Most issues of American Programmer focus on relatively technical topics, such as systems design, project management, or the nuances of the Internet. But occasionally we need to step back and ask ourselves, what's the point of all of this? What is it that we're stuffing into our computer databases? What exactly is the "asset" that a company's IT organization guards so jealously? Surely it's not the hardware, or the expensive software that we purchase from IBM, Oracle, or Microsoft. For some organizations, it may turn out that all they care about is the day-to-day operational transactions of business: orders, invoices, payments, inventory levels, and so on. But surely, after nearly 50 years of computing, we must have moved beyond that -- so what could it be that makes our investment in computing so valuable?