IORG Discusses Solutions for Info Overload
On July 15th, the Information Overload Research Group (IORG) held their inaugural conference in New York City. The group, whose founders include IBM, Microsoft, Google, Intel, and a dozen other companies and academic institutions, is on a mission to find solutions to today's information overload problems. In attendance at this first conference were both representatives from from the above companies as well as others from all over the world. Now that this event has ended, lets see what we've learned.
Thanks to IORG member and blogger Jared Goralnick, we have a great review of the highlights from the event including historical data, quotes, discussion topics, and even possible software solutions:
Information Overload By the Numbers
- $650 billion: Annual cost of interruptions for knowledge workers in the United States
- 28% of a worker's time is spent dealing with interruptions that are neither urgent nor important
- 6 Hours Per Week: Time lost due to context switching (multi-tasking, pausing, etc) - Does this means the Louis Gray's and Scobles are still few and far between?
Intel also contributed their own internally collected numbers:
- Average employee receives 350 messages per week
- Average executive receives over 300 messages per day
- Employees spend about 20 hours per week managing email, 2 hours of which is unnecessary email
Discussing Solutions
When talking about solutions to the information overload problem, the key areas that were touched on were process, training, and raising awareness. Intel also mentioned a couple of solutions they have implemented themselves - one being the use of "quiet periods" of 4 hours twice per week where people can disconnect from communication and fully focus on getting things done. They also make use of an internal software program called the "Intel Email Effectiveness Coach," that warns people when they're about to do something stupid, like send a message to 2000 people. (Wow - they should sell that!)
As far as software solutions go, Jared provides us a short list of the highlights. Here's what he said stood out:
- RescueTime - keeps track of not just your activities on your computer but those of your office mates, enabling you to see how you stack up and when you're slacking
- Slife - similar to RescueTime in that it gathers statistics about computer usage, but data is primarily kept locally rather than "in the cloud"
- SmartDesktop - Imagine your computer knew what was contextually relevant no matter what you were doing on it. (Private Beta)
- Seriosity - an economics-based approach to email management whereby one attaches virtual currency to their messages
- ActionBase - Turns Outlook into a database of sorts for knowledge management and wiki-like email correspondence
- Talk2Us - Jared called this one a "crazy voice recognition manage-your-life software that's in private beta"
- ClearContext - Helps you to better identify important information, group relevant items together, and generally have a better workflow within Outlook
- Permessa -Enterprise unified messaging for performance and compliance monitoring
Jared himself is also the creator of AwayFind, a tool that lets you get away from email without getting out of reach.
We will take a look at some of these other solutions over the coming weeks here at RWW and let you know what we think.
Image Credit: Autoroute: Mzlle Biscotte
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Thanks for further spreading the word about IORG, Sarah! I'm glad my article was helpful.
I really do think this group will help to both bring awareness to how much data we're increasingly overwhelmed with...and some of the solutions for addressing it.
Glad to see IORG caught your interest, Sarah! I'll second Jared's excitement at the potential that the group has to help address this problem.
One thing I would like to see discussed more is the application of Instant Messaging to address information overload. At Dexrex, we really think that applying new forms of interaction can help solve the glut of email.
Cool, will read at work :) Thanks for the review
good there are organizational and technical things that help with this situation.
but it is a problem of awareness, and that is a problem behind the eyes, not out in front or on the screen.
it is as much about how you deal with your thoughts as it is about the stuff in your inbox.
the value of a quiet mind in dealing with life and with information cannot be overestimated, because if the mind is really quiet, anybody can deal with any amount of anything.
intuition is another help, simply knowing what is important, and what is not, and being free of the fear that you might miss something.
i don't want to cut into the business of those fine companies you have listed in this story, but they only have partial solutions.
I thought it was a while ago. I suppose I made a lucky guess.
Posted by: phil baumann
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July 23, 2008 11:37 AM
Information Overload (as stated by Kirsh in Intellectica, 2000 [1] when I encountered it for the first time) is not just about interruptions to me. Interruptions are contributing to the information overload problem but it is not the sole source IMHO.
A very simple example is the Wikipedia experience. How many time each of us have been browsing it and end-up with 10 tabs on very interesting topics but ... just 15 minutes to read them all !
Information Overload resides in the inability to manage an amount of information growing at a faster rate than your ability to consume it. Yes emails are part of it, yes it matters [2] but it should not be restricted to it just because it's easier to measure.
The solutions to cope with this growing amount are mainly filters. Either embodied cognitive filters (methods basically) or external solutions (software, drawers, etc...).
I'd love to hear from others what are their own tricky quirky solutions.
Utopiah.
[1] "A Few Thoughts on Cognitive Overload", David Kirsh, Intellectica (2000).
http://interactivity.ucsd.edu/articles/Overload/published.html
[2] "serios" are discussed in "A marketplace for attention: Responses to a synthetic currency used to signal importance in e-mail"
by Byron Reeves, Simon Roy, Brian Gorman, and Teresa Morley, FirstMonday 2008
http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2100/1963
The things discussed seem to be for solutions that can be put into place now.. what about more powerful solutions for the future? One of the areas I am optimistic about, which I brought up in my speech about digital natives at a vanguard conference is natural language processing and ai. That is, being able to more intimately understand people's thoughts, opinions and tastes and using that model to automatically filter, organize and prioritize data to effectively allay information overload. I'd like to see some form of this within 2-5 years but 10 years is more like it.
We will be launching a new Web 2.0 platform for alert services and reminders that will make it easier to deal with IO. Stay tuned.
Also check out this blog devoted to information overload and how to deal with it.
Sarah,
The URL for Talk2Us is www.talk2.us if you could please update the post.
We are developing a semantic toolset to help assist in issues like this. It is free to use, and assist in market research. We are in the early stages of this venture, so we are able to remain agile and in-tune with users. The technology can be demo'ed at:
http://www.cklingo.com
There is a bit of a learning curve, which we are working to narrow (let us know if you have any suggestions), so we have made a video to walk you through using the search engine. We believe that our unique approach provides value to business intellgience and market research and is truely a breakthrough in the area os unstructured data analysis.
Let us know what you think at cklingo@novorum.com!