Overload – discipline or gizmos?
Jinfo Blog

20th October 2010

By Tim Buckley Owen

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You’re probably far too busy to have noticed that October 20 was Information Overload Day – or it was as far as knowledge economy consultant Basex was concerned. And virtually simultaneously, an entirely separate offering from LexisNexis documented just how miserable information overload was making people. Billed as ‘a day of high-level interaction, knowledge sharing and learning about the problem’, Basex’s online symposium offered case studies from senior managers at Morgan Stanley, Xerox and George Washington University (http://digbig.com/5bcqjh). Meanwhile the LexisNexis survey painted a cataclysmic picture of constant connectivity impacting on productivity and multitasking affecting quality among an increasingly demoralised white collar workforce (main survey findings at http://digbig.com/5bcqjm). Covering 1,700 professionals across five countries, LexisNexis’s International Workplace Productivity Survey also reveals that you need to vary your communication medium if you want to attract people’s attention in different parts of the world. In the United Kingdom, United States and South Africa they pay more attention to emails, while Chinese workers prefer you to use a mobile phone and Australians like landlines (http://digbig.com/5bcqjp). In a subset of the findings based on 600 legal professionals, the survey also reveals that workers around the world spend around half their time receiving and managing information instead of actually using it. Indeed, LexisNexis goes so far as to claim that the UK legal industry is under-billing and over-servicing because information management is taking up such a sizeable proportion of the day (http://digbig.com/5bcqjr). Unsurprisingly, the problems highlighted by these two providers each come with their own touted solution. Describing itself as ‘the world’s foremost knowledge economy research and advisory firm’, many of Basex’s solutions are behavioural – while LexisNexis, ‘a leading provider of content-enabled workflow solutions’, tends to go for software-based fixes. Cut back on the number of email recipients in the ‘to’ and ‘cc’ fields, resist the urge to forward, use more and better keywords and Boolean operators when searching are some of the tips offered by Basex in its TechWatch newsletter plugging Information Overload Day (newsletter registration details at http://digbig.com/5bcqjj). LexisNexis, on the other hand, speaks of over two thirds of UK professionals believing they’d be more productive if they didn’t have to keep switching between applications to get their work done, and almost three quarters saying they’d be more efficient if the software tools they used were designed to work the way they did (http://digbig.com/5bcqjt). Boolean logic, of course, is our stock in trade – and there’s currently a bewilderingly rapid growth in available software-based workflow solutions, which someone has to keep track of. Whatever the woes of the knowledge workers, the bottom line is that it’s all grist to the mill for infopros.

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