More than ever before, information is all around us and, while most people take it for granted, few can define the term. The word “information” in English is rather flexible and it means many things to many people.

The Urra-hubullu encyclopedia, one of the earilest of its kind

To borrow from Justice Potter Stewart, who was writing about the difficulty of defining “obscenity,” I know information when I see it.

When we need a phone number, we dial “information” (well, we used to, before the Web). We get information about a specific event (a party, a wedding) and we get information when we read a newspaper (be it online or a printed version).

We get information when we chitchat and we get information when we attend meetings and conferences.

The American Heritage Dictionary has one of the better definitions I’ve found, namely “knowledge derived from study, experience, or instruction.” It goes on to add “Knowledge of specific events or situations that has been gathered or received by communication; intelligence or news” and “A collection of facts or data.”

A brief look at the roots and origin of the word “information” also helps us to better understand it. The word comes from the Old French “informacion,” which in turn came from the Latin “informationem” (nominative “information”), which means an outline, concept, or idea. Informationem was the noun of action from informare, from which we derive our verb “inform.”

But I digress.

The reason information is important is because human beings simply have had to communicate with one another since the dawn of civilization. From cave paintings and oral history to the beginnings of a written tradition, mankind has documented and recorded that which is important and left it for future generations.

An increase in the human population, combined with improved tools for sharing information (starting with the tablet, paper, movable type, and going all the way into the computer age), has resulted in more information being created today than perhaps anyone had ever anticipated. What haven’t been developed in lockstep with this are tools that allow us to filter information so we get not only what we need but also that which we can absorb.

Despite great technological advances, we actually understand very little about how to manage information. Until we do learn more about managing what really has become a flood of information, all we can do is try to cope with the reality of Information Overload.

This Analyst Opinion is also available online at

Jonathan B. Spira is CEO and Chief Analyst at Basex.

It’s hard to avoid information. Not only do we live in a world full of it, making it nearly impossible to escape, but for some perverse reason, we actually like it.

Is it too much yet?

Indeed, we like it so much that we continuously create more of it and have even designed machines to do this for us as well.  In addition, we frequently compile information into metrics and ratios that describe other information.

A recent survey by a computer company showed that 90% of information was only looked at once after it was created.  The current Basex survey on how knowledge workers work already tells us that 50% of us spend one to two hours of our days creating information – and 15% spend more than three hours.  (If you haven’t already taken the survey, click here to do it now .)

Is this figure simply too high and are we in fact simply creating more information, not for its value but purely for the sake of making the pile bigger?

As we go about our day, it might be wise to cast a critical eye on our work that results in the creation of more information and ask ourselves some hard questions.  One, what is the practical purpose of the information that we are creating, and two, is it important enough to justify burdening others with it?

A quote generally attributed to Albert Einstein notes that “[N]ot everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”

Perhaps it would do us all good to think about why we are creating so much information, and whether perhaps we could get by with a bit less of it.

Jonathan B. Spira is CEO and Chief Analyst at Basex.

To find out a bit more about how knowledge workers spend their days and how Information Overload impacts them, a few weeks ago we launched a brief survey that asks you to look at your most recent full day at work and answer a few questions. If you haven’t already taken the survey, please stop here and take it now.

And how was your day?

Now that a few hundred people have taken the survey, we would like to share some preliminary results with you.

— 63% of knowledge workers feel they don’t have enough time to get all of their work done.

— 49% of knowledge workers feel that the amount of information they are presented with on daily basis is detrimental to getting their work done.

— 58% of those surveyed feel overwhelmed by information to the point of incapacity at least several times a week.

— 29% of knowledge workers have no time at all for thought and reflection during their day, and 58% had only between 15 and 30 minutes.

Please also help us get the word out about the survey by posting a link to it on your company’s intranet, your blog, your Facebook page, and anywhere else where knowledge workers might congregate. The more people participating in the survey, the better we will be able to take the first steps to increase our own productivity.

Participants will receive an Executive Summary of the survey’s findings and can also enter a drawing to win a set of Dilbert CubeGuard information overload blockers (three sets will be awarded).

Jonathan B. Spira is CEO and Chief Analyst at Basex.

It is easy to forget when we are presented with a piece of software that nothing about it is random. Software does not spring forth fully formed from its developers as Athena did from Zeus; rather, it is the result of years of research, development work, and testing.

It is also easy to overlook the fact that all that work is done by people, not faceless programming automatons. It is the unique personalities and personal goals of these people that shape a product , drive innovation, and impact the end-user experience.

The users of a piece of software, however, typically doesn’t see any of this when they install and run a program. They see features, icons, wizards, and may benefit from upgrades and enhancements in new versions without really understanding – or even thinking about – how these came about.

