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.
Dear Sir All I want to say: Before reading your blog for me it will be such an honor to work for T&R. And now your blog just makes me want to work for T&R more and this article makes me want to discover these “by-professionals-for-professionals” products. Sincerely cxl
Hi Tom I am not too much of a blog person but I am interested in your views on how information and the businesses around it will change over the next few years. I have been in the industry for just over 8 years (not that long yet) and I have seen some changes. What strikes me the most is the pace of acceleration of these changes in the last couple of years and I think we have not seen much yet. Because of the maturing of certain technoligies like web crawling and text recognition I think that most businesses in this space will be turned upside down although I am not sure how yet. So I’ll be watching this space for any insight. By the way in my previous business – and I am bringing the same concept in the one I joined recently we call it ‘actionable intelligence’. I think it’s very similar to what you refer to as intelligent information. I think though we are moving fast beyond that. I am now looking at ”context” and how the value of information increases based on its context. I don’t think this is a new concept but I think the new tools available now will make things different. Later. Turkish
Dear Tom At the level you have described intelligent information seems quite compelling. What is difficult for me to grasp is how to qualify the quality of the information that is being delivered. Let’s take an extreme case say a barrister who needs to form an opinion before presenting a case to court. At present it takes a huge amount of effort to sift and catalogue all of the relevant information and from that subset the barrister forms an opinion. Now replace the research effort with intelligent information. How does the Barrister jusdge which information stream will be relevant in the particluar instance that is being researched and what confidence to put in that information? Although this could be arrived at by triald and error the value of the intelligent information is only as good as the price ther recipients are prepared to pay adn that will depend on its quality and relevance.
Information in and of itself is useful and necessary but not sufficient. The second part to the Intelligent Information equation is the human aspects that enable it to be useful; similar to what Starborough said above. How does Thomson Reuters propose to work with people in general and leadership in particular to raise the level of human capital to maximize the utility of Intelligent Information? Mark S.
The context sensitivity of information provided to a seeker is perhaps the most relevant things about intelligent information. The more relevant a piece of information is to a seeker the more intelligent that piece of information will be. In response to what Starborough writes I don’t think intelligent information will obviate the need to still sift through what is received: when for example Amazon recommends the next book to buy you still have to peruse the material and make your judgement. The fact that you don’t have to sift through entire Amazon catalog saves a lot of time. The information it provides is tailored to the context within which you are working. So what might Thomson Reuters doing about intelligent information? I would expect them to invest heavily in data and text mining technologies for this purpose. In the realm of business decision-making that TR works in intelligent information service provision has to “anticipate” germane dimensions. Technologies for systemic anticipation would be the key.