In 1999, economist Hal Varian—now Google’s Chief Economist—co-authored Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy with Carl Shapiro.
That book explained how information behaves as an economic good: expensive to produce, cheap to reproduce, infinitely reusable.
It became the operating manual for the early internet economy.
Two decades later, the question has shifted.
The challenge is no longer how to price or distribute information, but how to manage it inside organizations that now run entirely on it.
From Economics to Stewardship
Varian’s original work focused on information as a market asset.
Today, information has become an organizational medium—the air through which decisions, judgments, and collaboration flow.
The issue isn’t scarcity anymore; it’s saturation.
Modern organizations are overwhelmed not by lack of access, but by excess complexity.
They have more systems, more dashboards, and more data than ever, yet the signal-to-noise ratio continues to drop.
The missing discipline is not more technology.
It’s the management of meaning—how information moves, changes form, and creates understanding across human systems.
This is the work of Human-Centered Information Systems (HCISI):
a new management lens that treats information as the world’s most misunderstood asset.
Information Rules 2.0
The following ten rules update Varian’s logic for a world where the boundaries between human cognition and machine systems have blurred.
They are drawn from the HCISI philosophy and the Information Utility Index, which measures information along two axes—accuracy and usefulness.
1. The Rule of Information Gravity
Information naturally flows toward the point of highest decision value.
When it doesn’t reach it—when insights remain trapped in silos or tools—the system is misaligned.
Design for flow, not storage.
2. The Rule of Diminishing Digital Returns
Beyond a threshold, adding more dashboards, metrics, or collaboration tools reduces rather than increases productivity.
Each new system adds friction to cognition.
Subtract until clarity emerges.
3. The Rule of Useful Inaccuracy
Perfect accuracy is overrated.
Often a quick, approximate insight made at the right moment creates more value than a delayed, flawless report.
Timeliness > Precision.
4. The Rule of Information Friction
Some friction is healthy.
When everything moves too freely, thought disappears.
Interfaces and review processes that invite reflection can prevent automation from collapsing into autopilot.
Friction creates focus.
5. The Rule of Shared Meaning
Information only has value when the receiver interprets it as intended.
Shared semantics, clear definitions, and consistent language are the real APIs of organizations.
Invest in language before software.
6. The Rule of Human-Centered Systems
Information should serve cognition, not compliance.
Dashboards are not managers; people are.
Design systems around how humans perceive, not how machines count.
7. The Rule of Curation over Collection
Collecting more data rarely leads to better decisions.
The real work is filtering, contextualizing, and discarding what no longer matters.
The value is in the edit.
8. The Rule of Living Governance
Information systems decay toward entropy.
Metadata erodes, definitions drift, and context disappears.
Governance isn’t a project—it’s an ongoing act of stewardship.
Treat maintenance as strategy.
9. The Rule of Contextual Value
Information has no absolute worth; its utility depends on time, purpose, and audience.
The same data point can enlighten or mislead depending on when and where it’s used.
Always ask: valuable to whom, and when?
10. The Rule of Reflection
Information gains value only when it changes how we think.
Space for reflection is not wasted time—it’s where raw data becomes understanding.
Interpretation is the highest form of information work.
From Rules to Practice
Managing information today is not a technical problem—it’s a design problem.
The most advanced system in any organization is still the human mind.
A truly human-centered information system balances computational efficiency with cognitive capacity.
That’s where HCISI and the Information Utility Index come in:
They provide a way to measure not just how much information you have, but how useful and human-compatible it is.
When organizations manage for information utility, they stop confusing busyness with productivity.
They build environments where the right signal reaches the right mind at the right time.
They move from data accumulation to information stewardship.
Managing AI as an Information System
Artificial intelligence complicates these dynamics.
AI can both amplify and distort organizational information flows.
Every model is an opinion about the world, encoded in math.
Without thoughtful governance, AI risks automating bias and compressing meaning.
To manage AI well, we must manage its information diet—the quality, variety, and framing of the data it consumes.
Prompting, in this sense, is the new literacy; it’s how humans negotiate context with machines.
The Information Dividend
Organizations that learn to manage information as an asset—accurate, useful, contextual, and human-centered—will gain what might be called an Information Dividend:
better decisions, less waste, and a culture that values clarity over control.
The rest will continue to drown in digital noise, mistaking motion for insight.
Epilogue: The Age of the Thoughtful Organization
The next revolution in productivity won’t come from faster machines or bigger models.
It will come from thoughtful organizations—those that design for understanding instead of output.
Hal Varian showed us how to think about the economics of information.
Now we need to master the ethics and practice of information.
Because in the end, managing information well isn’t about control.
It’s about care—care for meaning, for context, and for the fragile human intelligence that makes any of it matter.