Everything About Everything: If Information Is Power, Why Aren’t We More Powerful?

If Information Is Power, Why Aren’t We More Powerful? or Everything About Everything is a futuristic tale about infocentricity and a young man with a nose for information and an inquiring mind. It is an inspirational text about information recycling and reuse. The premise is that today, enterprises don’t know what they do know and, as a consequence, pay over and over in time, money and human energy to learn the same information. Today IT is 99% about technology and 1% about information. To change this will require a change to the underlying culture. When this change happens, we may even see corporate balance sheets including pre-positioned information as a corporate asset, much as inventories and other tangibles are valued. As today and tomorrow’s youth make their transition to the work force, several issues arise, chief among which is the question: Why would bright, young, computer literate people want to join enterprises that are in the technological and informational Dark Ages? The purpose of this text is to show enterprise managers why they must reinvent their information husbanding approaches to overcome enterprise amnesia, not only to remain competitive in the information-efficient world of tomorrow, but also to attract and retain their next generation of talent. Companies like the author’s firm, CAI/SISCo of Frederick, Maryland, have long been practicing what they preach and reaping the reward. Husbanding and leveraging pre-positioned information has reduced their competitive analysis and price to win (PTW) practice costs by at least 20%, allowing the enterprise to increase market share without increasing head count.