“What can we do to call more attention to the problem of Information Overload?” is a question I still hear regularly.   Last year we came up with an answer:  participate in Information Overload Awareness Day, a new workplace observance that calls attention to the problem of information overload and how it impacts both individuals and organizations.

Here's how we solve the problem…

Over 350 people from 30 countries did exactly that.

This year, Information Overload Awareness Day falls on October 20.

We are holding an online event that will do a deep dive into different ways that Information Overload is adversely impacting knowledge work and knowledge workers while also spotlighting possible solutions to help managers and policymakers cope with loss of productivity.

The event features a variety of speakers including Dan Holshouse of George Washington University, who is the former Chief Knowledge Officer at Xerox, Max Christoph, the Managing Director at Morgan Stanley, who has been leading the charge against Information Overload there, Oliver Brdiczka, a researcher at Xerox PARC studying the problem, Dan Rasmus, Microsoft’s former director of business insights, and Nathan Zeldes, president of the Information Overload Research Group and the former executive in charge of addressing the problem at Intel.  (I’ll be there too, of course.)

While a few people put their heads in the sand and say this is not a real problem, the costs are quite real and the problem is only going to get worse.  By 2012, the typical knowledge worker will receive hundreds of messages each day via e-mail, IM, text, and social networks.

Simply put, companies need to focus on what can be done to lessen Information Overload’s impact right now.  We’ll look at the latest research and solutions and cover areas including managing e-mail, calculating Information Overload exposure, improving search, and managing content, just to name a few.

The cost of the event is $50; attendees who promise not to multitask (i.e. IM, e-mail, or text) during the event will receive a 50% discount.

Companies are invited to sponsor Information Overload Awareness Day by enrolling as Designated Sites.  This allows all of their employees to attend at no charge and demonstrates their commitment to helping solve the problem.

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

I have been covering the
Cisco I-Prize for several years and continue to be impressed with this
initiative.  I spoke with Sharon
Wong, the Director of Business Development for Cisco’s Emerging Technology
group to discuss the conclusion of the second I-Prize. She said that the first
one validated the desire for teams to work together on innovation on the global
scale and they learned how much people really like to collaborate (see Cisco Announces I-Prize Winner and Results of Their
Global Collaboration). 
So this time they provided greater collaboration support through Cisco
tools including the following four.

Security concerns are in the news a lot lately. The government has issued public alerts against terrorist activity. Military experts are debating how to maximize armed forces’ safety amid intensified conflict in Afghanistan. Medical experts are producing vaccine to combat Swine Flu. Each issue focuses on the need to ensure public safety. Yet most businesses – including agencies that rely on timely, accurate information to make decisions about public safety – overlook a serious risk that jeopardizes their effectiveness and ability to survive. The threat? Inadequate document security.

Businesses need secure access to accurate information to make smart decisions. Usually information is scattered:

• on paper (subject to deterioration, misfiling, security breaches, and loss);
• trapped in the minds of executives, managers and workers (subject to unintentional alteration and selective memory); and
• stored in electronic documents and software applications (subject to inconsistent rules, conflicting policies, and difficult to lock down).

A recent 2009 AIIM report entitled Electronic Records Management – Still Playing Catch-up with Paper shows 60% of managers surveyed couldn’t be confident their records hadn’t been altered, deleted, or inappropriately accessed if they were challenged. More than 70% had no provisions for long-term electronic record archival; 31% had twenty or more content repositories that could be usefully linked (and presumably weren’t, complicating access and security). Many respondents described their electronic records as unmanaged; most lacked email management policies. It doesn’t take an expert to uncover a foul brew of document security concerns. Ignoring document security invites trouble.

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Humans have hunted from the earliest times. Maybe that’s why we often accept the burdensome quest for information. We’re accustomed to the chase—even fooled into thinking we’re doing something valuable. Yet time lost in pointless pursuit means something is sacrificed. In the case of college enrollment, a drawn-out chase can mean losing top candidates to other institutions and ending up with a mediocre catch.

During peak season, enrollment office employees frenetically pursue information and answers, compiling scattered documentation in the hope of making quick, prudent decisions. Admissions, student aid, registrar, scholarship committees and other areas each have separate forms requiring distinctive information.

