Tech Companies looking at Information Overload

Tech Companies Join to Stop Email Addiction  – June 18, 2008   -  Wall Street Journal

A new organization has formed: the Information Overload Research Group.  It looks like it’s spearheaded by Basex, who put out a report and got a lot of coverage in December 07 about 2008 being the “Year of Information Overload”. (See NYTimes coverage here.)

I’d love to see some research on how much of information overload is company-generated.  There’s still a lot of organizations out there that don’t effectively channel or manage company information broadcasts to their staff.  I’ve seen hundreds of situations where employees are still getting individual emails from their dept, region, HR, Marketing, Customer Service support, IT, etc., all with ‘important’ updates.  Where does this sit in terms of info overload, and what impact would streamlining this have?

Other research that would be great would be around how many companies actually train and encourage their staff to use RSS aggregators?  I think they are absolutely essential if you have several topics you have to stay across.  Do you use an RSS Feed aggregator like FeedDemon?

Company ‘mass emails’ overloading you?

I’d like to know how many internal emails (sent to the entire department or entire company) you get! 

From the ’keep the kitchen clean’ reminder to the HR Quarterly newsletter – how many is it a day? 

If these were gone, what impact would that have on your ability to manage your email?

If these were gone, what impact would that have on your ability to work well in the company – some of these emails tell you important stuff, right?  Or wrong?