In October 2010 Peter Songergaard, head of research at Gartner, stated that information will be of vital importance to our economy. “At the heart of the change, the next 20 years will be intelligence drawn from information,” according to Gartner’s Senior Vice President, Peter Sondergaard. “Information will be the ‘oil of the 21st century’. It will be the resource running our economy in ways not possible in the past.”

There’s two important aspects to this comparison. The first one has to do with oil being one of the most important resources for our worldwide economy. Especially for knowledge-based economies such as ours in the Netherlands this is becoming a fact of life. Organizational transparency is enforced both by law as well as by the public. Social media and the New Way of Working have caused an additional breach in Chinese walls surrounding the organization.

Protecting the information you have from the outside world is not what matters, it is making the most of that information. It’s about being smarter than the competition when it comes to processing information available, in order to facilitate better and faster decision making.

The second aspect of the comparison has to do with the fact that oil is become a scarce resource. All over the world engineers are working on ways to find alternatives for oil, as this resource is not without unconstrained. This is where the comparison goes wrong. Not only does information seems unrestrained, the opposite is likely to be true. There is an abundance of information, which stresses the importance of adequate processing. What is a scarce resource however, is knowledge, maybe even wisdom. Information as such is available everywhere, and there’s tons of it. But that doesn’t help us in becoming more efficient of effective.

What Sondergaard is trying to say is that in an economy where intelligence will become the decisive factor for being successful, organizations must strive to enable their knowledge workers to stay ahead of the information tsunami. Knowledge workers must be given the tools and methodologies to find all information they need, and to process them in ways that allow for insight. Data manipulation, reporting, visualizations, case management solutions and collaborative environments are all part of the solution for Enterprise Information Management.

Information is not the oil of the economy, knowledge is.