Information Overload: a $650 Billion Dollar a Year Problem

Information overload is expensive! In 2007, Basex, a business research firm that specializes in studying how professionals and office workers — “knowledge workers” — do their work and use technology, estimated the cost of information overload at $650 billion a year. It says the “figure is an estimate of the ‘cost of unnecessary interruptions’ in terms of lost productivity and innovation. The number, notes Jonathan B. Spira, chief analyst for Basex, is mainly an effort to put a size on what is a big and growing problem. After all, one person’s interruption is another’s collaboration.

The Basex press release quotes Nathan Zeldes, an engineer at Intel who studies computing productivity issues, who said, “At Intel, we estimated the impact of information overload on each knowledge worker at up to eight hours a week.”

“Neuron Global’s Sales Insight, Financial Insight, and Event Insight products will save companies huge amounts of money in lost productivity, performance and efficiency,” states Sedarius Tekara Perrotta, the company’s president.