated: June 6 2008 13:43

In his 1977 book “Global Implications of the Information Society”, the technology visionary, Marc Uri Porat, defined the information economy as occurring when labour related to the creation, processing and dissemination of information exceeds work related to the other three economic sectors – agriculture, industry and service. Based on that definition, Proat tells us that the information economy arrived in the west in 1967, when 53 per cent of labour income in the total workforce was derived from the information sector.

Forty years later, information is at the core of all economic sectors in the developed world, and an increasingly influential element in emerging markets. The amount of information, how we receive and consume it and whether or not we trust it, has been radically altered with the advent of the internet. This revolution has also created a growing global need for “intelligent” information.

What is intelligent information? It is certainly insightful and well written text, but it is also dynamic content delivered in electronic formats. It is self-describing, self-organising and action-oriented. As we pass from Web 2.0 to the semantic web envisioned for Web 3.0, intelligent information will be its common language.

Intelligent information has never been more valuable. Professionals will pay for just the right information delivered at just the right time and place in their workflow. In fact, people such as lawyers, doctors, scientists, accountants and those who power the world’s financial markets, will pay to be given less information, but precisely the right information that helps them make better decisions, faster.

None of us would pay for tomorrow’s weather forecast because the information has been commoditised, it is universally available. If you are a provider of consumer-grade weather information, you have little option other than to monetise your content via advertising. But if you provide very accurate long-range hurricane forecasts businesses such as property and casualty insurers will pay you handsomely for your professional grade information.

With the number of professionals growing, especially in emerging markets such as China and India, the global demand for intelligent information is booming. The world, in a sense, is professionalising, and doing so in real time. At the same time, physical industries are transforming into information businesses. We saw this in financial markets as currencies went off the gold standard and began trading electronically. A similar transformation is underway in the pharmaceuticals industry. Once a chemical compound discovery and manufacturing business, it is now all about decoding, analysing and manipulating the human genome.

As a result, a huge opportunity has emerged for companies that can provide access to intelligent information. The information majors are already establishing their territories. At Thomson Reuters we are staking our claim to the delivery of the kind of critical intelligent information that professional decision-makers must rely upon to do their jobs.

Businesses and professionals in the financial, legal, tax and accounting, media, scientific and healthcare markets require huge amounts of information, typically delivered in real-time, which can be consumed by machines as well as human beings.

To meet these demands, the new class of “information majors” will need to be global, highly innovative, experts in each sector they seek to serve, and able to invest in huge databases and sophisticated search and data mining capabilities.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008