Knowledge conversion is the key to success: businesses that know how to convert information into knowledge will be more successful than those that do not. The same is true for information technology companies.

• Author: Martin, Shannon E.
• Position: Business Matters

Any business can provide information, but those that can convert that information to knowledge will be most successful predicted Stan Davis and Jim Botkin in their 1994 Harvard Press Review article "The Coming of Knowledge-Based Business."

A snapshot of information technology (IT) companies listed in 2001 by Standard & Poor's Register support Davis and Botkin's prediction. In addition, there is convincing evidence that, over time, the strategic direction of knowledge conversion has been more successful than that of hardware and storage systems. So much so that today a business' ability to convert information into knowledge may mean the difference between that business' success and failure.

Information Science in the 20th Century

The term "information industry" is a 20th-century reference to the commodification of data and is thought to have been initiated by Vannevar Bush's article, "As We May Think," published by The Atlantic magazine in 1945. As director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development during World War II, Bush urged all who would listen to recognize the store of information that science had amassed up to and during the war. He also emphasized the need to think about how best to organize scientific information and use it for purposes other than destruction. His foresight and call for attention to the information wealth of industrialized society subsequently engaged several social and natural science disciplines to expand the ways in which data about all parts of life and human activities were recorded, stored, retrieved, and used.

Though not many companies immediately took up Bush's call, few industry leaders today would argue with the dominance of the information industry in the marketplace. The shifting descriptions and models for those members of the infromation industry present a snapshot of data collected and compared across time for particular companies that rose to the challenge of providing information services. A review of these information industry entities should offer at least a partial explanation as to why some succeeded while others failed in a time of unprecedented economic growth.

Among the disciplines most immediately responsive to Bush's suggestions were the library and information sciences. Among those coming into the information science community from industry, however, were those with physics, mathematics, economics, and communication technology training. While they often did not share the traditional library education approach to information collection, organization, storage, and retrieval, they very much understood the value of information as it served specific markets and met the needs of consumers.

U.S. sociologist Daniel Bell's research during the 1960s led him to speculate that a majority of the U.S. workforce at that time was engaged in information work and that information was an essential commodity for the second half of the century.

What the Experts Say

Critics of information's emergence as a product of industry include Mark Poster, who charged in his 1990 book, The Mode of Information, that Bell's studies undermined the value of free access to information as a public good for society. "Just when the merger of mass communications and the computer makes possible rapid, universal distribution of information, and therefore in principle extends the democratization of knowledge ... Bell sees fit to authorize the restriction of information to those who can foot the bill," wrote Poster.

Harold Fromm, in his 1991 book, Academic Capitalism & Liberal Value, noted: "The marketplace of ideas, once only a metaphor, has literally become just that, a system of commodities ... where information commands a price and is traded like pork-belly futures."

Irving Horowitz decried this view in his 1991 book Communicating Ideas. Horowitz claimed that Poster seemed to ignore the fact that information was never free and that "knowledge is a hard-earned value."

F. W. Lancaster dismisses the commodities argument, writing in the 1980 proceedings of The Role of the Library in an Electronic Society that "the electronic networks developed in the past 20 years have not created an information elite but have improved access to information for all segments of society."

Still others warn that too often there seems to be a melding of information and knowledge and that more information is not necessarily more knowledge. Political theorist Langdon Winner wrote in his 1986 Questioning Technology article, "Mythinformation," that there is a belief that "speed conquers quantity" and so people work toward information management as the "telos of modern society, its greatest mission."

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