Yet as each department collects what it needs, useful information that could be shared is often requested again…and again. Information that could move decisions forward sits idle, garnering little or no attention.

Regrettably, as processes are deferred, institutions risk losing top candidates to other institutions.

Make informed decisions, quickly

Whether we’re considering undergraduate or graduate admissions, student financial aid, scholarship applications, or faculty search, the overriding goal is to garner and retain top people. Even though roles and responsibilities differ among departments, most draw vital information from transcripts, applications, test scores, essays, and references. Often, specific data found on forms is valuable in multiple places. Unfortunately, departmental software systems that store this precious information create data silos, resulting in information that is unknowingly collected multiple times for varying purposes.

Gathering information several times—even if it’s done efficiently—wastes resources, results in redundancy, generates errors, and causes delays.

Why not re-use your information to satisfy current needs and anticipate what lies ahead? Enterprise content management (ECM) and business process management (BPM) software, integrated meaningfully with your business systems, redefine efficiency. By centralizing and securing access to content, then pushing and pulling information wherever it’s needed according to your pre-set business rules, ECM and BPM free your staff to work efficiently and focus on the services for which they were hired.

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“Work faster.”

“Get everything right the first time.”

“Outperform our competitors with better service.”

In challenging economic times, these goals are imperative. Yet achieving all three simultaneously is improbable unless you have the right tools to assist you.

Fast, accurate, friendly service helps you to be viable and competitive. At the same time, being effective is vital to cost-efficiency and customer loyalty. Unfortunately, however, fast work often generates mistakes, while meticulous attention to detail slows progress. Whether you are investing in technology and growth or are focused on doing more with fewer resources, electronic forms (eForms) and intelligent automation can help you get ahead.

According to AIIM’s State of the ECM Industry 2010 report, 41% of businesses aren’t confident that their digital information (except emails) is accurate, accessible, and trustworthy — a severe obstacle to efficiency. Forms are a small part of the web of business information. Yet when content is captured accurately and managed properly, eForms address the challenges of accuracy, accessibility, and trustworthiness while transforming service, increasing profitability, and encouraging sustainability. How? By:

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 Here is an interesting concept that is well articulated in a new book, The Learning Layer by Steven
Flinn.  Recently, I had an opportunity to
speak with Steve about this marriage of aspects of Web 2.0 and artificial
intelligence (aka adaptive systems) that can have useful applications within
the enterprise.

Steve is the CEO of ManyWorlds,
a firm that conducts R&D in the area of next generation systems
and business processes and provides practical applications of this work to
organizations. He was an executive at Royal Dutch Shell where he held  a variety of positions including Chief
Information Officer and Vice President of Strategy and Strategic Alliances.
Steve has a background in economics, mathematics and computer science.

Steve noted that use of personalized responses
based on user behavior has been pervasive on the consumer Web through such
things as Amazon’s recommendations. 
However, this technology has been applied much less within the
enterprise.  He feels that this is
ironic since behavioral information available within the enterprise  can generally be much richer than out on
the Web. You have a more clearly defined set of users and many more
interactions to data mine, along with more related teams who collaborate and
generate more behavioral data.  I
would certainly agree with the difference in the quality of information on user
behavior and also add that many Web 2.0 applications such as wikis work better
within the trusted environment of the enterprise. This seems to be another
case.

The Learning Layer approach takes this
personalization several steps further. Not only are personalized
recommendations provided to individual users based on their behavior and the
behavior of others, but the system feeds these recommendations back to itself
to continuously adapt on an automated basis. Steve said that the technology is
currently available to do this, it just needs to be properly applied.

For example, a system managing content might make
recommendations for related content based on a user’s profile and actions.  Using the Learning Layer approach, it
would also keep track of all user behavior and feed this back into the system
on a regular basis. The relationship between two sets of content may become
stronger or weaker depending how it is currently being used.  The same logic can be applied to the
connections between people to see the ebb and flow of connections.

The approach can be applied to work flow and here
it gets even more interesting in my opinion. Just as old school knowledge
management created more direct business value when aligned to business
processes, I see the same thing happening here.  Let’s take the example of a property casualty insurance
underwriter. After the system takes in enough actions to be able to
differentiate the skill level of users, it is ready to go.

