Information Sanity

·         Each year the amount of information created in the enterprise, paper and digital combined, grows faster than 65%.

·         Non-productive information work, such as reformatting documents or reentering documents into computers, consumed more than $1.5 trillion in U.S. salaries last year.

·         Survey respondents spend as much as 26% of their time trying to manage information overload.

·         Respondents split their time evenly between dealing with paper and digital information, but 71% prefer to deal with digital information.

·         The amount of time U.S. information workers spent last year managing paper-driven information overload cost $460 billion in salaries.

·         Reducing the time wasted dealing with information overload by 15% could save a company with 500 employees more than $2 million a year.

Sure, we poked fun and came up with a fake illness called IOS. 

But when you look at these stats — Wow.  Maybe there is more truth in our humor than meets the eye.  These stats say just about everything there is to say about the cost and challenges of information overload and the price we as knowledge workers are paying on a daily basis.

I can’t take credit for coming up with all this research.  It’s all IDC’s work.  Today on this site, we are publishing a pretty comprehensive white paper that Xerox commissioned IDC to work on.  What is contained in the 12 page report are some great insights into the problem, but also some solid suggestions on what to do about it and where to start if you are serious about fixing the problem.

So take a few minutes and check it out. 

Information Overload.  It just seems to be an everyday part of life lately.  And those that complain about the challenges IO presents need to get over it and move on.  Popular perception is that there is no solution to this problem.

Well.  As you have likely seen from my previous posts – I tend to disagree.  Just getting over it isn’t going to help and frankly if we keep at this pace of trying to share more and more information — things are going to break.  This past week, I joined up with a group of others that think the tech industry itself needs to band together to come up with some a solution before we reach our breaking point.  That group is IORG (http://www.iorgforum.org/). 

While the group is in its early stages, what most impresses me about IORG is that they are making the effort to figure out the solution from a cross industry perspective.   How do we keep some notion of sanity in an environment that is just crazed.  While I have only just now joined the board as the VP of Marketing – I’d encourage you to stay tuned this fall as we gear up for a conference in Palo Alto to discuss just how we go about slaying the preverbal windmill called Information Overload.

Separately — for a few yucks – you should check out the new videos we created at Xerox on the challenges of information overload.  I am sure you can identify with some, if not all, of the side effects caused by trying to process too much information.

Last week I had the opportunity to chat with two really smart analysts on information overload – Jon Gantz and Angele Boyd – both from IDC.  Three things struck me in the conversation:

1. This is a problem that is only getting worse – for everyone
2. Nobody is going to solve this problem in one fell swoop.  Can’t eat an apple in one bite
3. You likely have technology that you bought already that is capable to helping you start tackling the problem. 

It was the third example that really made me pause and in line with what I blogged about last time – what technology do you have to help slay this dragon called Information Overload.  For example, a lot of people scan stuff and send the documents to their own e-mail.  But how many companies actually scan a document and then parse the data and use it to populate fields in enterprise applications?

I know that I use the SmartSend technology that is part of my company’s MFPs to scan and send info to co-workers around the company.  Its pretty easy, print a cover sheet, scan the cover sheet and the document, select where you want it to go to – and off it goes. 

But how cool would it be if my doctor’s office actually took the scanning idea to the full level and instead of copying my insurance card for the umpteenth time, they actually scan it in, suck the data from the card and populate the forms they have to fill out for every patient.  It might actually free the person at the front desk to do something other than re-keying the information they just copied.

As Angele said during our discussion, in this day an age, the more RIO you can get out of the products you have, the better.

Now I know that last post I said I was going to focus on finding simple ways to get ore efficient – but there is just something I need to get off my chest first….

Attention Mr. and Ms. Marketing guru at the dozens of companies who fill my mailbox every day – you have got to try harder.

You see – sending me the same catalogue and Val-Packs you send my next door neighbor doesn’t cut it anymore.  Gone are the days when I have the time or the interest in flipping through the same spring catalogue I got two years ago.  With the economy the way it is – I am hording all the cash I can.  If someone is going to pry the dollars from my hands, you are going to have to entice me with something specific.

Last Friday I just had to laugh.  On the way to the mailbox at the curb, I saw my next door neighbor.  As we both opened our mailboxes – we joked about how we both were getting the same outdoor furniture and clothing catalogues and the same coupons for 20% off our next visit to a particular store.  The reason we laughed:  he is 78-years old.  I am just about 40.  Do you think we have the same tastes in shirts at this point in our lives?

