CW@60: Information management in a world of ‘too much to know’

<div class="imagecaption alignLeft"> <img src="https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/rms/computerweekly/CW-60-anniversary-logo-white-400px.jpg" alt="Computer Weekly 60th anniversary logo" width="226" height="117"> </div> <p><i>On 22 September 2026, Computer Weekly turns 60. To mark the milestone, we asked some of our friends - experts, parliamentarians, IT leaders and suppliers, as well as our journalists - for their perspectives on how tech has changed their lives over six decades. What's changed the most for you since then?</i></p> <p>In the beginning was the word. The term “IT” begins with the word that drew me into covering an industry of which I knew very little in 1997 - the word is “information”.</p> <p>For <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/resources/Information-management">information management</a> has been the compass by which I have navigated the foreign waves and shores of IT – the industry and market.</p> <p>From 2002 till 2010 I deviated somewhat into the field of information security, as the programme editor for Elsevier’s computer security journals, then as the launch editor, in 2004, of that publisher’s iteration of <i>Infosecurity</i> magazine.</p> <p>But even that foray into what is today, pretentiously, called “cyber security” was about the information being secured, first and foremost. <a target="_blank" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_cryptography" rel="noopener">Cryptography</a> goes back to 1500 BC - there is nothing new under the sun.</p> <p>I started out my post-undergraduate career not as an IT journalist, but as an English literature academic, first as a graduate student, then as a British Academy post-doctoral researcher and junior research Fellow, at Oxford – first at Wadham College (famous for the rakish <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wilmot,_2nd_Earl_of_Rochester">Earl of Rochester</a> and the brilliant Labour leader Michael Foot) and then at Wolfson College (famous for Isaiah Berlin, its first president). I’d be very proud to be associated with all three of those lads.</p> <p>My fields were politics in literature in the <a target="_blank" href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/20718009" rel="noopener">1930s/1940s</a> and the <a target="_blank" href="https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/6164" rel="noopener">1890s/1900s</a>. To cut a long story short, I wrote about the novelist and playwright <a target="_blank" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Hamilton_(writer)" rel="noopener">Patrick Hamilton</a>, and the Scottish writer and politician <a target="_blank" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cunninghame_Graham" rel="noopener">R. B. Cunninghame Graham</a>.</p> <p>As a lexicographical assistant at the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), I did come across the application of computers. The OED was an early user of Open Text’s information storage and retrieval technology. And I did acquire an Apple Mac to word process when I started my post-doc. Otherwise, I was innocent of IT - until the internet.</p> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Eye popping"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Eye popping</h2> <p>I had to get an email address to keep in touch with my girlfriend, who went to Australia on a research trip, in 1992. And then I discovered the web, in 1994, thanks to a friend who shall remain nameless. It was eye-popping.</p> <p>By 1997, just as Tony Blair was coming to power, I had run out of public money to finance my academic “career” and had wangled a job with an Oxford based publishing company, Oxford Open Learning, as commissioning editor for its ambitious project to publish PhDs electronically.</p> <blockquote> <div class="imagecaption alignLeft"> <img src="https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/rms/computerweekly/Brian-McKenna-profile-pic-2022-140x180px.jpg" alt="Photo of Computer Weekly journalist Brian McKenna"> </div> <p><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><strong><span style="color: #34495e;">“ Many of the techniques associated with modern IT systems go way back - metadata-like classification, indexing, summarisation, information retrieval aids and so on, pre-date not just the internet, but the printing press”</span></strong></span></p> <p><span style="color: #34495e;"><em>Brian McKenna</em></span></p> </blockquote> <p>I got the project going and then accepted a job as the in-house editor of two fine information science journals, <i><a target="_blank" href="https://www.emerald.com/el" rel="noopener">The Electronic Library</a></i> and <i><a target="_blank" href="https://www.emerald.com/oir" rel="noopener">Online & CD-ROM Review</a></i>. Those were published by a VNU subsidiary, Learned Information (LI), which also published <i>Information World Review</i> (IWR) and <i>Knowledge Management</i> (KM) magazine.