It may be the information age, but what we experience on a daily basis has a lot more in common with the middle ages–with feudal lords and knights–than it does with the modern economy.
Most of the infrastructure that we associate with the modern state has yet to be implemented when it comes to information. In other words, there’s a lot of work to do before we get anywhere close to the nirvana held up by BI analysts and vendors.
- There’s no equivalent of a common currency to facilitate trade–i.e. a universal layer to connect different information sources. Today, we’re still at the stage of barter, with painful one-off transactions each time we need to compare and combine information. The semantic web, among many other initiatives, aims to help the problem, but progress remains limited. If you compare modern finance to barter, you can’t help thinking that we have a long, long way to travel.
- There’s no equivalent of a central jurisdiction and police force to enforce information rules and regulations — each company / industry / country sets its own rules on who can access what information in which circumstances. We can expect this problem to becomes proportionately more important and difficult to resolve the closer we get to achieving point 1.
- There’s no equivalent of democracy. Today’s corporate hierarchies resemble nothing so much as the (surprisingly complex) systems of lords and vassals. Today, everybody has their part to play in the modern economy. But strategy and information sharing are still thought to be something that only the elite care about. The arguments used to defend this sound strikingly familiar to those used to oppose the expansion of democracy over the last few hundred years: “you can’t have too many people involved”, “people don’t care”, “people aren’t informed enough to pass judgment”, etc.
The good news? Maybe thanks to “internet time“, we can fast-forward to the age of information enlightenment in less than four centuries.