But I did get one thing that my buddy next door didn’t over the weekend, and this is my point: A local sporting goods store flyer was in my mailbox saying that last year I had a purchased some lacrosse gear for my son and given how fast kids grow – would I be needing anything for the upcoming season.

Simple, professional marketing flyer with a personalized note incorporated in the text.  To me that is customer service.  And you know what – I am going to one night this week be popping into his store with my son and a small wad of cash I pulled from under the bed.

Just goes to show you what a little effort will do these days…

Complaining about information overload feels odd these days.  But after three months of trying to buck up and deal – I just have to vent. 

You see – information overload was bad last year – but in the wake of layoffs happening throughout corporate America, the volume of incoming information has just gotten worse.  To say I am knee deep in “stuff” is a profound understatement.

That said, I don’t think my plight is a lot different than most people in the corporate world these days.  I bet a math wiz could create a formula that could calculate the ratio between the increase of information overload to every laid off employee.  I am sure it is directly proportional.  That said, and I am sure all of you agree – I’d rather be overloaded than unemployed these days.

So here is what I am going to do.  Rather than moan about the 10,000 things in my “inbox” or ask for some new technology that costs money, I am going to spend the next couple weeks trying out a few simple tricks using the technology I have in my office to see if I can get more efficient.  

And along the way I’ll report back to you what is working and what isn’t. 

Hey everyone.  Yes.  I am finally back.  I have had to climb mountains and cross massive rivers of paper and data to do it, but I have survived.  Hope you all missed me….

In fact surviving is a pretty apt topic today, starting with a Cliff Notes version of the book “How to get through your daily work life and not drown” in the Xerox newsroom today, offering up some tidbits of advice for dealing with the business of work. 

All joking aside, Xerox actually has scientists that study how people do their jobs and how they use – or don’t use – technology throughout the day. They are called ethnographers and they’ve have been studying “work” for more than 30 years and it’s pretty cool stuff. Ultimately their findings help Xerox, our customers and our partners prepare for the future of work – and better develop new software, systems and services that actually make people be more productive. 

Now that you’ve seen their tips, why don’t you share some of yours? How do you make it through your daily dump of information?

Interested in more survival stories? I’d also suggest you take a trip around www.infooverload.com today and go to “Get Help” to check out some pretty solid examples of what Xerox has done for its customers to make them more productive as well.  Some cool cost savings things – which just might come in handy these days given the state of the economy.

Some people think that what we experience as information overload is really a kind of reaction to multitasking. Apparently our brains are not set up to efficiently support multitasking. In fact, we aren’t really able to pay attention to more than one thing at a time. Instead, we rapidly switch our attention among multiple things. Inevitably we will do a poorer job at those things, and they will take longer to do . Researchers have found that switching attention causes you to lose your mental connections to what you were working on, and that it takes time to restore those connections when you switch back to what you were doing. This could create stress, that feeling we call “overload.”

So why are we doing so much multitasking? Somehow we have the illusion that if we are multitasking, we are getting more done. Some people appear to be addicted to multitasking. They attend meetings, compose documents, check mail, chat, and check news feeds all at the same time. They constantly need brief new injections of information or they get bored. Our brains can take in information at a much faster rate than real time speech or video can dish it out to us, so we try to soak up information from multiple sources at a time. This condition has been noticed and given labels such as online compulsive disorder, and pseudo-attention deficit disorder. Some even think that those who indulge have even developed shorter attention spans. They can’t deal with even brief moments with no information. This probably describes many of us who are reading this blog! And yet, although we suffer from this self-imposed condition, we experience it as information overload.

Researchers have identified interruptions as a contributor to information overload, and at PARC we are beginning to explore technological assists to help people more quickly recover their lost context as they switch among tasks. We even think we may someday have something to offer the information junkie – better information! But you’ll have to stay posted on that one. 

Guest blogger Teresa Lunt directs PARC’s CSL research organization, which has a wide range of research activities including ubiquitous computing; embedded sensor networks and ad hoc networking; security and privacy; control software for printing systems; bioinformatics; and ethnography for organizational environments and technology design.

Teresa Lunt, vice president, director of Computing Science Laboratory, Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)

Why do people immediately think of email when they consider information overload? Various research implies that information overload comes from the number of interruptions we experience during the day. And people experience email as an interruption. So perhaps that is why it is so strongly associated in our minds with information overload. 

