Information Age: News, analysis & insight for IT & business leaders

For the first several decades of the ‘information age’, technological innovation was sponsored primarily by large business. Consumers and small businesses would only take up a technology if two things happened: the prices fell and the usability improved to the point where no real training was required.

Today, the tide of innovation is increasingly flowing the other way. Consumers are employees too, and when they use smart mobile technology and advanced services over the web, they naturally ask: Why can’t we do this at work?

This effect is nowhere more evident that in search technology – the ability to retrieve just the right information from large, mostly unstructured, data sources. For five decades, some of the world’s top computer scientists have been working in this area, but in spite of its importance, it has been as much of an academic as a commercial pursuit.

The impact of Google, Ask, Yahoo and others has changed all that, even if their solutions are too simplistic for many enterprise applications. Their technical success and popularity with consumers has re-invigorated work in search technology and encouraged a wave of investment and innovation. This is important, because businesses report they are struggling desperately to deal with their masses of unstructured information.

But the innovation will not stop there: as our lead article discusses, improving information management and search technologies may lead to a new wave of automation, with computers better able to reliably extract meaning from data and use this to take and act upon decisions.

That alone could have dramatic consequences. But as our second feature on disruptive innovations demonstrates, similar advances can be seen in a host of similar areas, mostly with a consumer focus. It is almost a cliché to say it, but the information age has barely started.