FEATURE EDITORIAL

Do We Suffer From Information Overload?

Basex, an East Coast business research firm, has named the problem of the year as "information overload". By this they are referring to the growing number of communication and collaboration channels that people are required to work with on a daily basis, and say that the duplication of information across channels, and the cost of interruptions from this increasing plethora of tools is costing the US economy US$650 billion a year in lost productivity (New York Times Blog), which is calculated based on interruptions from phone calls, emails and IMs consuming 28 percent of a knowledge workers day (eWeek).

I think information overload is the wrong term for the problem, and I also think that their analysis reflects a lack of understanding about how knowledge workers work. Let's take each in turn.

What's The Real Problem Here?

The real problem is the proliferation of new standalone tools that become additive to existing ways of communication and collaboration. When IM is added to email and then comes wiki work and blog reading, people are forced to deal with new places to retrieve and work with information. These tools are often additive. For example: when IM is introduced, some email traffic shifts naturally to IM, thus taking away from email, however, because you are online and apparently available, additional conversations take place that otherwise may not have happened. And, equally, conversations that might have taken three minutes by telephone increase to 10 or 15 minutes by IM, because of multi-tasking and the slower rate at which people type compared to talking.

Back in 2004 I wrote about this proliferation of end-user tools for communication and collaboration, and how this would lead to bad things for end-users. We can now see this happening. Vendors of collaboration tools need to do a better job of delivering tools that integrate currently disparate communication channels into a single integrated client, and auto-arranging different streams of communication into related project groupings. Rationalization and elimination of tools should be a big focus for IT. There should only be one IM platform in any organization, not multiples. People shouldn't have to deal with multiple collaborative workspace products on a daily basis; just one interface that renders different tools within an integrated whole.

That new tools are additive rather than reductionary is a problem in most organizations, although interestingly Groove Networks claimed the opposite. Before being purchased by Microsoft, Groove claimed that the usage of its own tools internally had resulted in a migration of communication and interaction largely away from email and into a variety of Groove shared spaces. That left very little email to deal with, and even then, there was a clear and easy way to shift email from Outlook or Notes into a Groove space. The tool was eliminative, not additive.

In my view, Basex selected the wrong term for 2008. Rather than the year of information overload, it should be the year of communication coordination complexity, or the year of urgency addiction.

Does the Analysis Stack Up?

Further, I believe Basex portrays a lack of understanding in saying that managing email and IM takes users away from their "primary tasks". Or that dealing with interruptions from phone calls, email and IM consumes 28 percent of the users day, contributing to lost productivity. Most of us have to work with others to get our jobs done and to move forward the work of the organization. For this we need to communicate. In past business realities we would meet face to face. Today we are in a world that transacts business at an increased rate and where the people we work with on joint projects are often not in the same location. Much of our interaction becomes mediated by written text. So, while knowledge workers have primary tasks to do -- the sending and receiving of email, or having an IM conversation with another, or answering a phone call from a colleague, or keeping up with blogs related to our work -- all of these activities are in fact core to primary tasks.

As a related point, if you ask senior managers what they think about interruptions, many will say they don't consider a constant stream of people and interaction requests as interruptions, but rather as their work. That is why they are there...to talk to people, to coordinate with others, to learn what's going on.

Let's consider the robustness of the analysis in another way. If phone calls, email and IM are the problem, let's get rid of them. People would therefore, according to the Basex logic, suddenly be able to reclaim 28 percent of their daily work time, and thus the US economy would be US$650 billion better off in terms of reclaimed productivity. But wouldn't that result in the whole US economy grinding to a halt in short order? The Basex thinking does not leave me convinced.

What Does Dealing with Information Overload Look Like?

If we broaden the analysis and thinking away from interruptions to dealing with information overload true and proper, what do we get? One thing is the need for people and teams to get better at sharing knowledge that has been synthesized rather than merely being repeated. Have we taught knowledge workers the process of how to take a collection of data points and create a synthesis of those? Do people know how to build understanding over time by comparing and contrasting new information against what they already know? Do people have the technology tools at their disposal to do this effectively? Or do we merely expect that people will create "folders" of related information, at the page or article level, but never do the hard work of integrating the different points of view? It is hard work -- it requires the embrace of effective habits of personal knowledge management, and the continual seeking out of new and divergent viewpoints against which to test our current knowledge.

Among other things, this is what dealing with "information overload" is really about. What's your take? Send me an email.

-Michael Sampson

NEWS HIGHLIGHTS

SharePoint Toolkit

Microsoft released the Extranet Collaboration Toolkit for SharePoint, a free resource for planning and commissioning an extranet based on SharePoint. "The Extranet Collaboration Toolkit for SharePoint helps enhance security by creating each collaboration site as a SharePoint site collection. This ensures that teams using one collaboration site will not be able to view documents on another site, unless they are explicitly given access. In addition, the toolkit puts all external users in ADAM (Microsoft's lightweight directory service), rather than in the organization's primary internal directory." Microsoft SharePoint Team

Kryptiva Collaboration Suite

Kryptiva released the Kryptiva Collaboration Suite, which adds collaborative capabilities into the email inbox including IM, file sharing and desktop sharing. "Users benefit from the Kryptiva Collaboration Suite by installing a Microsoft Outlook plugin on their machines. When a user requests Kryptiva-enhanced functions, the plugin interacts with the Kryptiva Collaboration back-end servers to enable the user-selected functionality before the message is sent. Message recipients benefit from the Kryptiva-enhanced collaboration functions by installing the plugin."

IBM Atlas for Lotus Connections

IBM announced IBM Atlas for Lotus Connections, a corporate social networking visualization and analysis tool. Developed by IBM Research, Atlas "is designed to help organizations maximize their investment in social software by answering questions such as who the key experts are on a given topic, how they are connected, and whom a user's contacts know that they do not." The tool is available immediately, but only through IBM consulting services.

Beware of Junk Drawers

Sam from Jive Software says that Intranets have become "junk drawers", and that if we are not careful, the same thing will happen with collaboration tools. "We're at a crossroads again. Collaboration tools, content management and office productivity is converging and either companies will approach things strategically or they'll end up with "junk drawer 2.0." We see this everyday. Either we're talking to business-focused leaders looking for a comprehensive, strategic solutions or to companies who have appointed a technician to go buy parts and then sew something together. Our industry has to help companies peer ahead by painting a clear vision of what a collaboration-centric, Social Productivity system looks like, otherwise: no vision, no decision."

We welcome your ideas and your news for Collaboration Newswire's News & Trends in Collaboration. Let us know what you think by sending your comments to editorial@messagingnews.com. Written or compiled by Michael Sampson. All trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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