Some of the more famous figures in management talked about how industrialized nations transition to a “knowledge economy.” This was believed to be an ongoing process we’d witness over several generations.
I like this definition of knowledge economy:
We define the knowledge economy as production and services based on knowledge-intensive activities that contribute to an accelerated pace of technical and scientific advance, as well as rapid obsolescence. The key component of a knowledge economy is a greater reliance on intellectual capabilities than on physical inputs or natural resources. ^
With the transition to this economy, or rather to the degree of transition to this economy, information technology needs change. Knowledge is organized data; we’re going to need ways to organize our data, experts who signal us through the reams of data and find significant bits, and finally, we’ll need a way to constitute our externalized persona through our information.
Where previous generations of IT were about finding that killer app, our transitional knowledge economy is going to demand data in universal formats that can be manipulated by multiple applications, and possibly, update itself in these many forms with the collaboration of the operating system. People no longer use computers as calculators; soon, they’ll no longer use them as application interfaces.
This new knowledge economy will rely heavily on knowledge workers. …the most striking growth will be in “knowledge technologists:†computer technicians, software designers, analysts in clinical labs, manufacturing technologists, paralegals. …They are not, as a rule, much better paid than traditional skilled workers, but they see themselves as “professionals.†Just as unskilled manual workers in manufacturing were the dominant social and political force in the 20th century, knowledge technologists are likely to become the dominant social—-and perhaps also political—-force over the next decades. ^
As pointed out, people are going to need experts.
These are professionals of an uncredentialed sort, because their most immediate skills are outside of any academic program, since the technologies change too fast. (Later, the industry will recognize how important a solid founding in both technological concepts and humanities including critical thought can be, but that’s a ways off.)
On the UK’s Guardian newspaper site today, writer Jemina Kiss suggested that Web 3.0 will be about recommendation. “If web 2.0 could be summarized as interaction, web 3.0 must be about recommendation and personalization,” she wrote. Using Last.fm and Facebook’s Beacon as an example, Kiss painted a picture of a web where personalized recommendation services can feed us information on new music, new products, and where to eat. It’s a marketers dream and it’s really not far off from the definitions we’ve come up with in the past here on ReadWriteWeb. ^
These experts will manage everything from the mundane to the exotic. They are like the buddy you have who knows all the good restaurants, or the kid on the block everyone goes to with their computer problems.
4. Change the charts: The Charts don’t make much sense anymore. Now that fewer and fewer people are buying music the charts need to reflect the other ways that people are consuming music.
5. Trust the DJ: Online means anyone can access or own John Peel’s entire record collection, but the instant and massive availability of music on demand means you need a trusted guide like John Peel more than ever. The new layers of value will come from the social connections that come about through music as much as from the music itself. ^
These knowledge economians are going to be less interested in rote process, and more interested in both efficiency and marketing. I don’t think, however, that there will actually be a “web economy” distinct from the knowledge economy.
The knowledge worker (the executive in Drucker’s quote) goes after individual productivity; the web worker after group-based, collaborative, wisdom-of-crowds productivity. The knowledge worker cuts out unproductive uses of time; the web worker cuts out redundant information sources. The knowledge worker focuses on time efficiency; the web worker on attention expansion. ^
The web economy is a subset of the knowledge economy. While the web is still new, people are trying to use it as if it were a replacement economy. It’s more consistent to say it is one view of our economy, but that the rules are the same. You need to get customer to product, producer to market, and inform all parties of the advantage of this arrangement. The “web economy” as described above is a type of specialized marketing that operates within the knowledge economy.
Where will IT go in this brave new world?
Ultimately I hope that I can keep my identity, friend list, photographs, videos and everything else that constitutes the (de)Centralized Me at any service provider that I trust (meaning I trust them to protect that data, but never go against my wishes and try to keep it to themselves if that isn’t what I want), and just tell sites like Facebook and everyone else where to grab it. ^
We’re going to need a data-centric world, so that we can produce knowledge (organized data) from the masses of stuff out there. This will be the basic process: filter, arrange, add hierarchy and then, add marketing.
For this to happen, we need a few more things:
- We’re going to need a gadget to browse this data from anywhere. I suggest a hybrid phone, ebook reader and netbook.
- We’re going to need a universal format to stick our data in, so that it can exist in multiple places at once, with multiple permissions like we give to file systems, and the option to update itself automatically in different applications and/or add programmatic functionality to the data itself. XML/RDF will take care of the first part of this, but the operating system is going to have to grow to do the rest.
- We’re going to need a new culture based on the information ecosystem that gives us rights and expectations and customs based around keeping our data, both public and private, where we need it. Old etiquette was based on recognizing the individual and her rights; the new etiquette will be recognizing the rights of individuals to their data.
As part of this, ideas like data portability are going to become mainstream. We want the ability to take our data out of any specific application (like Microsoft Word) or web site (like Facebook) or operating system (like Mac OS) and move it to all others, with no restrictions, because there are going to be some interesting mashups.
Microsoft wasn’t interested in creating some grandiose 1980s’ style computer-aided-software-engineering (CASE) tool; it was thinking more along the lines of providing a class designer. The goal, according to Box: “putting more and more of your application into data and putting less in code.†^
All of this is part of our long, slow transition into a knowledge economy. Data is now cheap; it’s everywhere, and storage is cheap, too. Processing time is cheap. And we have lots of trained people.
“Then I went online, thinking the net must help me, but I was having to spend a lot of time finding sites. There was no central place that aggregated everything. I thought there really is an opportunity here. Not even Google can tell me where I can buy a red leather sofa.†^
It’s now a race to produce the perfect design, the perfect meme, the best explanation, and get it to your audience. That’s where the knowledge economy and information technology overlap.