With technology having become ubiquitous, consumerized, cheaper and more equally available to all, the second half of the Information Age will be focused on the exploitation of technology and the information it processes. During this period, the great fortunes are being made by companies like Google and Facebook, which are not traditional makers of technology, said Mark Raskino, vice president of technology research and consulting firm Gartner Inc.
This might be different compared to the first half, when the primary focus was the technology itself, when great fortunes were made by companies like IBM and Microsoft. Raskino said the majority of companies that gained competitive advantage did so by differential access to the technology from these providers — for example, by having more capital to invest in it or better skills at installing it in their businesses.
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The Information Age is an 80-year wave of economic and societal change and is in its second half, when business value comes from exploitation of technology rather than from installation.
In Gartner’s report, “Strategic Information Management for Competitive Advantage,” released late last month, the firm identified four types of generally useful information — location information, sustainability information, DNA information and social graph information — that are likely to dominate competition this decade, in the way that process information and customer information did in past 15 years.
Location information is maturing in availability, Gartner said, and might offer businesses the opportunity to optimize the use of almost any movable physical asset, human or inanimate.
Sustainability information will be vital in advancing business models in industries that are adapting to the realities of a finite Earth meeting the demands of massive emerging markets, Gartner said.
DNA information and the rapidly falling cost of obtaining it will be crucial to innovation and productivity leaps in agriculture, health care and pharmaceuticals, Gartner said, adding that it will also affect insurance and other sectors.
Social graph information will help companies “X-ray” and understand better organization, team design, culture and other factors affecting knowledge worker productivity, yielding insights to advance the intellectual service economy, in much the same way the study of time and motion study did for manufacturing in the 20th century.
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