The exiled Shah of Iran was reputed to have said Oil is too valuable to burn… There are more important uses for oil than burning it to produce energy, for God’s sake!.

He was right, fossil fuel based products are the basis of our modern lifestyle; pharmaceuticals, plastics, fertilisers, and huge range of products we rely on daily use oil and coal as a feedstock, and yet we squander this resource to burn for heat, power and transportation.

Without recycling we’d end up burning or burying these commodities, and using even more to replace what we’d just thrown away. I suppose one day we can resort to mining the old landfill sites for the valuable plastics they contain.

It strikes me that the climate change argument appears to be primarily over the concern for wasted money, but money is negotiable, we’ve all witnessed how effortlessly it can be created and destroyed. The natural resources we discard every day aren’t so easily manipulated, once they’ve gone, they’ve gone, money is a virtual resource, we can always make more.

In the UK, this title appears to be most frequently used in the public sector, for which the data presented on ITJobsWatch indicates there’s a small, but growing demand. Whilst these vacancies cite SQL and information security as desirable skills, I feel that it’s too tightly focused on specific platforms and established techniques.

Making full use of all the information out there, not just specific corporate databases, requires developments in the application of query languages. A distributed nature places emphasis on capturing and maintaining data source references, and version control to provide traceability.

Corporate data must move away from the monumental central store, with a schema unchanged since the dawn of time, to a series of smaller repositories that can be easily maintained, extended and indexed as the business need arises.

The key message is that if business moves quickly, as does information upon which it’s based, so must the approach to interpreting that information. As for the Information Analyst, this job is too big for any individual professional. It’s an exciting multi-disciplinary field that will grow in importance as key step in the future of information.

It seems clear that the world of tomorrow is going to be poorer: much of the pre-crisis money never actually existed, it was borrowed from the future. Whatever the reason, everyone is going to have less to spend. Production volumes are dropping, a feature of recession anyway, which combined with badly weakened Western currencies is going to lead to higher prices. So how is product development going to react?

The focus of product development, and maybe life in general, should shift from new products to incremental improvement. With little money around, the time is right to consider total cost of ownership: I want most of my kit to last a while, but still do a useful job.

Building on existing products rather that new launches will be the path. Longer component design lives, combined with modularity minimise the scale of component replacement necessary to add new functionality: no more ditching the iPod because your music collection has grown.

I also expect product ranges to shrink, freeing funding to concentrate on those with a real market and user base. The same will be true of functionality, every product has features almost nobody uses: why so many cup holders?

Consolidation is the theme, so tomorrow will be smaller, but I suspect better for it.