Profiting from overload and spam
Jinfo Blog

8th January 2009

By Tim Buckley Owen

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Ill winds always blow somebody some good, and the current economic crisis will be no exception. Information managers should be able to snatch something of value from the big chill, so here are a few suggestions. Information overload continues to go up. The collaborative business environments consultant Basex http://www.basex.com has been calculating its cost in terms of lost productivity, and its latest figure for the US economy is $900 billion, compared with $588 billion in 2006. Of course figures like this can mean whatever you want them to mean if you’re not careful – but why not have a go at Basex’s Information Overload Calculator http://www.iocalculator.com/ and see how the cost comes out for your company? You can also register for their report Information Overload: We Have Met The Enemy And He Is Us, which includes plenty of advice that you could recycle, plus a couple of high profile case studies. Closely related to overload is spam. According to the 2008 Annual Security Report from network specialist Cisco http://digbig.com/4yccy spam now accounts for approximately 90% of all email traffic. Cisco’s report is actually about internet security threats, many of which the sophisticated end-users that information managers support ought to be able to spot and deal with for themselves. But that still leaves plenty of basically legitimate stuff which is a huge time-waster nevertheless and needs managing. Time wasting is also a constant risk of social networking – and although the last 12 months have been replete with exhortations to business to embrace the phenomenon, it still needs management if the benefits are to outweigh the disadvantages. So the widely reported finding by the financial advisory giant Deloitte (try the Telegraph’s coverage at http://digbig.com/4ycda for instance) that many social networking sites may fail this year could prove useful. Declining advertising and other revenues – plus, in the case of services like Facebook and Twitter, no profits at all yet – could claim a fair few victims if the funding dries up, Deloitte forecasts. Yet other commentators predict a bright future for some networking services – and in its New Year resolutions for chief information officers http://digbig.com/4ycde Gartner actually counsels using social networking as a survival strategy. LinkedIn and Zoominfo feature among Outsell’s ‘30 to watch’ in its Information Industry Outlook for 2009 (outline at http://digbig.com/4ycdd – report costs $495). The information industry consultant also talks of some information providers – such as those specializing in market research, healthcare or compliance – being at least partially recession proof or else behaving counter-cyclically in downturns. However grim things get, overload, spam and ill-managed irrelevancies are three phenomena that will continue to provide opportunities for the information profession to demonstrate just how counter-cyclically it can behave.

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