Microsoft Office has as many as 600 million users worldwide, of which 500 million are properly licensed. That makes it the most widely-used application in the world – and the introduction of a new version can have a significant impact on millions of knowledge workers and how they work.

What we don’t get to hear very often is the perspective of the people involved in creating Office 2010 from the ground up. Microsoft allowed us to talk with its developers in the final months of the development of Office 2010 and we asked them what they did to improve worker productivity and what they were most passionate about.

You can find out what they had to say in Conversations with Microsoft.

Jonathan B. Spira is CEO and Chief Analyst at Basex.

Socrates was relentless in his pursuit of knowledge and truth and this eventually led to his death   In The Apology, Plato writes that Socrates believed that the public discussion of important issues was necessary for a life to be of value.  “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

Danger, Professor Robinson?

In the olden days, before the Web, someone wishing to leak secret government documents would adopt a code name (think “Deep Throat” of the Watergate era) and covertly contact a journalist.  The reporter would then publish the information if, in the view of the reporter, editor, and publisher, it did not cross certain lines, such as placing the lives of covert CIA agents in danger.

Enter WikiLeaks.

WikiLeaks, founded in 2006, describes itself as “a multi-jurisdictional public service designed to protect whistleblowers, journalists and activists who have sensitive materials to communicate to the public.”

The site was founded to support “principled leaking of information.”  A classic example of an individual following this line or reasoning, namely that leaking classified information is necessary for the greater good, is that of Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, thereby exposing the U.S. government’s attempts to deceive the U.S. public about the Vietnam War.  The decision by the New York Times to publish the Pentagon Papers is credited with shortening the war and saving thousands of lives.

Time magazine wrote that WikiLeaks, located in Sweden, where laws protect anonymity, “… could become as important a journalistic tool as the Freedom of Information Act.”

On the other hand, the U.S. government considers WikiLeaks to be a potential threat to security.  In a document eventually published on the WikiLeaks site, the Army Counterintelligence Center wrote that WikiLeaks “represents a potential force protection, counterintelligence, operational security (OPSEC), and information security (INFOSEC) threat to the US Army.”  The document also states that “the identification, exposure, termination of employment, criminal prosecution, legal action against current or former insiders, leakers, or whistleblowers could potentially damage or destroy this center of gravity and deter others considering similar actions from using the WikiLeaks.org web site.”

Ten days ago, Wired magazine reported that U.S. officials had arrested Spc. Bradley Manning, a 22-year-old army intelligence analyst who reportedly leaked hundreds of thousands of classified documents and records as well as classified U.S. combat videos to WikiLeaks.

Although WikiLeaks confidentiality has never been breached, Manning reportedly bragged about his exploits, resulting in his apprehension.

According to Wired, Manning took credit for leaking the classified video of a helicopter air strike in Baghdad that also claimed the lives of several civilian bystanders.  The previously-referenced Army Counterintelligence Center document also reportedly came from Manning.

The case of Manning is perhaps the tip of the iceberg.  Several million people in the U.S. hold security clearances and, while their motives may vary from clear (e.g. trying to end a war as in the case of Ellsberg) to unclear (e.g. Manning), the genie is clearly out of the bottle.

Socrates, a social and moral critic, preferred dying for his beliefs rather than to recant them.  Indeed, Plato referred to Socrates as the “gadfly” of the state.  The motives of today’s leakers may not be as virtuous as Socrates’ but today’s technology virtually ensures that a secret may not remain a secret for very long.

Jonathan B. Spira is CEO and Chief Analyst at Basex.

Once again, information overload and attention management are front-page news. Matt Richtel at the New York Times wrote yet another piece on this topic that appeared earlier this week in the New York Times (in the interest of full disclosure, Matt interviewed me for background information as he was preparing the piece).

Ich weiß nicht, was soll es bedeuten…

Matt’s written on this subject many times before so I wasn’t surprised that he was working on this. Unfortunately, while he found some great examples of information-overload casualties, the trends and problems he examines in this 3500+ word piece were far from revolutionary. There are many more key points he could have addressed and focused on, and I will address a few here.

Indeed, the problem of information overload isn’t a new one but it is one that has been exacerbated by the fact that 1.) we have countless new gadgets and tools that deliver “information” and 2.) the rate of information creation has increased dramatically. As a result, in order to keep up, people attempt to multitask, something that our brains simply aren’t capable of handling with any degree of efficiency.

Instead of multitasking what we actually do is task switching which is really a series of continuous interruptions. While this is done in the belief that one is being more efficient and getting more done, nothing could be farther from the truth. Each interruption comes with a penalty.

