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Top1. Introduction
Much has been said about a new economy, in an environment of rapid transformations and new types of business. The main feature is the amount of information to be processed by organizations and people, which has grown a lot when compared to what was processed a few years ago. The Internet and the possibility of doing business in different ways have raised concerns about the processing of information necessary for decision making in the world of business and people.
Then, one asks: “Are new rules needed for the economy?” According to Shapiro and Varian (1999), the changes seen today are due to technological advances, but the laws of the economy continue to prevail. They haven't changed. The change in the economy is in the way in which information is used, hence the most appropriate term of information economics.
Second (Evans & Wurster, 1984), the fundamental change in the information economy is not specifically some technology, but the new behavior of economic agents, which has emerged and is reaching a critical mass. The authors envision the emergence of connectivity between people. This movement has caused profound changes in the way organizations operate and the need to rethink the fundamentals of business strategy.
These transformations can be understood as the new forms of business, communication, and interaction. New technologies every day enable improvements that reduce obstacles such as time and space. Both people and organizations have exchanged more information, whether by sending messages or exchanging files. The emergence of connectivity creates several benefits never imagined. A few years ago, people exchanged music through cassette tapes, vinyl records and CDs. Until then the exchange (or sometimes loans) of music was conditioned to an exchange of physical goods. Who could have predicted that one day people would be exchanging music with each other digitally, online, without any physical contact? Napster understood what connectivity would be and provided people with something new.
Second (Evans & Wurster, 2000), connectivity would be an opportunity created by technology. Technology in turn would be the instrument that created such an environment. It is now necessary to understand the fluid that irrigates this environment, making technology work and connectivity exist – information.
This article is part of the literature review of the ongoing doctoral thesis project, which has as main objective to develop and test a conceptual model of measuring the use of information by the top management of organizations. To date, potential dimensions of analysis have been identified. These dimensions will become the constructs to be tested, seeking, through confirmatory factor analysis, in the next phase of the research, their confirmations and the structuring of the scale for measurement.