Through the 80's and into the early 90's, organizations invested an enormous amount of money implementing technology. Manufacturing Resource Planning (MRP) systems evolved into Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems as organizations looked to standardize and automate business processes.

Ultimately, these systems generated an enormous amount of data - data that began to pile up without systems and processes designed to organize and interpret it. Despite the value within all of that information, it proved extremely difficult to put the data in a format that enabled individuals to extract its value and use it to inform decisions.

Throughout the 90's, organizations continued to struggle to manage this new influx of content. The answer came in the form of Business Intelligence (BI) technology, which helped turn detailed data into actionable information capable of enabling decisions and also sparked an industry of Data and Information providers.

Organizations recognized the opportunity and began looking to purchase data and information to correlate with their own to make better informed decisions.

Flash forward to today: with the explosion of the Internet, introduction of social media and the transition of technology at an exponential rate, organizations are even more inundated with information. Most spend just as much time, if not more, figuring out how to use the information then they do making decisions with it.

This phenomenon has also turned most data, information and technology into commodities, creating an opportunity in the market for companies to not just continue to be part of the problem (by continuing to provide data and information on the already swamped industry), but to be part of the solution by providing not just information but also critical insight.

A decision maker is provided so much information that he or she must sift through it to determine what is truly critical - and relevant - to making any given decision. Further, domain knowledge and experience are necessary in order to make the best possible decision, limiting who can make the decision and increasing the time, as well.

Information providers that can transform themselves into sources of not only critical information, but also insight, will be able to seize this market opportunity and poise themselves for exceptional growth.

The key to long-term sustainable growth is to become the trusted source of critical information, while also offering insight (critical information + domain expertise + knowledge) into the industry. Together, information and insight will enable information providers to differentiate themselves in an otherwise crowded, noisy environment.

The market is moving at a blistering pace. Information providers that are poised to take advantage of their assets and transform into critical information and insight providers will be the clear winners.