I thought I'd share with the readers of this blog a brief thought-piece I wrote explaining why Thomson Reuters is focused on providing what we call "intelligent information."  The subject is a bit closer to my "day" job than I usually like to write about on this blog, but these days my day job is not leaving much time for anything else.

In his 1977 doctorial dissertation called the “Information Economy,” technology visionary Marc Uri Porat defined the information economy as occurring when labor related to the creation, processing and dissemination of information exceeds work related to the other three economic sectors – agriculture, industry and service.  Based on that definition, Proat tells us that the information economy arrived in the West in 1967, when 53 percent of labor income in the total workforce was derived from the information sector.

Forty years later, information is at the core of all economic sectors in the developed world, and an increasingly influential element in emerging markets.  The amount of information, how we receive and consume it and whether or not we trust it has been radically altered with the advent of the Internet.  This revolution has also created a growing global need for “intelligent” information.

What is intelligent information? It is certainly insightful and well written text, but it is also dynamic content delivered in electronic formats.  It is self-describing, self-organizing and action-oriented.  As we pass from Web 2.0 to the semantic web envisioned for Web 3.0, intelligent information will be its common language.

Intelligent information has never been more valuable.  Professionals will pay for just the right information delivered at just the right time and place in their workflow.  In fact, people like lawyers, doctors, scientists, accountants and those who power the world’s financial markets will pay to be given less information – but precisely the right information that helps them make better decisions, faster.

Consider this: None of us would pay for tomorrow’s weather forecast because the information has been commoditized; it is universally available.  If you are a provider of consumer-grade weather information, you have little option other than to monetize your content via advertising.  But imagine that you provide very accurate long-range hurricane forecasts; now businesses such as property and casualty insurers will pay you handsomely for your professional grade information. 

With the number of professionals growing, especially in emerging markets like China and India, the global demand for intelligent information is booming.  The world, in a sense, is professionalizing and doing so in real time.  At the same time, physical industries are transforming into information businesses. We saw this in financial markets as currencies went off the gold standard and began trading electronically.  A similar transformation is underway in the pharmaceuticals industry. Once a chemical compound discovery and manufacturing business, it is now all about decoding, analyzing and manipulating the human genome.

As a result, a huge opportunity has emerged for companies that can provide access to intelligent information. The information majors are already establishing their territories. 

At Thomson Reuters we are staking our claim to the delivery of the kind of critical intelligent information that professional decision-makers must rely upon to do their jobs.   

We will provide this professional-grade information and related applications to businesses and professionals in the financial, legal, tax and accounting, media, scientific and healthcare markets.  These markets require huge amounts of information, typically delivered in real-time, which can be consumed by machines as well as human beings.

To meet these demands, the new class of “information majors” will need to be global, highly innovative, experts in each sector they seek to serve, and able to invest in huge databases and sophisticated search and data mining capabilities.

We are building such a company at Thomson Reuters, and based on the people and assets of the companies coming together to form this new information leader, we are already well on our way.