Contributed by Jason Bloomberg, President, Intellyx
With all the buzz today about just how valuable data are, I wondered whether we should treat data as a corporate asset – and if so, whether they should go on the balance sheet. Today, data aren’t even treated as an intangible asset for accounting purposes.
I had no idea the can of worms I was opening. It turns out many people have asked this question before, both about the value of data as well as of information (more about the difference in a bit). Gartner analyst Doug Laney even wrote a book last year on the subject he named Infonomics, after the field of inquiry he spearheaded on the topic.
His basic idea: shoehorn information into the intangible asset class in standard accounting, thus representing information alongside other intangible assets like copyrights and licenses.
Sounds promising to be sure – but the devil is in the details. It seems that either representing information as an asset class is simply too hard, or perhaps the advantages of the status quo outweigh any particular reason to change how we account for information.
