Danger lurks in the document jungle

A recent Basex survey of 300 knowledge workers revealed (not surprisingly) that 95% of them create and review documents on a regular basis.

The prevalence of word processing tools and e-mail have made it easy, some would say too easy, to send documents anywhere and everywhere for input from colleagues, business partners, customers, and suppliers.

A mere twenty years ago, document review was very different.  Fewer documents were being generated overall so there were fewer to review.  The review process was paper based, documents were typically stored in file cabinets, and, since making corrections and revisions often meant retyping a document, people only made important corrections and tried to get it right the first time around.

Today, the typical knowledge worker creates one to two documents a day comprised of one to two pages each.  He also receives three to five documents that are between three to five pages long for review each week.

Why the disparity in size and quantity between documents created and documents received?  People who create longer documents also create more of them and are more likely to send them out for review.  In addition, 22% of documents are not sent to anyone for review and a similar number are sent to only one colleague.

What happens when a document comes back to its creator with these edits and comments is also interesting since most documents come back with multiple edits, changes, and comments.

Despite the tools available both within word processing software and externally, the typical knowledge worker uses a fairly inefficient process to review documents, 60% of knowledge workers say they e-mail the documents as attachments to several reviewers at once.  46% report that they then compare edits and comments manually once they have received them back from reviewers.

As a result, almost 40% of knowledge workers say they miss edits and comments in the documents they get back from review.  Fewer than half of the knowledge workers surveyed say they get documents back in a timely fashion.  Another 25% of knowledge workers say they intentionally leave people out of the review process for fear of slowing it down.

All of these inefficiencies come with a significant cost to the bottom line.  Errors in documents that are overlooked can result in lost sales and lower profits.  The multiple hours a typical knowledge worker spends each week trying to manage the review process could be put to far better use.

The future for document review and revision is far from dismal.  Software companies ranging from start-ups to industry giants are tackling the problem.  Nordic River, a version management company based in Sweden, offers TextFlow, a browser-based tool that generates marked-up review copies of a document based on changes and comments made in individual versions of a document.   Microsoft, in the forthcoming Office 2010 suite, will introduce Co-authoring, a set of tools that allows for multiple users to edit a document at the same time.

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

Mail Triage: determing one's priorities

What is demonstrated is the software equivalent of concept cars in the automotive world.

At Lotusphere 2010, two solutions that have the potential to significantly increase knowledge worker efficiency and effectiveness and potentially lower information overload caught my eye: Topika and Mail Triage.

Topika is a tool that attempts to resolve various difficulties in using collaborative tools (the developers of Topika, specifically exclude e-mail from being defined as a “collaborative tool” because, in their view, e-mail messages do not typically have shared materials.)  It was created by a team of researchers at IBM Research in Almaden including Tara Matthews, Jalal Mahmud, Tom Moran, Barton Smith, Steve Whittaker, and Julian Cerruti.

Topika, which integrates e-mail with collaborative tools, detects when a person is sending an e-mail message and suggests relevant social software tools that the sender could use in addition to sending the e-mail message.

In other words, when you write an e-mail, Topika suggests a place, activity, or site (such as Lotus Quickr or Connections) and stores it (including any e-mail attachments).  It adds information in the e-mail message that points to these places.  Right now the e-mail attachment remains in the e-mail message but an option to remove the attachment in future versions is under consideration.

Topika makes its recommendation by creating a work profile that is an index of an individual’s collaborative activities and the tools used.  By using Topika, knowledge workers can use e-mail to support collaboration via other tools.  Topika is in its early stages but it shows great promise.

Mail Triage and Personal Tasks is an innovative tool created by Jeff Pierce, a researcher who focuses on user sciences and experience research at the IBM Almaden Research Center.  It is one way of rethinking how we approach e-mail from mobile devices (as opposed to at a full-sized computer).  Mail Triage recognizes the fact that mobile e-mail usage is focused around triaging messages as opposed to reading them.  Knowledge workers want to know what’s new, what requires immediate attention, and what can be deleted.  Everything else can be deferred.

Mail Triage does just that.  It allows mobile knowledge workers to manage mail quickly by sorting, prioritizing, and deferring.  The top-level view of the e-mail client shows Triaged and Untriaged folders instead of the typical inbox.  It creates tasks for the user such as Call, Print, Read, Reply, Save, Schedule, Send, and Visit.

