Posted by: Jack Santos
How many emails do you get daily? I remember when my response of 50-100 per day would elicit a “yeah, right…do you get anything else done?”.
Sad to say, 50-100 per day is probably the low end of the norm for most people these days, and my work load has topped over 150-200 a day…then add my personal email box of 50-100.
Our collaboration and content group has a lot to say on information overload. Craig Roth has for years talked about the concept of information pull, instead of push. That is, set up a system so that you can easily get what interests you, rather than just get a torrent of unsolicited stuff that screams for attention.
One of the ways is to move some of that load to wikis or discussion groups. The jury is still out for me on that, and my take on the use of wiki’s (for other than joint authoring, like with Wikipedia) is skeptical. But some of the benefits of SharePoint discussion groups, or even wikis, are (as Craig pointed out):
- it enables simple subscription/unsubscription to the topic
- it maintains a historical record of how decisions were made for future justification
- it allows new employees to gain visibility to the whole thread
- it applies thread management like a tree structure
- it surfaces tribal knowledge so the corporation can maintain it (rather than this knowledge residing in our personal inboxes which are unsearchable and destroyed when we leave)
I guess so.
But it’s still yet another place to go, yet another place for MORE information, yet another place vying for your attention. Add to that blogs, news feeds, Facebook, Twitter…. well….its just piling on. Where will it all lead?
We may be at a tipping point where the processes for managing information are far more valued than the delivery mechanisms. One can only hope. Lyn Robison (from our Data Management group) loves to rant about how business people put up with bad information from their IT departments. No doubt. The sad thing is businesses want more.
Like the old shtick about the two senior citizens in the Catskills: “This pie tastes awful!” says the first, to which the friend replies “ YES! and the pieces are too small!”
And so it goes with enterprise information…
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