Top Secret Information

Knowledge is power

We talk a lot about big data; it is the new thing, the magic bullet that will solve all your organisational woes. No matter what your problem… the solution is in the data.

This is the information age. We are knowledge workers and knowledge is power. Data is an asset, we should hold onto it, protect it, it is the new gold. It is your biggest corporate strength.

Am I talking rubbish?

Is this really the start of something new?

Our obsession with data didn’t start sometime in the past 10 years, it really started in 1440 when Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press

Before the printing press the only way to record information was by hand

Books were a rarity; few people could read or write.

Books and information were the preserve of the very wealthy. They were painstakingly copied down by hand. Imagine how much you would have to pay for a hand written and illustrated copy of the bible. And then imagine how many transcription errors there were in every copy.

It is a wonder we kept the level of knowledge we did.

But that all changed when the printing press was invented. After that a book that took months to produce could be printed in days. The price of information dropped and its availability rocketed.

And as the cost of information dropped the use of it shot up, people shared ideas, built on them, recorded what they had learnt and shared it again.

Without the printing press there would be no agricultural revolution, no steam engine, no antibiotics and certainly no internet.

Knowledge isn’t power

Knowledge is useless until you share it, build on it, record it and share it again.

Should you be guarding your data assets, or sharing them?

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Image by Cocoabiscuit