Once the user accesses his desktop computer, a Lotus Notes sidebar allows the user to access, edit, or delete tasks and further triage e-mail messages on the desktop (by dragging them to the sidebar).

Mail Triage has the potential to make the knowledge worker’s use of mobile devices more efficient and effective than is currently the case.  It will be interesting to follow this project as it develops.

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

We’re trying to document individual experiences with and impact arising from Information Overload and would appreciate your help.

Please rate the top three factors or contributors to Information Overload (in terms of the impact on you personally) and tell us how and why they impact you and to what extent.  We will keep your response(s) private and anonymous.

Please e-mail your responses privately to ioanswer@basex.com and we will report back to you in the coming months.

Jonathan B. Spira is CEO and Chief Analyst at Basex.  He can be reached at jspira@basex.com

Catch me if you can!

One doesn’t have to go far to find a pedestrian engrossed in some form of handheld electronic device these days as society and information both become more mobile.

While many believe that they are successfully multitasking, this couldn’t be further from the truth.  The inability for the human brain to multitask is something that most everyone wants to wish away but few recognize that it simply isn’t possible.  Our brains aren’t wired that way and this didn’t miraculously change with the dawn of the Information Age.

When we reviewed the research done for “The Cost of Not Paying Attention” five years ago, it came as no surprise to find out that knowledge workers lost as much as a quarter of the workday due to interruptions and a phenomenon known as recovery time.  Each interruption comes at a cost – namely the “recovery time” or time it takes to get back to where one was prior to the interruption – and is typically 10 to 20 times the duration of the interruption itself.

Instead of multitasking, what happens is a form of time slicing.  Instead of being able to handle multiple tasks at once, our brains stop and start multiple times trying to address each individual task.  The recovery time from these stops and starts adds up as well.

If only people would focus on the task at hand – whether it be writing a report or walking down the street – without trying to juggle multiple tasks, everyone would be a lot better off.  President Gerald Ford was once accused of being too stupid to walk and chew gum at the same time.  Perhaps he simply chose to focus on one task at a time.

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

Shall we drone on?

All video collected is watched live by a team of intelligence analysts, so this translates into ca. 24 years of analyst team time being used in one year.

The amount of data (and the amount of time spent watching the videos) will only grow as more advanced drones are deployed that can record video in ten (with future plans for up to 65) directions at once instead of the one direction that is currently supported.

The use of  UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) is not only an expanding phenomenon in the military but also domestically as the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency and local police forces begin to use these tools.  The advantages are clear: pilots are not in danger, intelligence gathering capabilities are improved, and the ability to conduct strikes in remote areas is enhanced.

There are of course myriad issues that the use of UAVs for military operations present, ranging from humanitarian arguments that drone missile strikes are more likely to result in civilian casualties to political considerations about where they can operate, as seen in recent disagreements with Pakistan.

Complicating and contributing to these issues is the huge problem of how do deal with the flood of information that drones are returning to the analysts.

Mistakes such as falsely identifying threats can lead to unnecessary and potentially tragic civilian casualties, which could then inflame international public opinion and impair the ability for the military to operate effectively.  Likewise, missing a real threat because of Information Overload could also lead to fatalities.

The use of these tools will only increase, making it critical that we develop systems to organize, parse, tag, and act upon the data that is collected in an effective manner.  The Air Force in particular is working on this problem, but will have to move quickly to stay ahead of the mountain of incoming data.

Cody Burke is a senior analyst at Basex.

It is always interesting to come back to a new product as it moves through the beta process and see what has changed.

Not so dangerous liaisons

A few months ago we wrote about Liaise, an inbox add-on for Outlook that scans e-mail messages as they are being composed and creates a task list based on any action items it finds in the e-mail.

Liaise recently moved into public beta with the addition of several new features.  What we liked about Liaise when we first heard about it was that it captures the action items that lurk in every e-mail and keeps them from falling through the cracks.  With the public beta offering, the company has added some new features which improve its functionality and fine tune how the tool works.

Liaise has added calendar integration for Outlook so due dates for action items pulled from e-mail appear in the Outlook calendar, as well as in the calendars of mobile devices that are set up to synch with Outlook.  This is the logical step for the product and links tasks, e-mail, and the calendar together.  Not having the action items integrated into the calendar was not a major problem, but the tool’s utility is definitely enhanced with this feature.