</p> <p>I became the editor of first KM then IWR before joining the web-based <i>VNUnet</i> in more mainstream IT industry publishing – rather than in the <a target="_blank" href="https://www.infotoday.com/searcher/jun03/ardito_bjorner.shtml" rel="noopener">online information industry</a> of LI, which pre-dated the web, and featured such titans as Dialog and LexisNexis.</p> <p>The rest of my professional story can be followed on <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-mckenna-43a115/">LinkedIn</a>, but I want to dwell a little on the theme of managing information in the epoch of “too much to know”.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Too much to know"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Too much to know</h2> <p>There is a terrific <a target="_blank" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_Much_to_Know" rel="noopener">book on this topic</a>, from 2010, with that title, by Ann M. Blair, with the sub-title, <i>Managing scholarly information before the modern age</i>. In it she scotches the easy cliché about the Renaissance invention of information overload, with the advent of the printing press.</p> <p>Human beings have been managing information for many centuries – long before the west European mechanised printing press got going, through Johannes Gutenberg in the 15th century.</p> <p>Scholars had “developed techniques for selecting, sorting, and storing information on a large scale”, according to her book, long before the modern era - for historians the modern era does not begin with Mod, but rather begins around 1450-ish. And Blair’s book does examine the impact of printing in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries for information management.</p> <p>Her particular focus is on a long-running tradition in information management, “the collection and arrangement of textual excerpts designed for consultation in ... ‘reference books’.”</p> <p>Her challenge to the lazy assumption that information overload is uniquely a product of the internet is bracing to those of us whose education and formation lies in the humanities, not in computer science. She shows that many of the techniques associated with modern IT systems go way back - metadata-like classification, indexing, summarisation, information retrieval aids and so on, pre-date not just the internet, but the printing press.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="The advent of GenAI"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>The advent of GenAI</h2> <p>But printing did make a massive difference. And the advent of <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchenterpriseai/definition/generative-AI">generative AI</a> (GenAI), in late 2022, has made a massive difference to information management over the past few years. Indeed, many of the dreams of late 1990s KM – <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/ehandbook/AI-for-BI-takes-form-in-the-organisational-brain-concept">conceptualising organisations as if endowed with collective brains</a>, capturing tacit knowledge, and so on – have been given new life by GenAI, and now agentic AI. What an age we live in.</p> <p>With a background in managing library and information science journals and in editing <i>Knowledge Management</i> magazine as well as (briefly) <i>Information World Review</i>, I felt that I came at more traditional IT publications such as Computer Weekly with fresh eyes and a distinctive angle. That background also helped me navigate the terrain of information security with a bit more assurance.</p> <p>I also carry baggage from my days – well, 10 or so years – as a junior English literature academic, drawing on very particular theoretical traditions, mostly historical materialist; that helps with understanding the <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/blog/Data-Matters/What-would-Karl-Marx-make-of-Silicon-Valley">economic history of the technology industry</a> also. I like to think I wear that lightly. But it does help when, as a Computer Weekly journalist, one is engaged intellectually in interviews with C-level IT industry executives to have what that redoubtable Labour politician <a target="_blank" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_Healey" rel="noopener">Denis Healey</a> used to famously call a “hinterland”.</p> <div class="extra-info"> <div class="extra-info-inner"> <h3 class="splash-heading">Read all of Computer Weekly's 60th anniversary essays</h3> <p>Technology is changing the way we live and work like never before – touching people’s lives every day, opening up new opportunities and creating new challenges.</p> <p>So for our 60^th anniversary, we wanted to reflect on the human stories of how the digital revolution has changed the lives of some of the key leaders and influencers in tech today. Read our full collection of essays, which offers a unique set of insights and perspectives into the changes we have seen during Computer Weekly's first 60 years.</p> <h2><a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/essentialguide/CW60-How-technology-has-changed-our-lives-over-60-years">CW@60 - How technology has changed our lives over 60 years</a></h2> </div> </div> </section>