This week, I’ll make a small but significant move regarding the philosophy of this weblog.

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If you receive IT newsletters from the US, you cannot have missed it: last week, CIO Minute / Baseline issued their annual “500 companies that manage information best” ranking (click here to download the Excel file).

I have to say I was very excited by the perspective of seeing which companies manage information best in a world in which information is the new graal at the center of all paradigmatic shifts. Information today is what oil used to be, half a Century ago: the future.

However, I got disappointed by the fact that I, for instance, don’t know any of the 50 top companies of the ranking. The biggest company in the world, Exxon Mobil, ranks 52 – and it’s the very first name in the list I happen to be familiar with.  Again, in a globalized world at the information age, it’s a pity the survey weren’t more international.

To comment on the actual ranking, there’s lot to be learnt from the “Information Value-Added” (a metric rather hard to compute in an objective way) and the “Information Productivity” criteria. I leave it to your own appreciation but to tell you the truth, I believe this is complete bullshit. As a proof, and looking at the industries from which top performers come from, three sectors prevail: Energy, Manufacturing & Banking.

Seriously, how could the energy sector top the banking sector in terms of information management performance? The mission of an energy company is to produce energy, not manage information – which is a skill needed to better business processes and perform trading. Conversely, the mission of a bank is to manage information: datawarehouses in a bank are strategic in our dematerialized world since all the assets are digitally, not physically, stored. Few industries are as tied to information management as banking. There may be the telecom industry (eg a cable or mobile operator) for billing & CRM purposes & the Internet industry (eg Google) for load management. Retail (RFID challenges) and manufacturing (business process optimization) are next. So, could someone help me understand why is that that energy companies top their counterparts in this ranking? I really can’t tell.

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