INDIAN INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY ROORKEE

INFORMATION AS A RESOURCE

Team Members:
C. Krishna Kishore 17810016
Dushyant Yadav 17810021
Aniket Masurekar 17810033
Sahil Jatale 17810058
 About the Author

• Harlan Cleveland was a political scientist and public executive and also a
professor and director of University of Minnesota’s Hubert H. Humphrey
Institute of Public Affairs

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Managing Information as a Resource

• The resources of the Industrial age were tangible things like raw materials,
human resources and were easily understood.
• In the emerging post- Industrial society there is little understanding of
characteristics of information – the basic yet abstract/intangible resource.
• Both physical resources and information can be mined, processed, bought,
sold and managed.
• Information Resource Management means the planning, budgeting,
organizing, directing, promoting, controlling and management activities
associated with the burden, collection, creation, use and dissemination of
information by agencies and organizations.

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Even the Caveman Needs Knowledge to Survive

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Information, Knowledge & Wisdom

• According to the Author,

Information – The sum total of all facts and ideas that are available to be known by
somebody at any given moment at any time

Knowledge – Result of purifying the mass of facts and ideas, selecting and
organizing what is useful to somebody

Wisdom – Integrated Information and knowledge made super useful by theory

rooted in disciplined knowledge

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Information, Knowledge & Wisdom

• The distinction between information and knowledge – or knowledge and wisdom

is subjective
• As per the author it is probably not important to search for universal
agreement on distinction between knowledge, information and wisdom
• According to Chinese-American Geographer Yi-Fu Tuan
The difference is in the order of complexity.

Information is horizontal

Knowledge is structured and hierarchical

Wisdom is organized and flexible

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DIKW (Information) Hierarchy
Wisdom Know why
Integrating: Connect the dots

Knowledge Know how

Learning: Derive rules/policies
through experiences & patterns

Information Know what

Analyzing: To support
decision making

Data Know nothing

Observing: Description of events

Event Happening/Doing
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The "lnformatisation" of Society
• A century ago, fewer than 10% of the American labor force were doing information
work; now more than 50% of us may be engaged in it. The actual production, extraction,
and growing of things now soaks up less than a quarter of our human resources. Of all
the rest, which used to be lumped as "services," perhaps two-thirds are information
workers.

• It is not only in the United States that the informatisation of society has proceeded so far
so fast. As study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development,
indicates that the information component of the labor force increased its share of the
total by 2.8% during each five­year period from World War II to 1972

• While having fewer laborers in production and more in services is not new, what is new
is the pace of change made possible by the con­verging revolutions of computers and
telecommunications along with the dawning mass realization that something very large
and important is occurring under our very noses. When a much-read philosopher of
business administration such as Peter Drucker starts calling knowl­edge "the central
capital, the cost center, and the crucial resource of the economy," non-philosophers
preoccupied with the managing of organizations have to sit up and take notice.

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• G. Edward Schuh says, “The increase in agricultural out­put from the mid-1920s through
the mid-1970s came with no increase in the capital stock of physical resources.
• It was all due to increase in productiv­ity, with most of that due to new knowledge or
information. That makes clear the extent to which knowledge is an input or resource."

• We have grown up thinking of business as built on resources as­ things. But the physical
component of most business now is a small base for an inverted pyramid of organ­ized
information. Most people in business now work on ideas, procedures, marketing,
advertising, ad­ ministration, and trying to stay out of trouble with the consumers, the
regulators, and the law.

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Characteristics of Information

1. Information is expandable
2. Information is compressible
3. Information is substitutable
4. Information is transportable
5. Information is diffusive
6. Information is sharable

• New kind of resource.

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• Crucial resource.
1. Information is expandable
– Some information is certainly depletive over time.
– Information expands as it is used. And, many industries have grown up to
exploit this.
– “ We trade glut with scarcity, flood for drought.”
– The ultimate limits to growth of knowledge and wisdom are :
• Time
• Capacity of people to analyse and think integrative
2. Information is compressible
– This infinitely expandable information can be miniaturised for easier
handling
• Complex cases in single theorem.
• Insights from masses of data into a single formulae

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3. Information is substitutable
– It can replace capital, labour and physical materials.
– “ Workers who have previously helped grow or extract or make things, or
who have been in non-information services, will have to learn information
workers ,-- or get used to being unemployed. “

4. Information is transportable
– At the speed of light
– It bought major change in transportability of resources greater than multi-
millennial shift In less than a century.
5. Information is diffusive
– It tends to leak – and more it leaks more we have
– Dfs
– Excellent

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6. Information is sharable
– Information by nature can’t go rise to exchange transactions, only to sharing
transactions.

New Kind of Resource

– Different from other kinds of resources
– Concepts like scarcity, bulk, limited substitutability, trouble in transporting
notion in hiding and hoarding the resource are not applicable for information.
– A society in which information is dominant resource is not necessarily better
or worse , unlike industrial or agricultural societies
– Finally, the benefit of information as a resource only realized if it is in the
hands of right persons, for right purposes in a quality form.

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 Implications for Human Life

The implications of treating information as a resource are enormous, for life-styles

and workways, for human community and inhuman conflict.

The author believes that the implications are especially great for changes in the way
we think about life, work, community and conflict.

The information is now expandable, compressible, substitutable, highly

transportable, diffusive and shareable.

Information is also challenging the definition or changing the rules of

• Political Economy
• Economics
• Law
• Accounting
• Education

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• Information revolution is producing a revolution is producing a revolution in the
technology of organization.
• Information is the basis of human organization. People with better or more
information controls the rest of mankind.
• Since the information could be rapidly collected and analyzed, instantly
communicated , the monopolies are subjected to erosion.
• Previously, the leadership of uninformed people was likely to be organized in
hierarchy of command and control but now leadership of informed people is likely
to result in effective action.
• Shared responsibilities rather than command structures are more natural basis
for organization.
• Planning has to be a dynamic improvisation after a consultation with leaders who
will improvise on it.
• Participatory decision making implies a need for much feedback information that
is widely available. It involves more transparency and less secrecy.

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Thank You

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