We’ve heard a lot about it. I’ve spoken a lot about it. Information Age 2.0 is here.
The second generation of the information age is not about information for the sake of organizational optimization or creating efficiencies within the business. That was the first generation.
Information Age 2.0 is all about creating corporate growth. It’s all about fueling business, the production of revenue and profit from our information assets.
It’s leveraging information assets in brand-new ways that create momentum, brand equity, and revenue growth for the business.
Businesses are starting to look at byproducts, the waste of the business. These just naturally happen within any business and they are an ignored asset. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure, and we’ve seen that in a lot of different industries. However, we’ve never seen it as powerfully as we’re seeing it in this second-generation information age.
For example, we used to see businesses where the computers were no longer used become a recycling business. These businesses are taking tangible assets that weren’t considered a core part of the profit center and turning them into revenue growth for the company.
Coca-Cola had an incredible asset: high-quality water used for their soda products. They realized they could bottle the water and sell it for next to no cost. That created a brand-new revenue generating product for them: selling bottled water. It completely changed the sector. Today, bottled water is huge. Who would have thought? This was simply a byproduct. Their ability to have great clean water came from their need to use water in order to build soda.
Today, more and more businesses are looking at the data information and content that they have within their companies. It is simply just laying around within the enterprise. They’re looking at new, interesting ways to turn that information and data into software products.
How do you take these byproducts–the intellectual capital and data that you have–and turn it into a revenue-generating product that consumers or other businesses will buy because it is so valuable?
We’re seeing services industries who know their consumers so well because of the tons of data, information, and insights they have. This has great potential to be turned into a SaaS platform or a software product to provide assets to other industries that may be interested in their market.
Technology companies are not only embedding their technology within the plethora of devices, but they’re also able to capture interesting new data and combine it with other publicly available data and information. They can then provide insights that, until today, were unavailable.
Data byproducts. Information byproducts. They’re the new raw materials, the new minerals, that sit within the mountains that are the companies today. We have to go mining for them. Think about where and what they are.
As soon as we know them, we can take these natural resources of businesses and turn them into powerful assets that drive revenue and revenue growth. These can provide something different for our customers that can quickly monetize and get us to the next level of our business.