The 500 Companies That Manage Information Best

From Baseline: The group of companies that make up the Baseline 500 are special—and this year, they are even more so. To determine who makes our annual ranking of the best corporate managers of information, we started, as we did last year, with a list of publicly traded companies. But instead of looking at one year of financial results as in the past, we examined five years.

From there, we determined each company’s Information Value-Added score, which is profit left after subtracting the cost of capital invested by shareholders. And then we looked at Information Productivity, or IP, which is Information Value-Added divided by a company’s costs—selling, general and administrative expenses. IP scores determine the Baseline 500 ranking.

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