Introducing Infocounting? – A new Approach to Valuing Information as an Asset

For the past 2 years I have been busy helping Digital Atmosphere create a concept and software that collectively deliver a new approach to Enterprise Information Management. Up to now, our patent and trademark submissions have prevented me talking publicly about it. However, now we have completed those activities sufficiently to allow me to begin to share publicly what we are doing.

What Is Infocounting??

Organizations often proclaim the company’s workforce as “their biggest asset”. In an increasingly competitive global market, companies seek to compete through continual productivity enhancement and innovation. Knowledge workers are charged with driving the company forward with ever increasing efficiency improvements and organization enhancements. In this quest, an organization’s information has become its key strategic asset and its information management systems, its strategic business tools.

Yet traditional accounting approaches offer no support for the tracking of information as an asset, nor for the evaluation of an organization’s ongoing ability to manage it. Instead they focus on the inflow and outflow of cash as an indirect and lagging measure of the organization’s information efficiency.

Likewise, traditional software development approaches focus on end-users, striving to deliver functional and non-functional requirements of isolated business information systems. “Information management” systems, such as electronic documents, email, file shares and SharePoint are little more than digital dustbins of uncontrolled, uncountable and duplicated digital data.

What is required is a new way of accounting for information. Information must be tracked as assets, information balance sheets must be constructed that show information assets and measure human capital. Information profit and loss accounts must be created that track how effectively an organization creates, utilizes and destroys information.

In short, a new positive information accounting discipline is required – This is Infocounting.

How Does It Work?

Digital Atmosphere’s dA2 software framework provides a number of productivity enhancing extensions to commonly deployed information worker platforms, such as Office?, SharePoint?, tablets and phones. Our Entity Lifecycle Framework (ELF) overlays an information management lifecycle and metadata framework for managing business entities, such as project assets allowing us to easily collect, aggregate and reuse emails, documents, tasks, contacts and metadata.

All of our software assets are Infocounting enabled, allowing us to continually aggregate activity information and to pass those data feeds through our proprietary Infocounting algorithms to generate perspective driven Infocounts. We record both positive and negative information asset events and apply business context to the information that we process. If left alone, the value of your information assets will depreciate.

If you have some level of financial literacy, consider our Infocounts as Balance Sheet and Profit and Loss views of your corporate Information (as an asset). We borrow accounting style visualizations and apply them to information, creating Infocounts that can be viewed from any perspective from the individual worker to the organization as a whole and can be understood and actioned up to board level.

Why do I need it?

Infocounting finally provides a simple, continuous mechanism for measuring, managing and valuing information in the enterprise. At their basic level, your Infocounts provide an instant visualization of your information content (emails, documents, tasks) and their use (or not as the case may be). You can immediately determine how much information you have in a particular department, project or your email repositories. You can then start to answer questions like:

? Which information is actually important to us?
? Is anyone actually using our SharePoint? installation (and why are we spending so much money on it)?
? Is there an information deficit in project X?

Delving deeper, the application of Infocounting helps standardize, enforce and measure the effectiveness of your information governance policies and information management approach. It allows you to easily distinguish between the important and the irrelevant, to intervene early in projects were information deficits exist. When you improve your information management practice (for example, by reviewing key documents or removing duplicated and out of date information) your Infocounts will immediately reflect this. Thus, information management through Infocounts is easy and intuitive, allowing good information management to become embedded practice and “second nature” within the business.

Our underlying premise is that better information management leads to better business outcomes. By identifying scenarios where duplicated or out of date information is in use (such as the wrong quality manual or an out of date specification) or where an information deficit exists, we can prevent what would otherwise become expensive or potentially harmful mistakes, such as a construction team building the wrong thing or workers following unsafe working practices with the consequences that may entail. We are currently pioneering research with a number of Australian Universities to elaborate this assumption and to provide the necessary academic rigor to underpin our Infocounting algorithms and approach. We are also talking to our industry partners to explore how Infocounting might be used to improve health and safety and risk management outcomes though better information management.

How Do I Get It?

To use Infocounting today, you will need to partner with us. For the past two years, we have been working with forward thinking organizations to fine tune our software, services and our creative thinking. At the same time, we are making a large (and ongoing) investment in our core software, services and tools. If you would like to be part of that journey, then talk to us about our co-development options to start deploying information worker software that your people will actually use and gain insights into your information that you never thought possible.