Infonomics: The New Economics of Information

Increasingly, IT and business executives talk about information as one of their most important assets. But few behave as if it is. Executives report to the board on the health of their workforce, their financials, their customers, and their partnerships, but rarely the health of their information assets. And corporations typically exhibit greater discipline in managing and accounting for their office furniture than their data.

Watch this virtual session, led by Mr. Douglas Laney, as he shares insights from his best-selling book, Infonomics, about how organizations can actually treat information as an actual enterprise asset. He will discuss why information both is and isn’t an asset and property, and what this means to organizations themselves and the investment community. And he will cover the issues of information ownership, rights, and privileges, along with alternative data challenges and opportunities, and his set of generally accepted information principles culled from other asset management disciplines.

You will also learn how to:

• Monetize information assets in a wide variety of ways, including a number of real world examples

• Manage information as an actual asset by applying asset management principles and practices from other asset domains

• Measure information’s potential and realized value to help budget for and prove data management benefits

• And how classic microeconomic concepts can be applied to information for improved data architecture & management, and economic benefits

Douglas Laney

Adjunct Clinical Assistant Professor of Accountancy

Douglas Laney is an adjunct clinical assistant professor of accountancy at the University of Illinois Gies College of Business. He teaches an MBA course on Infonomics. This course along with others including an Introduction to Business Analytics, and a capstone course are all also available on Coursera. He also is on the faculty at Carnegie Mellon University where he teaches executive courses in data moneitization and data & analytics maturity, and he is co-chair of the annual MIT Chief Data Officer Symposium. Laney earned a BS in software engineering and business administration from the University of Illinois in 1986. He also is the Data & Analytics Strategy Innovation Fellow at the digital services consultancy West Monroe where he consults to business, data, and analytics leaders on realizing new value streams from their data assets. He originated the field of infonomics and authored the best-selling book, “Infonomics: How to Monetize, Manage, and Measure Information as an Asset for Competitive Advantage.” And his new book “Data Juice: 101 Real-World Stories of Organizations Squeezing Value from Data” has just been published. Previously, he was a distinguished analyst with Gartner’s chief data officer research and advisory group, and is a three-time Gartner annual thought leadership award recipient. Laney also writes for Forbes and other business and technology journals.