Information Overload Help: II

It was recently announced that Intel has produced a microprocessor, that can contain two billion transistors; so Moore's Law continues.

Moore's Law says the number of transistors on a microchip doubles every two years.

So far, so good, for the computer scientists at Intel. But what are the implications for Information Overload and the users of business information?

Last month's first article on Information Overload, or InfoLoad, identified the main causes of the Information Tsunami breaking over the shores of business organisations, and into the Read & Do Baskets of already-overloaded business information users.

Now, with Intel's announcement and the implication that it will soon be more feasible to increase the deluge of information coming at us, seems a good time to address the second part of the InfoLoad issue - namely the Effects & Business Consequences of InfoLoad:

1. InfoLoad can have a hyper-stress effect on the InfoUser.
   The sense of the stress is captured in Richard Wurman's book Information Anxiety. Literally & physically, InfoLoad can make you ill, impair your performance, (for example in decision-making and in reaction time), and shorten your life.
   
   
2. If there is one thing that we cannot waste today, it is time. In fact it can be a source of competitive advantage - or disadvantage. But that's what InfoLoad leads to; wasted time, because there is so much filtering, sorting and reading to do, and much of the InfoLoad is marginally useful information.
   
   
3. And Bacon's Law: bad information drives out good. That is, the really relevant and critical information gets buried and lost. You're in a meeting and have to acknowledge you weren't aware of a key piece of information - it got lost in the pile. Or that vital information needed for complying with regulatory requirements - it somehow got lost in the shuffle.
   
   
4. It makes us lose focus and stray from what's important.
   We get mesmerised and, in trying to stay abreast and catch up with the pile of information, we lose sight of key goals & objectives.
   
   
5. Lastly, InfoLoad wastes money. January's article on InfoLoad made the point that one of the causes is the assumption that information is a free good. But it isn't!
   
   One of the latest trends in computer operations is virtualisation of servers and memory which, through clever software sitting above the operating system, frees up a lot of the space currently used. But this, and any other technology, is only putting off the day of reckoning, because storage volume requirements are at least doubling every three years.
   
   There is so much information clogging up hardware resources that organisations are running out of space and money to store all this information, having to buy more and more hardware.
   
   And yet, hardware is only the tip of the ice berg. The real waste is in the waste of human resouces in producing and maintaining the less-than-useful information that makes up much of the InfoLoad Mountain.

Next month we'll start looking at key remedies
for addressing InfoLoad.

In the meantime, do you have any war stories concerning Information Overload, or do you have ideas that might possibly help?