Now if an underwriter with no experience in
underwriting laundry mats, for example, starts to work on one the system
recognizes this. It also knows the steps that an inexperienced underwriter
should take when working with laundry mats and provides these process steps. It
can also recommend a person who is slightly more advanced than the user who can
offer guidance. If the user has middle level experience, then the process steps
can be tailored to that level. In the meanwhile the system is observing the
ongoing user behavior on an aggregated basis and making adjustments in the
proper process steps for everyone at all levels.

The technology is around to create this type of
system. I can see the value and wish I had this capability when I designed
knowledge management systems for underwriters in the early 90s.  Call centers that deal with complex
topics would be another great target area. You need to have enough complexity
to warrant this type of intervention and then enough users to generate useful
data for the system to apply.

We also discussed the concept of learning value
that Steve raises in the book. He took the concept of value of information from
decision analysis and applied it to learning. In decision analysis people
calculate the value of having certain information to help with decisions. The
same concept can be applied to learning. 
When undertaking an activity there is the direct value and the value of
the learning derived from the undertaking. This often translates into the
amount of uncertainty that can be eliminated by the new knowledge and its
effect on actions. Steve noted that learning only has real value if it changes
behavior (i.e., decisions).  If
people will still do the same thing regardless then nothing is gained. That
sounds simple but it is often overlooked.

I like this approach. I think it does extend the
possibilities of enterprise 2.0. If we can create data rich environments
through the transparent interactions within enterprise 2.0 then we have
expanded the learning opportunities. Then if we can use this expanded learning
to better guide individual behavior we have taken it a notch further. Now if we
can turn this learning back on the system to auto-generate changes within the
system itself, we have taken things another step further.  I think the data gained from the
transparency of enterprise 2.0 is a large piece of the value. Here is an
approach to make better use of this transparency.  

The combination of a weak economy – causing many to streamline operations to keep afloat – and increasing regulatory demands made business challenging for many in 2009. Those that emerged from the rubble of crumbling profits, hoping to resurrect their bottom line and succeed in this decade are working harder than ever, often with fewer resources. Although the economy will eventually improve, the regulatory scene is becoming more demanding, placing greater burdens on business. Only those that make wise use of limited resources will survive.

Despite recent unpredictability in government, business, and the economy, one thing is unchanged: compliance, security, and cost-efficient management remain the focus of many businesses. Named in multiple industries as the top three drivers for enterprise content management (ECM), they are more closely intertwined than ever:

• Cost efficiency is only possible in today’s litigious economy with an integrated, efficient compliance management program that mitigates risk and avoids costly penalties. In a paper or mixed media environment, it’s nearly impossible to achieve.
• Compliance is only achievable with stringent internal controls and an overseeing force to manage document security, governing access to information and how it is used. Entrusting oversight to fallible humans alone means there will always be mistakes. Zero tolerance is on the rise; penalties for non-compliance can be financially devastating.
• Security is only manageable in information-intensive businesses when you have the tools to pull all of your information together so it can be controlled, centrally and consistently. Even with a full complement of employees, it’s challenging. In a paper-based environment, it’s impossible.

The solution? ECM.

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As I argued in my previous post “Why traditional intranets fail knowledge workers” (originally named “Serving the long tail of information needs”) there’s a long tail of information needs to be served within knowledge intensive enterprises, and which can’t be served with the use of traditional intranets.

Organizations typically try to serve their employee’s information needs by producing varying types of content (text, images, video…) which is intended to communicate a message to, inform, the employees. Due to limited resources, all information needs cannot possibly be served. The line needs to be drawn somewhere, and it’s usually drawn where the cost of providing a certain kind of content exceeds the potential value of the information that the receivers can gain when extracting information from the content (assuming that the value is created when the content is actually consumed, i.e. transforming into information by the receiver). This is illustrated by the dashed horizontal link in the Long Tail power law graph for information needs illustrated below.

Although sometimes blunt and misguiding (as when there is information which is supposed to be never be used, but yet is absolutely critical to provide access to – such as a Standard Operating Procedures for emergency situations in a power plant), content usage rate (or popularity, if you like) is the easiest way to estimate the value of a certain piece of content, and thereby the information extracted from it. The reasoning is simple; if many people request a certain kind of information, it is likely they see value in it. So if many employees request a certain kind of information, it is likely to be valuable enough for the organization to supply that information to them.

