The Debilitating Impact of Information Overload on Corporate Performance
Rather than summarizing the information they receive, a number of office workers and decision-makers habitually pass on documents to everyone else at work. Forty years ago, this may not have been a problem, but in 1970, Alvin Toffler saw that it would be, writing his book Future Shock and coining the term for the contemporary malady of “information overload.”
Information overload refers to the state of having too much information to make a decision or remain informed about a topic. Not only do organizations wade through countless pages to find the information they need, they also are interrupted routinely by incoming e-mail messages, phone calls and instant messaging that break mental focus. As people are faced with growing levels of information overload, the inability to make clear and accurate decisions increase their stress levels.
An article in the New Scientist magazine claimed that exposing individuals to an information overloaded environment resulted in lower IQ scores than exposing individuals to marijuana. Over-exposure to information is as debilitating as a night without sleep.
Although the invention of the printing press has made it possible to distribute written information to large amounts of people, it was not until the advent of modern computers that information could be created, duplicated and accessed by almost anybody. The Internet has opened global society to an infinite amount of information. This has allowed individuals, businesses, and governments to create and use more information than ever before in history.
The benefits of information are obvious, but at present, unfiltered, unstructured information has also become easy to transmit through the Internet. Furthermore, the democratization of knowledge-production has paved the way for contradictions and inaccuracies to enter the pool of materials that organizations must process, adding the task of assessing the validity of materials and claims.
Decision makers are now having more difficulty finding and using the knowledge that is relevant to their businesses. According to a survey conducted by the Gartner Group, 90% of businesses suffer from Information Overload as office workers spend 40% of their time managing information. A survey conducted by IWF Wissen revealed that an average person spends 150 hours looking for lost information.
Unless businesses have expert researchers, an abundance of time, and the capacity to assess and analyze massive amounts of information quickly, the knowledge that they need drowns in the oceans of information overload.
In response, individuals can spend more time focusing on the quality, rather than the quantity, of information. They can also avoid multi-tasking to retain mental focus, and spend parts of the day outside the information overloaded environment. Learning how to communicate information more directly and precisely can also have a great impact on how they process the information that they receive.
As information overload more and more characterizes the era, it could be the condition, rather than the problem, of our times. Policing the production of information or setting limits to it would be ridiculous solutions, given the importance of expanding knowledge.
Alex Linden, Gartner Group’s Director of Research, points out, “The ultimate objective is not to decrease information (flow) but to equip decision makers with the best information available.”
This need for structured, filtered information has produced a host of information services companies, of which Neuron Global is a leader. It’s Knowledge processing product lines enable people in organizations to learn and remember more, and allows information to inform, as it should do in the first place. Individuals can spend more time focusing on the quality, rather than the quantity, of information. They can also avoid multi-tasking to retain mental focus, and spend parts of the day outside the information-overloaded environment. This makes them more productive and effective employees who can make decisions and take actions more quickly and accurate than their competitors.
