Uh oh: Information overload does not exist
I may be in trouble. Ton Zijlstra has a recent piece on signal vs. noise in which he says: Ton's Interdependent Thoughts: Every Signal Starts Out As Noise
Why do we call information and data coming to us noise? Because we know not all that stuff is useful, we label the unuseful stuff as noise. And because of the tilted signal to noise ratio we perceive, i.e. what little we actually use from what comes at us, we say we suffer from information overload. I say that this is rubbish.
There is no such thing as information overload. It does not exist.
"Information overload" is the phrase I am using in the current version of my "what do I do" talk with people. They seem to understand information overload from their own perspective, and I can usually communicate that the individual problem is only exacerbated in groups of people. Thus "Helping organizations deal with information overload" can make sense in conversation.
What Ton is suggesting is that information overload is a temporary phenomenon due to the changing nature of the way we draw information and our historical fear of "missing something" if we don't examine every piece of potential information. Ton suggests that we need to move away from this mode of operation to something that is more flexible and trusting of the simple fact that we can only absorb so much within a given time frame. At some point, we need to make decisions and see what happens as a result. We are always free to make mid-course corrections if it appears our actions have unintended consequences. Ton argues that in today's world these consequences are frequently unknowable in the time we have to make the decisions.
Now this is something that makes sense for me in terms of how I want to approach organizations. So, no "information overload," but I aim to help organizations become confident in their abilities to take action in an uncertain and incomplete world.
5 Comment(s)
I think as well "information overload" means one thing in a world of transiant information.
Paper files, small hard drives, etc - all have meant that people have to choose what to save and what to throw away, since there is only limited space (physically) for the items.
However, we are moving to a world where the financial cost of deciding to keep EVERYTHING (even paper via digitizing it) is low and getting lower.
In this world the decision is not the all or nothing of SAVE or DESTROY, but instead the less binary "FLAG/MARK or LEAVE UNMARKED" (made less binary by the capability of tracking accesses and by the capacity to support a multiplicity of schemes as well individuals doing the marking - think the multicolored flags and multiple flag modes in Outlook for a trivial example)
Combined with powerful search and indexing tools - "Google" but also even deeper and broader tools, corporations can seriously consider saving everything.
Then the challenge is to create views into the universe that allow a user to work efficiently and effectively, only revealing the hidden complexity and history when it might be valuable to do so.
From a consulting standpoint this approach might be "focused on enhancing the value and utility of knowledge in the enterprise" or something (need to work on the phrasing).
Shannon
The cost of "keep everything" may be low in terms of the technological cost, but the cost in terms of what it means for business is another thing altogether.
How many times do we hear about a legal proceeding where someone has turned up old emails (and other documents) that give the appearance of impropriety? Most large companies today have explicit policies for records retention - when to keep and when to toss any type of record, whether on paper or on your hard drive. My last company even instituted their policy within the Exchange server mailboxes that items were deleted after a certain time period. If it was truly critical, it was to be saved to personal mailboxes. And even then, it was to still fall to the records retention rules.
The company also gave us some education on how to write so that we aren't embarrassed about it in five years.
On the other side of this, companies need to recognize that with electronic media as they are, there will always be the possibility that "deleted" materials will turn up somewhere and create "trouble." Companies need to acknowledge this and work with it, rather than fight it.
Great wrap up of several posts on social enterprise from Jack Vinson's "Knowledge Jolt With Jack". The enterprise is social, as we have heard from a number of writers, such as Etienne Wenger on communities or John Seely Brown on The Social Life of Info... Read More
The enterprise is social, as we have heard from a number of writers, such as Etienne Wenger on communities or John Seely Brown on The Social Life of Information. Jon Udell of InfoWorld follows this with an article on The social enterprise that discusse... Read More
Microsoft has an article entitled, "Suffering from Information Overload?" in their section of Outlook 2002: http://www.microsoft.com/office/previous/xp/columns/column01.asp. It mostly talks about how to use Outlook well.