In 2003 through 2005, Basex conducted research that led us to uncover the phenomenon of “recovery time,” the time it takes an individual to return to a task after he has been interrupted. Recovery time is generally imperceptible because the individual is not aware – even if he returns to the task – that he is struggling to get back to the point at which he was before the interruption.

Each time an individual switches tasks and tries to return to the previous task, he has to go back in time and recollect his thoughts and recall exactly what he has done and what he has yet to do. Some repetitive work may be involved as well, e.g. redoing the last few steps. This of course assumes that the individual returns at all – in some instances, the task is forgotten altogether. The interruptions also increase the likelihood of errors being committed.

When this happens over and over again (which is the case for most people during the workday), the ability to devote thought and reflection to a particular task – the hallmark of the knowledge worker – becomes nearly impossible. The human brain is curious and always seeking new information. As a result, external stimuli – the beeps and bleats of technology indicating a new message or call – are like the siren Loreley, the beautiful Rhine maiden who lured passing sailors to their doom with her singing and long, golden hair.

We found that recovery time is between 10 to 20 times the duration of the interruption. That means that a 30 second interruption can result in a minimum of 5 minutes of recovery time. Added together, unnecessary interruptions plus the related recovery time can consume as much as 28% of the workday and hundreds of billions of dollars in time.

Little has changed since then. If anything, we multitask more. But we can still tame the multitasking monster – it merely requires some discipline. In the coming weeks, we’ll look at ways to do just that.

Jonathan B. Spira is CEO and Chief Analyst at Basex.

The somewhat elusive key to understanding Information Overload, and thus developing meaningful solutions to lessen its impact, is to first develop a clear picture of the amount of information that individuals receive and consume and also develop an understanding of how much information is too much in a given circumstance.

Just how hungry for information are you now?

This is a tricky set of problems because information does not lend itself to direct measurement.  Traditionally, researchers have approached this question in one of three ways, namely looking at words, bytes, or time.  A document, for instance, could be high in words, low in bytes, and high in time spent reading it.  A video clip on the other hand, could be low in words, high in bytes, and low in time.

Research conducted at the University of California, San Diego tells us that roughly 3.6 zettabytes of information were consumed by Americans in their homes in 2008.  This translates to ca. 11.8 hours a day of information consumption.  Those numbers are, as stated, for information received and consumed solely in the home and do not address business settings.

In the coming months we will begin our efforts to determine how much information knowledge workers consume in the course of their work, thereby developing a profile and understanding of the knowledge workers’ information diet.

One concept we are studying is satisficing, a method of decision making that seeks to reach an “adequate” solution to a problem, as opposed to searching relentlessly for the optimal solution that may cost more in time spent than it is worth.  Satisficing is a naturally occurring and largely subconscious thought process that probably kept humankind from starving at some point in history, when our ancestors decided that they could make do with the berries on the tree and not wait forever for the perfect mammoth to pass by.

Depending on the circumstances, knowledge workers are both under- and overusing this strategy.  This frequently leaves them with sub-par solutions to a problem or results in wasted time when a simpler solution exists.

Another interesting concept we are grappling with is how to measure information.  The Shannon entropy, developed by Claude E. Shannon in 1948, is a way to measure the average information content of a message in units such as bits.  Perhaps more intriguing, it also provides a way to measure the information content that knowledge workers miss when they are unaware of a random variable.  For example, if only the last letter of a word is missing, it would be relatively easy to determine the word, as the other letters would provide context.  However, if only one or two of the letters in the word are presented, it will be much harder to determine the word, as there is little or no context.

Since this is ongoing work, and many of you readers have backgrounds in this area, we would like to hear from you in the coming weeks.  What do you think is the most valid way to measure information?  How much work related information do you estimate you are exposed to on a daily basis and how are you making these estimates?

Please participate in the discussion below.

Jonathan B. Spira is CEO and Chief Analyst at Basex.
Cody Burke is a senior analyst at Basex.

Slowly but surely, managers are beginning to realize that facilitating efficient collaboration amongst their legions of knowledge workers is a strategic priority.  While this will certainly come through the deployment of improved knowledge sharing and collaboration tools, few managers know which tools they should consider deploying, so inertia sets in and they make few if any changes.

This is unfortunate because tools that were leading edge five or more years ago simply do not have the type of functionality to support the way we need to work today and in the coming years.

Let’s take word processing, for example.  In many respects, these tools have changed relatively little from the word processing hardware introduced by IBM in the 1960s.  That early hardware supported text entry, editing, and printing, and yet even as more features have been added over time, the way people use word processing tools has changed very little.  A Basex survey in early 2010 revealed that 25% of knowledge workers still print out their documents to compare the comments and edits they get from colleagues.

