Here’s a nifty little piece from Harvard Business Publishing’s The Big Shift: Abandon Stocks, Embrace Flows.  It paints a broad picture of a world in which ownership of stocks of knowledge are becoming relatively less valuable than participation in flows of new, tacit knowledge.  This is true for individuals and companies.

Now transfer the idea to information markets such as legal publishing. Value in the traditional legal publishing world was based on stores of retrospective information – collections of primary law documents such as court decision and statutes; secondary work such as treatises and encyclopedias; journals; practice guides.  To be sure, there’s always been a “flow” component to legal publishing – Shepard’s and other citator products tell us when the validity of a legal source has changed, for example, and the ubiquitous loose-leaf service was the print world’s way of trying to keep up with the flow of new information – but the value publishers provided was the in the archives of information, knowledge, and analysis that publishers produced and that lawyers incorporated into their practices.

Today, all the newest information tools for lawyers are all about the flow – not so much about how I search and retrieve what’s needed from existing stocks of knowledge, but how I position myself to not miss the new knowledge contained in the rapid flow of ideas around me.  Blogs, RSS, Twitter, are all about positioning myself in the stream of information I care about in order to not miss anything. Today’s wider array of workflow tools available to legal, tax and compliance professionals are all about dropping exactly the right piece of up-to-date information into my hands just as I need it – pulling it out of the flow.  The value is increasingly tied to the timing and the currency of the knowledge, not just its availability or even quality.

In many parts of the information industries we are moving from a search-and-retrieve model to a publish-and-subscribe model.  Note that search-and-retrieve works well when the value is in “stocks” of knowledge, but that publish-and-subscribe makes more sense when the pace of change means the greater value lies in just knowing what’s changing.  Note, too, that publish-and-subscribe means the information consumer is both consumer and contributor.  As this piece notes,

We can’t participate effectively in flows of knowledge–at least not for long–without contributing knowledge of our own. This occurs because participants in these knowledge flows don’t want free riding “takers”; they want to develop relationships with people and institutions that can contribute knowledge of their own. This is a huge hurdle for most executives who were trained to guard their knowledge carefully. Yet if they remain “takers” they will find themselves rapidly marginalized. Knowledge flows tend to concentrate among participants who are sharing with, and learning from, each other.

Twitter offers a perfect example of this; its value increases exponentially when networks of people use it to not just share information but to solicit and provide expertise, and to leverage that sharing across a network. The loose collection of products, platforms and tools we call social media are a response to this increasing tendency of knowledge workers to value the flow of information and tacit knowledge relative to stocks of knowledge. Information products that capture and allow participation in those knowledge flows have become more valuable than archival information products.

One Response to “Stocks and Flows: A Metaphor for Information Markets”

1. Streams, Lakes, and Brian Eno’s Box | Jason Wilson | Thoughts wrote on 29 Jul 2009

   [...] subscribe to David Curle of LexDisruptus.com, but he had an interesting post recently titled “Stocks and Flows: A Metaphor for Information Markets.” In the post, David says that he uses RSS and Twitter to make sure he doesn’t miss [...]