Collaboration and Content Strategies Blog

Four Key Points About Enterprise Attention Management

Blogger: Craig Roth

I'm just putting the finishing touches on a new document on Enterprise Attention Management.  This one will be a short primer on our view of the subject.  It's been over two years since my main document on EAM was published and my thinking has evolved as I've hit questions from people at presentations and in private conversations.  It's also been shaped by the press coverage of information overload and e-mail overload - often by encouraging me to put warning signs in front of some slippery slopes that they wander into: Counting all distractions as interruptions?  Lumping interruptions into information overload?  Using 100% focus and efficiency as the benchmark to compare "cost of overload" to?  Assuming only tips and tricks for individuals can chip away at it?  Yeesh!

After a brief description of what enterprise attention management is and its business context, I describe 4 points that are key for my position on EAM:

1. Not Everyone Feels Overloaded

As strongly as you and a few like-minded people may feel about the impacts of information overload, a lot more people just don't notice or care.  But improving efficiency and reaction time: that's something everyone can get behind.  Get away from having to shake everyone awake about the "problem" and its a lot easier for others to get on board with your efficiency argument.

2. Key People in an Organization Can Take Action to Improve Efficiency of Information Workers

You can try to organize your little information garden and give tips to your teammates to do the same and one small portion of your company will breathe a little easier.  But there are a few people who select the gardening tools and set expectations for everyone's gardens - they have a different set of things they can do to help everyone in the organization.

3. Use EAM as a Lens to Understand Impacts of New Information-based Technologies

Enterprise attention management can be used as a lens to analyze how various technologies and programs will impact the attention of information workers.  One recent example of applying this architecture is the "EAM for e-mail" posting I did here.

4. Influence Process and Culture Selectively

An evangelical approach to "information overload" starts with declaring it "bad" and then figuring out how to force people not to overload each other.  A more practical approach does not see lots of information as good or bad, but rather focuses on efficiency and looks for key moments when processes and culture can be influenced.  These include teachable moments, such as new hire training or rolling out a new technology.  They do not include an e-mail blast or interoffice memo out of nowhere telling everyone how they should now behave.

This is a cross-posting from the KnowlegeForward blog

How to Improve E-Mail Client Software: 15 Ideas Based On Enterprise Attention Management

Blogger: Craig Roth

The most popular "overload" topic in offices today is e-mail.  But after all these years of incremental improvement to IBM Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange, surely there can't be any low-hanging fruit left to pick to help people manage inbox overload.  Or is there?

The Enterprise Attention Management Conceptual Architecture to the rescue!  Rather than relying on a set of personal pet peeves or specific annoyances that have happened in recent memory, a model such as the EAM conceptual architecture provides a systematic approach for analyzing the attentional characteristics of a system.

The EAM architecture is intended for use by organizations to examine individual technologies or whole systems (such as the information worker desktop) that are suspected of causing explicit (information stress) or implicit (poor decision making, slow reaction to new information) information handling problems.  With systems it can be used for gap analysis.  Here I use it as an intuition pump to reveal a set of potential enhancements to e-mail software that would improve its attentional characteristics.

Click on the thumbnail below and scroll around to see the ideas that came out of my informal analysis of e-mail. Also, here is a quick summary of the recommended improvements (going clockwise from the upper-left of the diagram):

• Scheduled delivery
• Maintain whitelists to bypass blocks and delays
• “Move to discussion” greys out “reply”
• Automated routing and prioritizing? Not yet
• Un-bury turning off or freezing of “toasts” (alerts)
• Enable e-mail hyperlinking
• Enable role-based profiles
• Enable sender tagged e-mails
• Stop attachment abuse
• Presence-enable recipient lists
• Enable group-based rules
• Turn e-mail into generic small-content tool
• Manage multiple inboxes
• Provide inbox analytics
• Token systems
• Remind sender if no reply

Caveat: I'm not an e-mail expert.  It's possible that some e-mail systems can already do these things outright, with some configuration, or with simple coding.  If so, great, although they should be no more than one click away.  In the meantime, my inbox is filling up as I wait for these capabilities in the next version of e-mail programs.

Note: This is a cross-post of an entry from the KnowledgeForward blog, where it was named "E-mail Overload: No Cure, but Enterprise Attention Management Can Shed Some Light"

Beating Up the News for $650bn

Blogger: Craig Roth

Over at the KnowledgeForward blog I wrote that I predict that in 2009 there will be an announcement that information overload or unnecessary interruptions cost U.S. workers $1 trillion.  Basex has already released estimates of the cost of information overload being $900 billion and unnecessary interruptions being $650 billion.  The figure is soft to me to begin with, but becomes even softer when it becomes a Rorsch test for info-stress.  To the New York Times, it's the cost of unnecessary interruptions (well, the recovery time mostly) that are mostly of a mundane nature. To BusinessWeek it's the annual toll on U.S. productivity from interruptions.To Henry Blodget, it's the cost of checking email too often. To Read Write Web it's the cost to the nation of inbox overload and task switching.

Now, I strongly believe organizations can and should take concrete steps to help improve the efficiency of information workers by providing attentional technologies and capabilities that can pull important messages forward and push less important messages back from the worker's focus (see A Manifesto-free Definition of Attention Management).  But I don't want to fall into the same trap as Knowledge Management which collapsed in on itself due to overstated estimates of its cost with the implication it could be recovered.  I listed 5 reasons I find these estimates dubious (check out the blog entry for more detail on each):

1. Lumping in social interactions and distractions with interruptions

2. By counting all costs and no benefits (quote “total cost” instead of “net cost”)

3. By ignoring closed-loop analysis

4. By playing loose with the definition of “unnecessary”

5. By comparing against perfect short-term productivity instead of long-term sustainable productivity

But if there's a good cause at stake, what's the harm in crafting numbers that help to shock readers awake and spur action on a problem?  The Economist ran an interesting story about how AIDS researchers at the World Health Organization and UNAIDS are being accused of using poor statistical methods that "distorted priorities for the treatment and prevention of the disease."