Then what’s the cost of information? Well, a simple way to define it is to define it as the sum of all activities that it takes to supply an audience with a certain kind of information. The lower the cost, the more information needs we can serve. That’s basically why we use media and information technology – to lower the supply costs of information.

Assuming this is true for a lot of the information needs that exists over time in an organization, then the organization have two major challenges to address concerning all the information needs that make the cut (has a value / cost above 1):

1. Make sure the information is, if possible, captured into some content and made accessible.
2. Make sure the content is as easy to access and consume (interpret and understand) as possible

The second challenge usually presents great potential for improvements in most organizations. You might be familiar with the now classic the IDC report from 2001 by analyst Susan Feldman, “The high cost of not finding information” (which you can read about in this whitepaper). Feldman’s research showed that average knowledge workers spent 15% to 35% of their workday searching for information. 15% of the time was spent on duplicating existing information and searchers are successful in finding what they seek 50% of the time or less. Even though 10 years have passed since the findings of the research was presented, I’m pretty sure it holds true also today. As an example, Laurie Buczek,Social Media Strategist and Platform Vision Team Manager at Intel, partly motivated Intel’s investment in social computing in the following way:

“The average Intel employee dumps one day a week trying to find people with the experience & expertise plus the relevant information to do their job. We have calculated some of the $$ impact due to lost productivity and opportunity. Let me just say that it is motivating us to take action.”

Although the costs of not being able to find and access information fast enough are typically high, the costs of not being able to find a certain piece of information at all is potentially even greater. Rework, delays, suffering customer service, bad decision-making…you name it. All of these things happen frequently due to the lack of access to the right information in the right time – and quite often due to the fact that the information isn’t accessible in the first place.

These problems can partly be addressed by making sure all information that has been captured and encoded into content can be accessed and found by anyone who needs it. Yet, it is safe to say that the vast majority of all information and knowledge we have haven’t been captured and encoded into content. Sometimes because it can’t be, but as often as not it’s not been captured due to the high cost of capturing, storing, organizing, managing and delivering it.

The thing is that many orgs don’t bother much with the first challenge if they have just been able to produce and provide access to information that is worth managing. The problem is that there are lots and lots of valuable information which does not make the cut. Information that either never becomes accessible, or where access is very limited because it resides in email inboxes, in collaboration spaces that people won’t find or access unless they knows about it already and either has access or asks for it, on user desktops, on file servers not indexed by the intranet search engine, and do forth.

So what makes a certain piece of info worth managing? Well, if the value / cost quote is higher than 1, we’ll produce, store, organize, manage and distribute it to the users. Given that most of this content will be found in the long neck, that’s where we will focus most of our efforts and resources.

For content where the value / cost quote is equal to or lower than 1, we’re likely not going to manage it. We’ll much rather not produce or capture it. We’ll even delete it if already exists, so that it does not get in the way of other content that we need to manage.

Now, we should ask ourselves what would happen if the following was to become true:

• The cost of producing, storing, managing and distributing information decreases radically due to new practices and technologies
• The resources we have available to do this are not longer limited to a fraction of the workforce, but the entire workforce can be used, even resources from the outside – for free?

Would this change the game plan?


YES.

By coincidence, these things have now happened.

Thanks to the (technological) development during recent years, we now have technologies available which allow us to communicate and share information with other people, across time and space, in a variety of ways. If you need to have a rich, two-way and real-time conversation with an audience you do not know in advance and want anyone to be able to join, you can do that. If you only need to send a small text message to one specific recipient while you are out on a run in the park, you can do that. If you want to be able to discover, connect and collaborate with like-minded people across the globe who you don’t yet know, you can do that.

The access to these communication tools is also being democratized as virtually anyone who possesses basic computer skills and a device that can access the Internet can get access to and use the tools anytime and from anywhere they want. For free. No education or training required.

