Thumbs up for the knowledge (r)evolution

Hold a tennis raquet and look at your grip: What makes it possible to hit balls hurling towards you are your opposable thumbs. Now imagine that you are wielding an axe, which is probably more important to human evolution than a tennis raquet, and you are well on your way to appreciating the significance of opposable thumbs.

Using tools, early humans started to build our civilisation. To accelerate matters, we built machines and gave the machines tools to manipulate materials like metals. JP Rangaswami has published some intriguing thoughts arguing that we are on the verge of defining the equivalent of machine tools for the information economy. Brace yourself for value generation on an unprecedented scale.

We may be starting to see glimpses of what the new machine tools look like. Just like we have modularised construction of houses and cars, we are starting to share snippets of knowledge and use them to build larger constructs, e.g. contracts. Mechanisms such as search and RSS let us traffic knowledge in new ways, allowing us to consume more relevant knowledge per time unit.

We are going to use that capability to become better at making decisions. Better means being able to make more decisions per time unit and increasing the quality of each decision. Business is about decisions, it is about making the right decisions at the right time and reducing the risk associated with a decision. Higher quality decisions will happen when we base them on the insights of many more people, each of whom is able to process more knowledge per decision.

The new tools are being developed by gangs of hobbyists, start-up businesses and a few established firms. The early prototypes are slowly being adopted by enterprises; the traditional business case arguments failing to quantify the benefits when faced with radical process change.