What kind of resource is information?

It is usual nowadays, almost a cliche, for information to be described as a “corporate resource”. Increasingly it is viewed as the “fourth resource”, to go with human, material, and financial resources. This viewpoint feeds the whole concept of information resource management (IRM). This term was originally used by its main advocates as a somewhat narrower concept than “information management”, of which IRM was viewed as a subset This distinction seems to have been rather eroded recently, and the concept of “information as resource” pervades the whole area.