Until quite recently, the only way to reach a large audience with a message was to broadcast it via print (newspapers, books…), tv or radio. Now you can be a one-man media corporation and reach as many people as any of the big old media corporations. The great power than comes with mass-communication, which for long have been restricted to those who could afford to buy and own the production means and whp had the education and training required to operate the tools, that power is now available to anyone. That’s a really big shift which has lead to a sort of new Renaissance – one that is not restricted to an intellectual class, but which anyone can join by engaging with other people in the blogosphere, Twitter and Facebook.

As a result of these changes, more and more of the conversations where we exchange information and knowledge with each other are taking place online instead of face-to-face or via telephony. Content is produced as a bi-product of our conversations. With virtual collaboration becoming the norm even when we meet face-to-face or just need to talk to each other, the things we say and do are being captured and encoded into various forms of content such as voice, video, photos and text. The dark matter of the business universe is becoming visible and accessible as our business conversations are being captured instead of being transient and passing by without a notice, only touching a those individuals who participated in a specific conversation.

In short, the cost of communicating has collapsed.

What is interesting is how the information and knowledge exchanged through these various kinds of conversations now is easily captured and can be made available to people who did not participate in the conversation. Content is increasingly being created as a bi-product of conversations. This is to be contrasted with the typical approach where we capture and encode the information into content (documents etc) before it is communicated. For information that is encoded into content this way, one can definitely say that the cost of producing content has collapsed. And here lies the great opportunity when it comes to being able to serve the long tail of information needs; if the information exchanged in our conversations can easily be captured and shared, then some of this information is likely.

To do this we must first make it possible for people to find/discover, connect and communicate with each other in various ways (blogs, web conferencing, micro-blogging, IM/chat) so that the information can be captured into content (text, video, sound…). We must have a platform that empowers and a culture that encourages people to communicate and collaborate with each other.

We must also find ways to store and collectively organize the content so that it can be found or discovered and used by anyone who might need it. Here we can learn a lot from the social web and the use of Web 2.0 technologies and how search, tagging, links, and metadata created from explicit and implicit user activities to make information findable even when there is an abundance of information available to us.

Again, just as I argued in “Why traditional intranets fail knowledge workers”, we need to focus more on creating filters to handle the abundance of information than trying to stop the inflow of information. We need to stop seeing information supply as a problem to be solved (by trying to delimit it) and instead focus on how to satisfy information demand. By using information about our own social connections, the exchange we have with them, and the activities they do, we can employ social filtering techniques to “pull” relevant information. By letting not only any systems you use but also your friends and colleagues become aware of what you’re interested in, currently working on, planning to do, and so on, you can create an attraction to yourself that will “pull” relevant information to you, even information you didn’t know existed or you didn’t know you where looking for. Instead of having to spend a lot of time and effort on searching for information, you will get more of your information needs served by social filtering; manual and automatic recommendations on what information might be relevant for you.

To me it’s clear that most enterprises, especially knowledge intensive, need a platform that provides the capabilities which I have mentioned above. There are many reasons as it can help them make better use of shared knowledge, improve decision-making, increase agility and responsiveness, and facilitate innovation. If innovation, like Idris Motee says, “is like ping-pong”, it is because ideas need to be bounced back and forth before they mature and can attract the right people who can bring it to the market. If an organization really considers innovation to be important, it should engage everyone and make innovation everybody’s business. It should provide a ping-pong table, give every coworker, partner and customer a racket to play with, and invite them to play.

To me, it is a feasible (pragmatic) strategy to extend and transform the traditional intranet into a social intranet that incorporates these new capabilities. With the risk that using the term “intranet” adds terminology baggage that might cause problems, I have chosen to accept that the expression “social intranet” seems to stick to people’s minds. Using an existing term will likely help people learn about the new things faster than “Enterprise Social Software Platform” (ESSP) possibly could – at least during a transitional phase. There will certainly be a few who will just put lipstick on a pig and call it a “social intranet”, but I don’t expect that many people to be fooled to believe that adding some features such as commenting for corporate news stories and profile pages will really transform a traditional intranet into social intranet.

