Whilst watching a re-run recently of ‘Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb’, it struck me that we are approaching a genuine watershed – a tipping point if you like – in relation to how organizations can, and ultimately must, respond to what I’d describe as the Third Information Age. 

If we turn the clock back, the First Information Age was arguably characterized by a relative scarcity of information for organizations, along with the technical challenges of capturing and using it.

In the (current) Second Age, we have witnessed the explosion of new digital media and content channels, platforms and devices. In this scenario, the challenge for organizations has been in trying to manage all of the huge volumes of unstructured information that are being generated and shared every single day.

But I believe a Third Age is now dawning. Here, organizations will acknowledge the ultimate futility of trying to manage what I’d term as escalating ‘information inflation’. Not simply the sheer volume and diversity of information being created, but the associated increase in human, technology and organizational costs of trying to manage what is essentially unmanageable.

A point is being reached where the costs of directly tackling this information inflation outweigh the business benefits.

Far better, smarter (and less costly) is to make information inflation irrelevant. Accept that your organization cannot ultimately keep up with the spread of unstructured information and instead focus resources on how best to intelligently search and extract what you need from the ‘chaos’.

The information genie is now well and truly out of the bottle and won’t go back in.

So, stop worrying about it and instead think about how your organization can turn the genie to your advantage.

We’re pleased to relay the news that our new ISYS 9 Suite was named to KMWorld’s Trend Setting Product list of 2008.  Obviously we’re biased on this one, but we believe our latest enterprise search offering gives our customers even greater “beyond search” power, unlocking the true potential of parametric search, navigation, results refinement and discovery.

As we add new ISYS 9 customers and learn more about their ISYS implementations, we’ll post those user stories on our website and blog. So be sure to check back often.