I think about information as an asset. I think that the term "asset" works wonders when you need to focus on the true value (or otherwise) of any corpus of information.
What is the most significant thing that most of us have done with our information assets in the last, say, 10 years? For most folks I would wager that the answer to this is that we put them up on the Internet or perhaps our local intranets. If you had electronic information assets over a decade ago you have most probably "web-enabled" them by now. If you had paper-based information assets over a decade ago, you have probably captured them to some web-friendly format by now.
When web-enabling any non-trivially sized corpus of information, an interesting reorganization dynamic kicks in. The higher the degree of granularity imparted to the information, the more useful it is in electronic form. In simple terms, think of each chunk of information as a web page. To a first degree approximation, the smaller the chunks of information, the better.
For example, if I navigate to this quarter's sales figures, I don't (typically) want a 300 page document loaded into my browser. I would like the information broken down by region or by product so that I can load it into my browser in focused, bite-sized chunks.
To take another example, if I navigate to the complete works of Shakespeare, I do not (typically) want a single web page loaded into my browser. I want to pick from a list of plays/poems, then perhaps pick a particular part of a play/poem and finally, get a small, focused document loaded into my browser.
This process of splitting one large asset up into lots of smaller assets that are more useful (read "valuable") on their own is the conceptual analog of asset stripping[1] in a financial sense. If it wasn't for the generally negative connotations associated with the financial term, we could use it in the information business. Regardless of the connotations however, the concept is sound. Namely, when it comes to information assets, the sum of the parts generally does amount to more than the sum of the whole in value terms.
This surplus value, this web dividend (to use another financial-oriented term) comes about for an interesting reason. Why are information assets split into pieces when they are web-enabled? Is it because organizations see the web dividend that is there to be profited from? Sometimes, yes, but generally I suspect not.
Most of the time, the web dividend accrues as an accident. A sort of happy, innocent, unavoidable result of a technical limitation of the web. To put the limitation in its simplest possible terms, the web works best with small documents. There you have it. It is as simple as that. From this technical limitation, a significant - sometimes very significant - unlocking of value from existing information assets is often triggered.
Some time ago in this column I talked about constraints as innovation vectors[2]. This column has been about technical constraints as a value vector.
Aren't technical constraints wonderful? Let's have more of those!
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asset_stripping
[2] http://www.itworld.com/Man/2672/nls_ebiz_innovation061003/
