By Suaad Sait July 28, 2010

“This steady and undissipated attention to one object, is a sure mark of a superior genius; as hurry, bustle, and agitation, are the never-failing symptoms of a weak and frivolous mind.” – Lord Chesterfield, 1740

I have a nagging feeling that I am being overwhelmed by data. Some days at work I feel like I am trying to drink from a fire hose.  It seems like the information being presented to me is so frequent and of such richness, than I am having a hard time making sense of it.

So, I decided to add it all up!  How many different pieces of data am I exposed to on a daily basis?  Mind you, I’m talking about data in the aggregate sense.  1 email = 1 piece of data.  As does one tweet, one magazine article, one advertisement on TV, one conversation with a co-worker and so on.

Here is what I came up with for the past 24 hours:

Nearly 1000 data points in one day!  No wonder my brain feels tired all the time.  I wish I had a time series of data measuring my data consumption over the last decade.  I bet that the total data points have grown by at least 100%.

This fire hose of information is really becoming a distraction as well.  I’ll start off focused on getting an item accomplished and before you know it I have wasted 20 minutes following some click-stream of seemingly relevant information, only to find myself studying something totally unrelated to the problem at hand.

According to Wikipedia’s article on Short-term memory, my brain’s short-term memory capacity is 7 plus or minus 2 items at any given time.  If that is truly the case, that explains quite a bit.  My typical meandering path through Internet research generally takes more than 7 steps – so it’s no wonder that I frequently lose focus on what I originally was researching.

Studies of multitasking are even worse.  Brain scans made of test subjects during multitasking show how incapable we are.  Everything thing from inhibiting learning to “response selection bottlenecks” can be blamed on too much information being consumed too quickly.

The net of all this research is that our always-on internet and it’s fire hose of information are contributing to a decrease in productivity and are a substantial cause of concern for the knowledge worker.

Don’t drink from the hose, sip from it’s stream of insight

At the end of the day, my information consumption methods are unsustainable.  I simply can’t remain productive while my exposure to information doubles with each iteration of Moore’s law.

My plan is to avoid the fire hose and to sip from a stream of insight:  A stream that will be automatically curated from the hose.   This curation process of picking the best and most relevant bits of information from the stream and presenting those bits in context to what I am working on is the new target for information management tools.

Another Lord Chesterfield quote explains our efforts at Workstreamer:  “Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.”   We hope you will join us on our journey of turning information in insight.

By Hank Weghorst July 19, 2010

Corporate America is at war.  Large organizations are under attack from every direction, and in many cases business strategists are losing the battle of information supremacy.  Not because they can’t get the info they need – but rather because they are drowning in too much information and not enough insight.

Nearly three quarters of a century ago, in 1937, noted economist Ronald Coase penned a short essay titled “The Nature of the Firm”.  He was trying to understand why companies had gotten very large as the industrial revolution displaced our pre-20^th Century agrarian lifestyles.

Since the dawn of civilization, we had lived in tribes.  We survived as small groups of highly connected individuals. If we lived in the farming village of the 19^th century, I’d help you build your barn, and you would help me build mine. Together, we would thrive or suffer based on our collective success without much involvement at all from external forces.

But by the beginning of the 20^th Century, that had all changed.  Industrialization was driving the birth of the corporation, and then the mega-corporation.  By the 1930’s energy, transportation, finance and consumer goods companies were pulling millions of works off the fields and into the factories.  Why did these companies become so large?

Coase discovered that the size of the firm is correlated to the cost of information.   When we were all farmers, the amount of information we needed (small), and the cost of getting it (low) allowed our “enterprise” to be tiny.   In the auto industry of the 1930’s (not to mention energy of the 1970’s or finance in the 1990’s) the amount of information needed to succeed and the cost to obtain it was substantial.  It was this high cost of information that drove the existence of a formal top-down decision making structure that still exists in many companies today.

What few expected merely a decade ago was the emergence of a force that would throw Coase’s law into reverse, and change the game in the necessary complexity and size of the firm.  The power of the internet is now driving down the cost of information to the point where almost everything you need to effectively compete in the marketplace can be obtained from your browser and procured at almost no cost.

As business strategists, many of us are stuck in systems that are tuned for expensive information.  While we are dealing with complex processes, massive data sets, and painful authoritarian structures, the modern competition can be nimble, cheap and open.

In the battle for insight supremacy, thinking and acting like Special Forces may make the difference between victory and defeat for our corporation.