The Value of Business Analytics: Identifying the Path to Profitability

THE POWER OF INFORMATION

Revolutions come and revolutions go; while their influence may be obvious in retrospect, it is rare that we appreciate their impact at the time. The one thing they have in common is disruption at all levels of society. First, the agricultural revolution; then the industrial revolution; and now, 60 years into the latter, we have the information revolution.

Information has always been power, but the past few decades have seen a subtle shift occur, fundamentally altering the way we perceive it. It has been only relatively recently that the amount of data available to us has outstripped our ability to investigate that data. At one point in time, it was arguably possible to have read every written word ever set on parchment or papyrus. While the true number will never be known, it is said that King Ptolemy II Philadelphus set the Library of Alexandria a target of 500,000 scrolls. At the time, this represented the largest collection of knowledge in the known world.

Things change. At the time of this book’s publication, the United States Library of Congress had over 33 million books (including other printed material) and 63 million manuscripts. The Internet Archive, capturing only a subset of all the information contained on the Web, has already cataloged almost 2 petabytes of text and is growing at approximately 20 terabytes a month, in itself a larger amount of information than that held by the Library of Congress.

A little over 2,000 years have passed between ...