It's the Volume of Information-Prediction 1

I have been really bored by the "predictions for 2011" posts this year. I do not need to hear anymore about cloud computing, collaboration or social media for the enterprise. Those ideas were interesting in 2008 but not today. At the risk of also being boring, I have three posts planned which include a bit of prediction. The themes are somewhat related and are listed below:

1. The overpowering volume of information
2. Education
3. Validation

This post covers the deluge of information.

First let's set the stage. Steve Jobs in a Wired interview said:

"The world's getting worse. It has gotten worse for the last 15 years or so. Definitely. For two reasons. On a global scale, the population is increasing dramatically and all our structures, from ecological to economic to political, just cannot deal with it."

Nothing new here, but the world is going through one of its periods of exponential growth with China and perhaps India emerging as developed countries. This emergence is stressing everything--the environment, financial markets, political structures, etc. This growth, supported by the new IT technologies, is creating information at unheard of rates. However, as Paul Kedrosky correctly points out in Infectious Greed, we have passed through the "age of too much information" and are now in the "age of viral information" and here in lies the problem. Not only are we creating more information but the exchange of this information is accelerating. 

Nassem Taleb, author of the Black Swan, brings these thoughts to the correct conclusion:

"Connectivity and operational leverage are making cultural and economic events cascade faster and deeper. Anything fragile today will be broken by them." 

The volume and pace of information exchange has surpassed the current systems of governments and other authorities to monitor and react. The financial crisis in 2008 was not caused by just bad financial engineering but also by the fact that market participants had better information systems than the regulators and reacted much more quickly.

Two examples show recognition of my point.

1. The central bank of a distressed European country is now in the process of rebuilding all of its information systems. 
2. The UN has announced a major new initiative to capture worldwide information in real time on natural disasters and make it available to affected governments.

The fearless predictions:

1. Governments will have a tremendous need for better real time information and monitoring systems with a focus on integrating data from a wider range of disbursed sources
2. Once these systems are in place, decision making will need to be decentralized in order to speed up response times
3. Decentralized decision making will require a new form of government with the bureaucracies replaced by stand alone agencies (e.g. TVA) or private sector enterprises with responsibility to respond to disasters (whether they be natural, terrorist or financial)

Chances that any of this will happen--zero! Re-thinking government in the age of viral information is too complex an issue for today's politicians and government dignitaries to grasp. That is why I think it is such a big opportunity for the private sector.

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