Pull and the Semantic Web Could Save $10 Trillion Worldwide
March 22, 2010
According to the World Bank, humans produced about $60 trillion worth of goods and services in 2009. A few weeks ago, I mentioned IBM’s Many Eyes data visualization service, and they provide an excellent pie chart breakdown of world GDP that I can’t include here because it uses JavaScript to show the details. (Remarkably, Japan’s 128 million people still have a higher GDP than China’s 1.3 billion, but barely.)
No matter what business you’re in, whether it’s rice farming or computer programming, you must use information. If use of information accounts for 40% of average world economic activity (a reasonable assumption, I think), then humans generate about $32 trillion worth of information every year. If we could all adopt the principles of pull and the semantic web over a ten year period, say at a cost of $1 trillion per year, I estimate we could save at least $12 trillion per year worldwide by using information smarter. IBM agrees. IBM thinks we should be using information smarter, and so do most people working in the semantic web.
So if we could make our use of information more efficient by 30%, we could save $10 trillion every year, worldwide. Because our economy is so information rich, here in the US, I think it would be around $2 trillion.
Yes, it’s important to have a FaceBook strategy, and a Twitter strategy. I would say most companies need to learn to get that right. They could learn a lot from Pringles and Starbucks. I hope your company is thinking about it.
But think about this – what if your company could manage information so much better that you could save 30% of your cost of dealing with information and make your company ten times or fifty times more effective? What if your company could work with your customers on a whole new level? What if all our companies started solving problems, rather than wrangling data? The principles of pull and the semantic web may not be as sexy as Twitter and Facebook at the moment, and they may not be as cool as working on your mobile strategy. But the principles of pull and the semantic web are 100 times bigger than these things. They are going to change your industry. They will make a huge difference in whether our global economy recovers fully and manages not to dive as sharply next time. They will provide solid answers to our crises in health care, finance, energy, government, etc. These are crises of information, and FaceBook isn’t going to save us from the next financial meltdown. The semantic web could. In fact, I argue that it’s the only thing that has a chance to be productive at the scale we’ll need it to perform.
The principles of pull and the semantic web need better PR. I welcome your suggestions on how I can make more people aware of my book and my ideas. My previous three books were all bestsellers. This one needs your help in crossing over to the business market. If you know people in venture capital, business schools, incubators, small business, enterprise, or government, please tell them about my book. And if you know some of the people at IBM’s smarter planet initiative, I would love to talk to them.
NOTE: I am revising this down to $7 trillion after further research. I will elaborate on that in a new blog post when I have better figures to work with. It’s still $7 trillion a year though, and that’s a lot of dough.