Another addition to Liaise is the ability to control more of what is displayed in e-mail messages.  In some situations, it may be preferable to have an e-mail appear normal to the recipient, particularly if that person is not a Liaise user.  At other times, for instance if the e-mail is internal only and all recipients are using Liaise, it may be useful for information about the action items pulled from the e-mail to appear in it.  The private beta of Liaise displayed this information by default.  More control is almost always a good thing and this makes the tool more likely to be used.

Liaise also had added support for cloud-based synching of project information among teams.  Particularly useful for keeping partners, clients, and disparate project teams up-to-date on project and action item statuses this allows information on projects to be updated when changes are made, without the use of e-mail.  Updates to projects can also be condensed into a single e-mail, in the event that the knowledge worker wishes to see a list of changes in one place.  Anything that cuts down on overall inbox traffic is to be applauded, although we do have lingering concerns about combining items in a single e-mail, as something may get overlooked.

As Liaise moves through the beta process the company is adding features and tweaking the user interface.  From what we have seen so far, the company is focused on improving integration, control, and the ability to synch information between users.  We like Liaise and think it has the potential to fix at least several of the problems that e-mail is plagued with relative to project and task management.  Looking towards the general release of the product as it moves out of beta, first on our wish list for future enhancements would be the expansion of the tool beyond Outlook.

Cody Burke is a senior analyst at Basex.

Are we sharing all of our knowledge yet?

When the organization is the United States Federal Government and the amount of information that has to be addressed daily dwarfs what most people can conceptualize, lives may be at stake when an individual or system fails to connect the dots.

Such a failure occurred on December 25, 2009, but it need not have.

The tools to manage information on a massive scale do indeed exist and it is clear that the U.S. government is either not deploying the right ones or not using them correctly.

The National Counterterrorism Center, created in 2004 following recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, has a mission to break “the older mold of national government organizations” and serve as a center for joint operational planning and joint intelligence.  In other words, various intelligence agencies were ordered to put aside decades-long rivalries and share what they know and whom they suspect.  Unfortunately, while this sounds good in theory, in practice this mission may not yet be close to be being fully carried out.

In addition to the fact that old habits die hard (such as a disdain for inter-agency information sharing), it appears that the folks at the NCTC failed to grasp basic tenets of knowledge sharing, namely that search, in order to be effective, needs to be federated and contextual, that is to say it needs to simultaneously search multiple data stores and present results in a coherent manner.

Discrete searches in separate databases will yield far different results compared to a federated search that spans across multiple databases.  All reports indicate that intelligence agencies were still looking at discrete pieces of information from separate and distinct databases plus the agencies themselves were not sharing all that they knew.

In this case, much was known about Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian man accused of trying to blow up Northwest Flight 253.  In May, Britain put him on a watch list and refused to renew his visa.  In August, the National Security Agency overheard Al Qaeda leaders in Yemen discussing a plot involving a Nigerian man.  In November, the accused’s father warned the American Embassy (and a CIA official) in Abuja that his son was a potential threat.  As a result, the son was put on a watch list that flagged him for future investigation.  He bought his plane ticket to Detroit with cash and boarded the flight with no luggage.  Yet, almost unbelievably, no one saw a pattern emerge here.

Shouldn’t a system somewhere have put the pieces of this puzzle together and spit out “Nigerian, Abdulmutallab, Yemen, visa, plot, cash ticket purchase, no luggage = DANGER!”?

Information Overload is partially to blame as well.  Given the vast amount of intelligence that the government receives every day on suspected terrorists and plots, it could very well be that analysts were simply overwhelmed and did not notice the pattern.  Rather than being immune from the problem, given the sheer quantity of the information it deals with, the government is more of a poster child for it.

Regardless of what comes out of the numerous investigations of the Christmas Day terrorism plot and the information-sharing failures of the various intelligence agencies, one thing was abundantly clear by Boxing Day: the Federal Government needs to greatly improve its ability to leverage the intelligence it gathers and connect the dots.

Clearly, there are many changes that need to occur in order to improve security but one relatively simple way for the government to proceed is to take the first steps to lower the amount of Information Overload and raise the signal-to-noise ratio so that critical information can rise to the top.

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

Here's to less information!

It took the Internet a mere four years to reach that number.  Just last month there were 10 billion Web searches performed and most people didn’t find what they were looking for.

Indeed, 50% of all searches fail at first blush and, to make matters worse, 50% of the searches believed to be successful fail, unbeknownst to the user, to some extent as well.