But here is the paradox with email. It’s so easy today for people to email: professionally and personally, we are copied on everything and get all kinds of attachments and links to information. In one sense, this constant stream of activity can be a useful way to keep your finger on the pulse of your organization (or your life). But it can also feel like a burden. If someone emailed something you, they think you remember it. But more than likely, it came in with hundreds of other messages and you won’t remember it, you’ll forgot you ever got it. In fact, unless you need it at the time, you won’t even look at it. This is why it is so important to get information just at the time you need it.  

So we really need two things: a way to see a whole lot of activity at a glance to get a sense about what is going on, and a way to get key information delivered to you just when you need it. 

It seems to me that the real information overload problem is that people in business are expected to keep up with many more things than they were in days past. The world is a bigger place, and things are evolving quickly, so there are many more things to keep track of. This means that simply organizing information better, or enabling it to be searched better, doesn’t solve this problem. Somehow we have to have a way of consuming and digesting more of it. Or, in lieu of that, have a sort of lazy, or “just-in-time,” consumption of it. That is, ignore it until we need it. This could work for some kinds of information. The problem is, when we need it, how do we know what the relevant things are that we should know about. Could a system be smart enough to understand this for us?  

I think this is a great area for research. At PARC, we have been working on aspects of this problem for some time.  

Teresa Lunt directs PARC’s CSL research organization, which has a wide range of research activities including ubiquitous computing; embedded sensor networks and ad hoc networking; security and privacy; control software for printing systems; bioinformatics; and ethnography for organizational environments and technology design.

Becky Dziedzic on behalf of Mike Moeller

Mike is taking a brief hiatus from Information Sanity. But the conversation doesn’t have to stop – help us keep it going with your comments, and we’ll do our part by sharing insights from others who are passionate about the topic.  

To kick things off, check out Ashlee Vance’s blog at the New York Times from Oct. 7th. The post, and the person that commented on it, brings up a favorite topic of ours – one Mike hasn’t yet covered. The paperless office. We actually like to think of it as a “less-paper office.” Let’s face it, we’re Xerox, we’re not trying to get rid of paper altogether. We know you still like to save your receipts, we know you like a back-up copy of your healthcare forms, your bank statements, your legal documents, we know you still want to print your photos, we know direct mail campaigns can still generate twice the sales return of any other medium…and we still like to print it all. It’s still our core business.  

But more than that, it’s our business to make it easier to get work done. So, when a hospital can save 15 percent in operating costs by converting 75 percent of its patient paperwork to digital, we’re going to help them do that. But we’re also going to help a small business like Watson Realty in Florida affordably print color documents to stand out in the stack of mail sitting on the countertop of potential clients. 

Paperless Office? If you want. Less-Paper? Another step toward Information Sanity.

Boy, do I wish I had seen the Clay Shirky presentation last week at the Web 2.0 conference.  According to a bunch of blogs such as this one http://jonathanpberger.com/wp/2008/09/notes-from-clay-shirkys-talk-its-not-information-overload-its-filter-failure/.  Shirky claimed that information overload isn’t a new problem and the problem isn’t that there is too much information, but rather the filters that are used to share information.

Interesting thought.  While I don’t agree entirely with Shirky, I can see where he is headed.  His point, from what I gathered, is that we need to have a filtering problem, not an information overload problem.  I’d say we have actually both.  But for now I am going to build on what Shirky seems to be thinking.

We as a society have lost our ability to filter the information.  In fact I’d take it one step further – I think we are addicted to sharing information.  It has become an obsession, a compulsion and addiction.  It is now something we don’t think twice about doing – either in our personal lives or professional.

While Shirky points to the first printing press as the place that information overload started – I’d point to the advent of the Xerox machine as the place where people’s filter for sharing information went out the window.

While I am too young to have actually used them – the days when you had only three carbon copies to give to people forced a person to actually think about who should get the information they had just created.  Along came Xerography – and presto no more thinking.

Fast forward to today and I think we need to enter people into rehab clinics to detox them from their addiction to share.  Just because you can cc (carbon copy for those of you that don’t know that) 100 people on your email – doesn’t mean you should.  Just because you can now print out 100 copies of something in under 2 minutes, doesn’t mean that 100 people actually need, want or care about the information.

So next time you feel the urge to share — stop, think and filter.