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
[...] we announced an approximate cost of Information Overload ($900 billion p.a. to the U.S. economy for 2008), there has been a lot of discussion both in the [...]
January 13th, 2009 08:26
[...] Now that we know that Information Overload costs the U.S. economy a minimum of $900 billion per year, it appears that it will be 2009’s problem as [...]
February 18th, 2009 07:23
[...] when just the unnecessary ones are counted, but it jumped up instead). In December, they posted a blog entry saying According to our latest research Information Overload costs the U.S. economy a minimum of [...]
March 18th, 2009 05:47
[...] http://www.basexblog.com/2008/12/19/information-overload-now-900-billion-what-is-your-organizations-… [...]
May 7th, 2009 05:35
[...] http://www.basexblog.com/2008/12/19/information-overload-now-900-billion-what-is-your-organizations-… [...]
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
[...] Information Overload: What is your organization’s exposure? (http://www.basexblog.com/2008/12/19/information-overload-now-900-billion-what-is-your-organizations-exposure/) [...]
July 4th, 2010 15:09
What I don´t understand is that – apart from a couple corporations – no one else really seems to be interested in those findings too much. I mean, if you add this up to the whole world, than you are at trillions and trillions of USD/Euros etc. That is more than all wars and all catastrophes combined cost! Give me a break! In the light of such numbers I sometimes begin to doubt whether the merits of the information age can balance that out! No, seriously! And then: All those addicted Twitter, Facebook and iGadget users around the world! Hey, nobody can and wants to stop progress. But if progress evolves as a step backward (at least in terms of productivity), then we should perhaps rethink quite a bit of what we are presently doing…
December 16th, 2010 09:12
[...] December of 2008, we announced that Information Overload was costing the U.S. economy $900 billion per year. We arrived at that figure via an exhaustive process of categorizing occupations recognized by [...]
February 1st, 2011 11:56
[...] of 25% of the knowledge worker’s day to the problem. The total could be as high as $1 trillion.http://www.basexblog.com/2008/12…This head-on approach has big conceptual problems though. I for one, don't believe IO is a [...]
June 5th, 2011 06:32
[...] Information Overload: Now $900 Billion – What is Your Organization’s Exposure? » Basex Blog » [...]
June 13th, 2011 16:01
[...] — a real problem that has a measurably negative impact on the bottom line. In fact, a recent report from Basex Research Group estimates that workers lose 28% of their time to information overload. [...]
June 17th, 2011 02:00
[...] American worker.” And the cost is neither hypothetical nor conjectural. According to a recent study, information overload is deemed responsible for nearly $997 billion in annual lost productivity for [...]
July 12th, 2011 13:53
[...] information. There is also a resulting impact on the business bottom line. In fact, a recent report from Basex Research Group estimates that workers lose 28 percent of their time to information [...]
July 18th, 2011 12:06
[...] In his new book “Overload-How Too Much Information is Hazardous to Your Organization”, author Jonathan Spira says it’s not just personal productivity that suffers. Too much information to handle effectively costs the US economy $900 Billion a year in bad decisions, delays and wasted time. [...]
July 19th, 2011 11:21
[...] In his new book “Overload-How Too Much Information is Hazardous to Your Organization”, author Jonathan Spira says it’s not just personal productivity that suffers. Too much information to handle effectively costs the US economy $900 Billion a year in bad decisions, delays and wasted time. [...]
July 26th, 2011 23:02
[...] In his new book “Overload-How Too Much Information is Hazardous to Your Organization”, author Jonathan Spira says it’s not just personal productivity that suffers. Too much information to handle effectively costs the US economy $900 Billion a year in bad decisions, delays and wasted time. [...]
October 14th, 2011 20:14
[...] of $900 billion per year in lowered employee productivity and reduced innovation, according to Basex. Through surveys, Basex determined that 50 percent of a knowledge worker’s day is spent [...]
December 19th, 2011 05:54
[...] im Durchschnitt 14.5 Stunden mit dem Lesen und Schreiben von E-Mails beschäftigt waren. Wie Basex, eine auf Wissensmanagement spezialisierte US-Firma, im Jahr 2008 ausgerechnet hat, kostet die [...]
February 1st, 2012 04:34
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April 4th, 2012 23:17
WHAT IF INFORMATION OVERLOAD DOES NOT EXIST?
The core assumption behind information overload is that the information we want is the same as the information we need or like. Therefore, we cannot with good reason cut back on the information we want, because it reflects stuff that is important to us. Hence, thanks to the web we are overloaded with needed information that we can’t help wanting. However, from the perspective of contemporary affective neuroscience, wanting and liking are NOT the same thing, and are governed by entirely different neural processes. Thus, what we want is different from what we need because wanting and liking represent distinctive neurological events. Therefore, the key underlying premise of information overload that everything we want is the same as everything we need is based on cognitive principles that have no basis in neural reality, and the concept of information overload must therefore be abandoned.
The linked article questions the concept of information overload by challenging this most elementary underlying assumption. Based on the work of the distinguished neuropsychologist Kent Berridge of the University of Michigan (who also vetted and endorsed it), it is simple, short, and uses a Boston Red Sox title run to make its very radical point. Hope you ‘like’ it or at the very least the Red Sox!
http://mezmer.blogspot.com/2012/02/searching-for-red-stockings-myth-of.html
July 18th, 2012 10:08
[...] $900 Billion/year: cost of lowered employee productivity and reduced innovation from information overload. 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. (Basex) [...]
October 19th, 2012 18:55
[...] was estimated as long ago as 2008 that information overload is costing the US economy around $900 billion a [...]