By John Baxter
Recent questions about information security have honed in on President Barack Obama’s BlackBerry. Obama, who is self-admittedly attached to his PDA (personal digital assistant), recently told reporters that the Secret Service would have to pry his BlackBerry out of his hands.
After some negotiating and the implementation of additional security measures, President Obama was allowed to keep his device to stay in touch with close associates and a few select friends.
Although it is a small issue, especially stacked against wars and an afflicted economy, many empathized with Obama’s BlackBerry plea. PDAs, e-mail and other information technology can turn us into amnesiacs; once plugged in through technologies, it becomes almost impossible to imagine how we functioned before such things.
This access to information, however, has an all-too-familiar price: Information overload. The term doesn’t need defining because almost everyone who works for a living occasionally experiences the head-spinning anxiety that accompanies the onslaught of personal, professional and promotional e-mails. It’s all too common to hear people say that they never take a vacation from their e-mail because it’s not worth the daunting amount of “catch up” that must be done upon return.
It’s also a safe bet that most people won’t be able to make it through this article without fielding several e-mail interruptions.
What’s worse is that these constant distractions are adding up to big dollars lost for even the smallest businesses.
“Generally speaking, information overload costs companies by lower concentration levels, making it difficult for people to follow complicated trains of thought, lowering innovation levels, creating the likelihood of reinventing the wheel because information cannot be found, quickly propagating mistakes and leaving workers to wonder how they will know if they got the ‘right’ information from the ‘right’ place,” according to Jonathan Spira, chief analyst, and David Goldes, senior analyst at Basex, a knowledge economy research firm serving IT vendors and buyers with knowledge worker management and productivity issues. Their paper “Information Overload: We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us,” explores the cost of information mismanagement in the electronic age.
