Overall growth in data volume is without doubt as Eric says, ‘painful for those in the information market’, but drill down further to consider the life and death challenge for every organisation to not only to deal with this phenomenal growth, but most of all; to make sense of it.

As Albert Einstein put it "Information is not knowledge".

Extracting value from such a dynamic resource currently relies on the fact that you know what you are looking for, generally giving rise to fixed rule investigation. The difficulty comes when those rules become redundant / ineffective as the data changes/ grows (even with the aid of mathematical elastic sides).

Reliance on fixed rule investigation alone to deliver sufficient knowledge for key competitive advantage now, let alone in Eric’s forecast, is essentially forlorn. It is almost impossible to cover every pre-defined eventuality arising from the data, let alone retain a shelf life in such a shifting and increasing torrent.

The real need is for a next generation capability to sit alongside current methods to deliver a dynamic knowledge that is fully adaptive to change and with the ability to answer such questions as “tell me what is interesting”, “what should I know about?” etc.

Businesses and Governments do need to deal with ‘the information problem’, but that is only part of it – a very sobering thought.

Information is not knowledge and only knowledge delivers opportunity, success and maybe even survival – if you don’t acquire it, others will and that is likely to be an overwhelming force.


David Sutton