The Currency of Information: What Kind of Asset Is Data? (Part Two)

Gresham’s Law, familiar to most people, states that bad currencies eventually drive good currencies out of circulation. But there’s a corollary to Gresham’s Law, called Thier’s Law, which says that Gresham’s Law applies only to “fiat currencies,” that is, in cases where the government (or some similar authority) decrees that both currencies have th... See more

data needs to be managed for quality, timeliness, consistency, reusability, and business relevance

The purpose of metadata is not simply to describe data and information assets, but rather to proactively answer questions that consumers might have about them. Where did this data come from? How up to date is it? How trustworthy is it? What business process(es) created it? What business process(es) use it? What transformations or filtering have bee... See more

In a world rapidly accelerating toward automation and measurement, data is a commodity. Filtered, labeled, and processed data is the most valuable asset. Thus, information processing is the most important force of our reality. It’s critical that this power is decentralized.

Depending on the user profile and specific use case, there may be other drivers of dataset value:

• Provable compliance becomes more valuable as a data asset traverses its maturity curve. In the early days, when the utility of the data is unknown, participants are less inclined to pay for compliance. But as the ecosystem matures, this becomes more of

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We must understand, evaluate, and account for wholly new, non-monetary forms of ownership, and assets of great value that have extraordinary effect, but no tangible market price or mathematical means of measurement, such as participatory rights, alliances, systemic interdependence, and defined relationships, or else the stories we tell of our insti... See more

The value of information is determined by what’s discarded in the process of creating it.

Information is economic sunshine. Do you capture it and trade it around or do you let it bounce away?