Information Overload: Now $900 Billion – What is Your Organization’s Exposure?
According to our latest research Information Overload costs the U.S. economy a minimum of $900 billion per year in lowered employee productivity and reduced innovation. Despite its heft, this is a fairly conservative number and reflects the loss of 25% of the knowledge worker’s day to the problem. The total could be as high as $1 trillion.
Information overload describes an excess of information that results in the loss of ability to make decisions, process information, and prioritize tasks. It remains a key challenge for companies that operate in the knowledge economy but it is nothing new. Indeed, it was very much on the minds of thought leaders of an earlier information age centuries ago, including Roger Bacon, Samuel Johnson, and Konrad Geßner whose 1545 Bibliotheca universalis warned of the “confusing and harmful abundance of books” and promulgated reading strategies for coping with the overload of information.
In modern times, information overload was first mentioned in 1962, in an article entitled “Operation Basic: The Retrieval of Wasted Knowledge” by Gertram M. Gross. The problem was predicted by Alvin Toffler in Future Shock (1970), and in 1989, Richard Saul Wurman warned of it in his book, Information Anxiety.
Workers spend up to 50 percent of their day managing information, according to a recent survey conducted by Basex of more than 3,000 knowledge workers, and streamlining these processes can have a significant impact on productivity. But determining the extent of the problem is the first step.
To help companies understand their financial exposure, Basex has created a free, Web-based Information Overload Calculator at www.iocalculator.com, allowing companies to calculate the impact of the problem on their own operations. [N.b. Our legal counsel urges that users be seated when operating the calculator.]
Indeed, in order to remain competitive in 2009, companies will need to begin an information overload bailout, i.e. taking active countermeasures, in order to remain competitive. Nothing is more disruptive to the way we work than information overload and we need to reverse this trend as quickly as possible.
Some companies are already doing so. Intel, a company with 86,300 employees, sees information overload as a serious problem. “At Intel we estimated the impact of information overload on each knowledge worker at up to eight hours a week,” said Nathan Zeldes, a principal engineer focusing on computing productivity issues at Intel and founding chairman of the Information Overload Research Group, an industry consortium. “We continuously look at applying new work behaviors that can help reduce its impact.”
Jonathan B. Spira is CEO and Chief Analyst at Basex.
January 9th, 2009 21:36
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January 13th, 2009 08:26
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February 18th, 2009 07:23
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March 18th, 2009 05:47
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May 7th, 2009 05:35
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May 20th, 2009 08:27
Some very interesting data in this blog post. Recently, we created a white paper suggesting some ways to reduce part of the information overload, i.e., email overload. We have also quoted statistics from your authoritative 2008 study on the problem of email overload.
We argue that the email deluge is created in a large part due to companies using email for the wrong things – file collaboration, task management, discussions and consensus building etc. Using emails for such “group” situations causes a single message to evoke a flood of responses, with the same information being replicated over and over again. We have suggested online collaboration tools as a solution, which use the “pull” approach, where people go to information only when they need it, as opposed to email, which always seems to be poking your sides to keep checking it.
the white paper is here – http://www.hyperoffice.com/business-email-overload/
May 21st, 2009 06:42
Email Overload solved by Online Collaboration…
Email overload is starting to become recognized as the biggest culprit of lost productivity. I began researching this topic a couple weeks ago and found that just in the last 3 months alone there have been articles written by the NY Times, Wall Stree…
November 18th, 2009 06:57
This is an invaluable information to all the organizations across the globe, as it showers light on a a very serious problem affecting productivity. Information Overload has become so serious that it’s causing anxiety in the work place, and web based solutions like taroby which focuses on managing IO has come up. It’s great that finally Organization has realized the importance of managing IO to improve productivity.
December 16th, 2009 13:49
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