Today, companies have a choice in their core desktop productivity tools.  Not only does Microsoft offer the now-ubiquitous Office suite (the 2010 version was just released), but Google offers a cloud-based suite and OpenOffice.org offers an open-source solution.

While these three offerings will all competently compose documents, present slides, and crunch some numbers, their capabilities vary greatly when viewed in the context of how knowledge workers actually work.  To dig deeper into the differences between these offerings, we developed an entirely new version of our Knowledge Worker Impact Quotient, a tool we use to help potential users of an offering to understand the potential positive or negative impacts the piece of software might present.  We then applied this analysis to the offerings from Google, Microsoft, and OpenOffice.org, with somewhat surprising results.  There was little difference between the offerings in terms of very basic functionality but once any kind of collaborative or knowledge sharing processes were applied, significant differences became apparent.

Our findings and recommendations are available in two reports, “:What’s New in Microsoft Office 2010″: and “:Three Variations on a Theme: An In-Depth Analysis of Office Suites from Google, Microsoft, and OpenOffice.org”: – online here at http://www.basex.com/2010

Jonathan B. Spira is CEO and Chief Analyst at Basex.

Perhaps it’s because desktop productivity applications such as word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software are so ubiquitous and have been around for so long (relatively speaking) that many people take them for granted.

When will our suite be upgraded?

People have been using computers to process words for decades but the ante has been raised significantly in the past five years, as knowledge workers have come to rely upon basic desktop productivity tools to not only provide basic functionality but to either offer or work in concert with applications that support the levels of knowledge sharing and collaboration that are de rigueur in the twenty-first century Knowledge Economy.

Microsoft has long owned what is considered the office suite market although a host of companies have been nipping at its heels, offering everything from free, open-source suites to free online suites.

The two most prominent competitors, OpenOffice.org, which offers the OpenOffice.org Productivity Suite, and Google, which offers the free Google Apps as well as the paid Google Apps Premier Edition, have captured a tiny percentage of Microsoft’s 600 million users yet the amount of mindshare these offerings enjoy goes well beyond their actual market presence.

Many organizations have sat out the last one or two upgrade cycles in both the Microsoft Office and Windows arenas and they also haven’t upgraded their PCs, which, in many cases, may be five years or older.  As a result, the clock is ticking and these organizations will need to make decisions about new office suites this year and next.

While free software may sound appealing, the reality of the situation is quite different.  Since the market for desktop productivity tools is so large, and office suites comprise the single most-used tool or set of tools used by knowledge workers, we decided to put Microsoft Office 2010 under a microscope and see what has changed and how those changes impact the knowledge worker.  In addition, we also dissected and compared Microsoft Office 2010 and its two closest competitors, namely the Google and OpenOffice.org offerings.

We put our findings in the form of two very detailed reports and they are now both available to you online.

Jonathan B. Spira is CEO and Chief Analyst at Basex.

Prague at night

There’s nothing like staying in six hotels over nine nights to find out the state of technology in European hotels.  My trip looked like this: New York, Munich, Prague, Munich, Bozen (Bolzano), Munich, New York (I am on the plane flying to New York as you read this, most likely).

I stayed in brand new hotels (one that opened a mere two days prior to my arrival), and some with over a century of tradition.

Technology was in evidence everywhere:  New contactless key card systems for hotel rooms (the one-year-old Kempinski Hybernská in Prague, Czech Republic), a buzzer system to let guests into your room (the 100-year-old Parkhotel Laurin in Bolzano, Italy), and of course Internet access.

The surprising thing is that, while the speed was never blazingly fast, it all seemed to work.  In addition, several hotels had very reasonably priced or free access, namely the Kempinski Hybernská, where Wi-Fi was free but using the wired access was not, and the Parkhotel Laurin, where one day Internet cost only €8.

The only slight difficulty came about when I tried to access the Wi-Fi in the lobby of the Parkhotel Laurin.  No matter what I did, my trusty ThinkPad X300 couldn’t see the access point (although apparently everyone else’s laptop could).

No problem, thanks to the super staff.  I was invited into one of the hotel’s offices and connected via cable.

There was a significant low-tech failure, at the brand new Novotel at the Munich Airport (Flughafen München-Franz Josef Strauß).  Several of the foam mattresses were placed upside down on the bed platform (I was travelling with a colleague and my room the first time we stayed there and his room the second time had this problem).  At first I thought it was a high-tech design but ultimately, it was simply overlooked.

Jonathan B. Spira is CEO and Chief Analyst at Basex.