Clearly something has to be done.  With the New Year almost upon us, we can start with a few simple New Year’s Resolutions that are time tested in lowering the amount of Information Overload we all face.

1.)    Learn better search techniques.  Control search results using Boolean logic by typing AND or OR and use advanced options to narrow the field.

2.)    Use restraint in communications.  Don’t cc the world, don’t include more people than necessary in any communication, avoid gratuitous “thanks” and “great” replies, and avoid reply-to-all at all costs.

3.)    Write clearly.  Better yet, refrain from combining multiple themes and requests in one single e-mail.  And make sure the subject is specific as opposed to general (writing “Help needed” without further details helps no one, especially the recipient).  These simple steps will add instant clarity with little effort.

4.)    Read what you write – before you click send.  Unclear communications result in excessive and unnecessary back-and-forth communications that would have been unnecessary were the first missive unambiguous and to-the-point.

5.)    Read what others write – before replying.  While it would be nice to believe that people will place the most important information at the very beginning, often times the key facts are buried in the closing paragraphs.  What you are about to ask may already have been covered.

6.)    Value your colleagues’ time as if it were your own.  If a response to an e-mail is not immediately forthcoming, don’t pick up the phone or send an IM saying “did you get my e-mail?”.

Happy New Year!  Prosit Neujahr!

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

What is it that you are looking for, my dear?

In an age where Information Overload costs the U.S. economy ca. $900 billion per annum, finding the right information has become far more critical.

To increase the odds that you will find what you are looking for, we’ve prepared five simple search tips that should result in better and more accurate results, regardless of where you are searching.

1.)    Boolean logic
Search engines typically use a form with a search box into which one types the search query.  To control the search results, use Boolean logic by typing AND or OR.  Many search engines including Google default to AND when processing search queries with two or more words.  To exclude words, use NOT (java NOT coffee, java -coffee).  For increased relevance, use NEAR (restaurants NEAR midtown Manhattan).

2.)    Options
Most search engines include options (on Google, these are found by clicking on Advanced Search).  Use options to narrow down the field you are searching.  Examples include file format (.ppt, .doc, .pdf, etc.) or Web site (basex.com).

3.)    Search tools
When it comes to search, one size does not fit all.  Use a variety of search tools beyond Google.  Try search visualization tools such as Cluuz and KartOO on the Web and KVisu for behind the firewall.

4.)    Meta search engines
A meta search engine runs several searches simultaneously.  Tools that may be helpful include Clusty and Dogpile.

5.)    Archived (out-of-date) materials or nonexistent Web sites
The Wayback Machine on the Internet Archive is useful for both older versions of Web pages and sites that have disappeared over time.

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

When should one sign off?

Two Fridays ago, Belgium celebrated a day without e-mail, where people were encouraged to send as few e-mail messages as possible, according to the government minister who organized the event, citing Basex’ research on the cost of Information Overload as part of the justification.

Earlier this week, a writer for the New York Times published 10 Proposals for Fixing the E-mail Glut.  While a few of his suggestions were valid, one of the problems the author failed to mention is that, with e-mail, each knowledge worker uses it a bit differently.

And just yesterday, a report published by the University of California, San Diego, estimated that Americans consumed ca. 3.6 zettabytes of information in 2008, which amounts to ca. 34 gigabytes per person per day.

E-mail has become what I call the “path of least resistance.”  It’s frequently used when another – more suitable – tool should be used.  Examples of this range from word processing (writing long documents in e-mail) to instant messaging (asking whether I want Russian dressing on my sandwich is more appropriate via instant messaging than e-mail for a variety of reasons).

In October, a Wall Street Journal writer proclaimed that e-mail’s reign as “king of communications” was over.  Meanwhile more and more e-mail messages are sent every day. (My retort to this is here.)

While the author of that piece raised some valid points, the problem is that changing e-mail’s very nature is a daunting task.

Today, e-mail serves as a common medium that supports rapid and near real-time information exchange for hundreds of millions of people.  Making changes in a small organization can be difficult; just imagine what it would take to change ALL of those people’s ways of working.

Finally, while e-mail may seem to be an unending challenge for the knowledge worker, it’s really just the tip of the iceberg.  Information overload is far more complex than too much e-mail.  It’s too much content, poor search tools, the list goes on and on.

It will take a lot more thought and reflection in terms of studying how millions of people communicate and interact through e-mail before we can really begin to effect positive change.  But that day will surely come.

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