Knowledge management is a joke and search technologies are overrated.

It was about ten years ago that I really began to understand the adage, "you can't manage, what you can't measure." It was the early Internet days, when companies like CyberCash were promising micropayment systems for e-commerce, Yahoo was establishing the first search/portal system and supply-chain vendors like i2 Technologies were beginning to leverage TCP/IP to rearchitect information flow among disparate factory planning systems. It was then that I realized emerging knowledge management applications had (and still have) a fundamental flaw: they don't measure the value of information. Without knowledge valuation you can't have knowledge management.

To realize the productivity potential of information technologies will require information valuation. By historical analogy, it is as if we are in the middle of the industrial revolution and we don't know the cost and price of steel. Today we sit in the midst of the information revolution and still don't know the value of the most fundamental resource that drives our global economy: information. The benefits of the information revolution won't be realized until bottom-up, market-based valuation of daily information exchanges emerges.

Seven years ago, I shared this concept with Shanda Bahles of Eldorado Ventures. Three years later she gave me a call and asked me to come back in to explain what an information valuation system would look like to the partners. For the next six months Ross Mayfield and I worked day and night developing a business strategy for infecting the world with this technology. It was early 2001, and the venture investment community was, to say the least, not investing in "radical, unproven technologies." So we shelved our business plan. The world was not yet ready to value their time.

Several recent events make me think that the world might just be ready for information valuation. For example, the interest in using prediction markets and idea futures within companies to optimize resource allocation and sales forecasts are gaining momentum. While I still think it will be a few more years until robust systems are developed, I am more optimistic than ever that knowledge measurement systems will emerge. The reason is simple: search can only go so far.

Search technologies, no matter how sophisticated, can't capture the implicit value that humans inherently place on information and relationships. Today "search technologies" continue to command great attention and funding (Google) as "the solution" to the "info glut" problems that arise from working in an information economy.

While I won't go as far as to say that "search is dead," I certainly believe that in the next decade it will be relegated to a background function, as information valuation technologies allow simple, seamless ways for individuals to place a monetary value on every form of information they encounter each day. Bottom-up information valuation of highly nuanced information will enable markets in everything. In the process, information valuation will transform the future of work, organizational cultures, eliminate information overload, and finally make knowledge measurement (and thus management) a reality.