New Information Age

Reflection on New Information Age

     

         Nothing surprising there, except for the idea that this is “a period in human history” — which tends to suggest it will come to an end at some point. The industrial revolution in the late nineteenth century ushered in the industrial age, and the digital revolution in the mid twentieth century spurred the emergence of the information age. So it is not entirely crazy to speculate about what might lie beyond the information age.

         Of course, I am not arguing that information will become obsolete. Firms will always need to harness information in effective ways, just as most of them still need industrial techniques to make their products cheaply and efficiently. My point, instead, is that information will become necessary but not sufficient for firms to be successful. All this talk of “big data,” for example, feels like an attempt to strain a few more drops of juice out of an already-squeezed orange, just as Six Sigma was a way of squeezing more value out of the quality revolution. Both are valuable concepts, but their benefits are incremental, not revolutionary.