I will make it clear in this blog that IT is not going to mean Information Technology, but Information Trust.
Yes. You guessed it right. IT more often than not stands for Information Technology. That accepted, I could bracket all the developments happening in connecting people through devices like iPhones, iPads and Internet as nothing but developments in Information Transmission – IT once again. Moving along, all those apps that work on these newer platforms, which are processing information can be called as tools for processing information or simply put, Information Tools – IT once again. Before I go into expanding on IT as Information Trust, let us analyze a certain market condition that we all come to know will exist and experience to different degrees.
Pause for a moment to think the number of manufacturers who are in the me-too business to commoditize anything that comes out in the market as novel and attracts wide spread attention and demand. The variants of the same appear like mutants within a matter of weeks. If I tell you that there are 30000+ CPUs (central processing units) to do nothing but doing the same computational thing faster and faster you may begin to wonder where I am going with this example.
It is all about IT – Information Trust. It has got to do everything with the levels of trust factor that me-to products or services experience in the market. When I go by what Tom Peters says as ‘Brand is Talent’, more known the brand is, more trust you develop in the talent behind the branded product or service. However, that talent does not come from just one or two things or people. It is some sort of consolidation in terms of teams capable of performing certain tasks at a higher skill or confidence level or consolidation of knowledge that is capable of solving the problems or innovative enough to set itself from the rest.
More we delve into this aspect of information trust we see a pattern emerging. Me-too products will be trusted less initially and hence the talent behind them. However, instead of embarking on me-too products, if a business continues to thrive on what it is well-known for, I think the road to innovation will become less thorny and we could see innovation taking on a newer meaning. I am not sure I have made the connection yet with Trust and Innovation, but please read on.
This example gives us a certain meaning to Information Trust. The type and the kind of information that is communicated to the customer, and, way in which it is communicated is what develops the Trust in the products or services that a business provides. That quantifies Information Trust – no matter what the quality of the product is. If a quality of a product is communicated without the noise (or you may call it hype), the information trust that is developed might be good enough to buy that product as an alternative to a more expensive product.
The problem is, me-too products and services implicitly carry the notion of trust by the look and feel of the product, but will not carry the same trust to back the product up when the product breaks down. Just to address such problems we see plethora of governing bodies, regulatory or compliance bodies and other infrastructures coming into existence just to attend to such notional abuse of the trust factor. On extreme occasions the trust factor has brought down economies of the world on the higher end of the spectrum and companies at the lower end of the spectrum.
It is easy to blame over-regulation when economy suffers and under-regulation when the vibrant economy collapses without examining the Information Trust. Such mis-directed regulations do not help to rectify the problem as they become more or less over or under corrections to the existing market.
However, once the IT is understood in the context of such mis-directions, we can begin to understand the benefits of COT to produce healthier levels of IT to really fire up innovation through COI and learning through COL. To look at this from an other angle, investing in COL and COT will continue to foster IT through COI. It may seem that I am talking in some coded language, but simply put it is yet another way of looking at Trusted Learning.