Most people will, if they’ don’t already, come to understand that a social intranet is not just about adding features such as blogs, wikis, activity feeds, social bookmarking and micro-blogging on top of a traditional intranet; it’s about rethinking the purpose of intranets with the intention of bringing the paradigm shift in how we communicate and collaborate that is taking place on the web to the very core of how enterprises are operated and managed. A social intranet needs to be seen as a strategic component when trying to do this.
Although the notion of social intranets is quite new, the business case for social intranets is anything but new. In fact, it has existed as long as there have been enterprises, and it’s growing stronger and stronger the more vital timely access to the right information and knowledge becomes for an enterprise in order to compete and thrive. The business case can easily be summarized, as in this quote from the 2001 IDC whitepaper mentioned above:

“While the costs of not finding information are enormous, they are hidden within the enterprise, and therefore they are rarely perceived as having an impact on the bottom line. Decisions are usually information problems. If they are made with poor or erroneous information, then they put the life of the enterprise at stake. Therefore, it behooves the enterprise to provide the best information-finding tools available and to ensure that all of its intellectual assets have access to them, no matter where they reside.”

It’s high time to start serving the long tail of information needs.

Oscar Berg posted
a useful piece on why traditional
intranets fail today's knowledge workers that I want to bring to your
attention. I heard about it through Twitter and Marcia Conner. Oscar starts
with some useful stats on the increasing amount of knowledge-based work. He
writes that a study by The Work
Foundation estimated
our workforce has 30 per cent in jobs with high knowledge content, 30 per cent
in jobs with some knowledge content, and 40 per cent in jobs with less
knowledge content. I think the numbers are higher for knowledge work but this
is still a lot.

Oscar notes that knowledge work is less
predictable and repeatable than traditional industry work. Move over Fred
Taylor. He adds that the structure of knowledge work typically emerges as the
work progresses. I would add that it is very context dependent and this argues
against the concept of best practices, at least the static kind.  This makes it hard to know in advance
what knowledge you need.  This
means that you need to place control over knowledge access in the hands of the
worker and not the system. It argues against scripted solutions.

Most traditional intranets do not provide the flexibility
for knowledge access that knowledge workers require.  As Oscar writes, “most of today’s intranets primarily consist
of pre-produced information resources which are intended to serve information
needs which can be anticipated in advance. They aim to serve people who perform
predefined and repeatable tasks.” This is so nineteenth century.

Now in the twenty first century we have the potential to
address these needs through a social intranet (aka enterprise 2.0).  This is more than a simply adding
collaboration tools. As Oscar writes, “It equips everyone with the tools that
allows them to participate, contribute, attract, discover, find and connect
with each other to exchange information and knowledge and/or collaborate.”  Ahem.

I have just given you the highlights. Hopefully this is
enough to make you want to read Oscar’s complete passage.

August 18, 2010 – Vancouver, BC — Intranet Connections (www.intranetconnections.com) is pleased to announce the intranet launch for BC Place, the venue for the opening and closing ceremonies of the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Winter Games.  BC Place launched their Intranet Connections Intranet 2.0 CMS Software in July with goals of improving corporate communication, increasing employee involvement, and enhancing information sharing within the organization.

After the 2010 Winter Games, BC Place was scheduled major construction to revitalize and modernize the facilities, including the largest retractable roof of its kind in the world.  When the Administration team at BC Place learned that half of all full-time staff would be moving to temporary offices at the Vancouver Convention Centre and the other half would remain at BC Place, they immediately became aware that a corporate communication tool was needed to unify the two locations.  The IT team spearheaded the project, identifying an intranet site as the best means to facilitate internal communication and provide a central repository for staff information.

In evaluating intranet solutions, BC Place knew they wanted to find a turnkey product that did not require any programming or custom development in order to get their site up and running. 

“We ultimately selected Intranet Connections as an intranet solution because it was out-of the box and it required minimal administration overhead.  Intranet Connections also came highly recommended, was proven in the market place and was developed by a Canadian company.  We really liked the fact that Intranet Connections was a local organization.”  says Winnie Mok, Information Services Manager at BC Place.

Since this was BC Place’s first intranet implementation, Intranet Connections’ suite of ready-to-use applications allowed the intranet development committee to focus efforts on the key success factors for a well received rollout.  Priorities for the launch included: educating users about the role of an intranet, developing dynamic and relevant content and establishing site usage guidelines.

The new intranet has become a central part of BC Place’s multi-location communications and information management strategy.  Construction news, press updates, updated policies and information about their upcoming road show are all posted on the intranet to keep employees at different facilities up to date and in the know.

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