... the agencies spent many years overcounting the number of cases ... Dr Pisani cheerfully admits to being a doctor of the spin variety herself—she refers to the process as “beating up the news”. She absolves UNAIDS's researchers of any blame. They did their best to collect true numbers in difficult circumstances and with little money. But so as to rack the world's conscience, she wrote reports that put the worst possible complexion on those numbers.

As Joel Best, author of Stat-Spotting: A Field Guide to Identifying Dubious Data, said on NPR's Bob Edwards show on 1/10/09, a lot of statistical abuse is introduced by researchers in the social sciences who truly believe in their causes and want to draw attention to them.  He questions statistics that support worthy causes, but are nevertheless misleading, overstated, or wrong. 

Mr. Best is a sociology professor and takes special notice when statistics involve social causes.  Regarding measurements on lost productivity, Mr. Best writes (Stat Spotting, p52-54)

In recent years, it has become very common to hear that this or that social problem costs America so much each year in lost productivity.  These estimates ... typically involve billions of dollars.

The basic idea behind these claims is that social problems interfere with people's ability to do productive work.  Lost productivity is the value of the work that could have been done if the employees had been able to concentrate on their jobs.

Now, fiddling with any of those numbers [that get multiplied by time and value to obtain the estimates] can lead to wildly different estimates of productivity losses.  The particular choices made have everything to do with the resulting statistic.

It is these choices that can distort the information overload and unnecessary interruption cost figures, causing organizations to focus on the wrong problems.  Do I choose a definition of "cost" that is net of benefits, or just all the costs alone? Who defines interruption (does it include social interactions and self-imposed interruptions such as distractions)? Who gets to determine whether an interruption is "unnecessary"?  As most interruptions only benefit one party involved, do you find the net cost to the organization for the interruption or just total the costs for the person who was put out by the interruption?  To make a statement on aggregate costs (e.g., to the U.S. economy, to an entire company), you need to make aggregate judgements about which interruptions count as "unnecessary", not aggregate individual, one-sided judgements.

I encourage any company that suspects info-stress may be occurring or that  poor decisions may be made based on information overload to step back and consider their enterprise attention management environment.  But be very careful about making a numerical estimate of the actual cost because it is interpreted as a judgement on potential savings and risks distorting the view of what should be done to address it.

Is an Intranet Infrastructure or Application?

Blogger: Larry Cannell

While keeping the driveway clear of snow and battling slippery roads to finish some last minute holiday shopping I’ve also been thinking about a report I am working on (to be published in the February/March time frame). The topic is intranets and the role they play in an enterprise. It seems to me the intranet is something many of us take for granted but its importance has changed dramatically over the 10-15 years they have been around.

Most definitions of intranets describe intranets in terms of technology. For example, the Wikipedia entry for intranet starts out this way:

An intranet is a private computer network….

In my opinion, saying intranets are just technology is similar to Henry Ford saying “Any customer can have a car painted any colour he wants so long as it is black.” At the time Ford said this he was only looking at cars as technology, but they mean so much more to us. Perhaps our prevailing view of intranets is as mature as cars were in 1909 (when Ford said this).

We discount the importance of intranets because, at one time, they were simply a bunch of technologies. They were pieces of infrastructure. Just deploy a few intranet technologies (like maybe a portal, a web content management system, or even collaborative workspaces), similar to how we might install a router, and they will simply pay for themselves.

This is where we got it wrong. In my opinion, intranets should not be treated as infrastructure. They should be treated like a suite of applications which support the most important processes used within the enterprises. Intranets support how we work online, and this is something we all should feel strongly about since it impacts our personal and organizational effectiveness more than any other set of tools we use.

When NCSA launched Mosaic browser in 1993 it was a rudimentary client, just good enough to get us thinking about the potential of an interconnected web. A couple of years later the Apache web server project was born out of another NCSA project and we were off making websites and demonstrating how easy it is to connect everyone to the same information.

Also taking place in the late 1990s was the rise in use of client/server e-mail systems, like Microsoft Exchange (version 5.0 was released in 1997). In many cases, Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes became the standard e-mail system providing the first reliable peer to peer enterprise communication system.

Deploying these e-mail systems was fairly straightforward and success soon followed since most everyone already knew, or were quickly learning, how to send and receive e-mail. The first experiments in using the web were similarly, although more narrowly, successful. These private applications of popular Internet technologies demonstrated to us that this stuff worked.

However, for many enterprises these early successes came from the IT infrastructure group. This may be the source of the problems we have today, with intranets that don’t seem to add any value (other than being technologies which connect our office computers to the Internet). Since these efforts grew out of IT infrastructure groups many of our intranet efforts stayed within them and were also considered IT infrastructure.

I’m not blaming IT infrastructure groups (I worked in one for ten years). But, intranets should no longer be treated as infrastructure. Infrastructure is technology that is well understood and could be considered a commodity (paint it black, who cares?). Intranet technologies are far from commodities. E-mail, yes, might be considered a commodity. But, for example, the use of collaborative workspaces is still quite immature and not at all close to being commoditized.

Rather, intranets should be treated as a portfolio of applications that are owned and funded by an organization and has a roadmap for improvements based on real, documented needs. Intranet technologies are used by people and understanding how people work is a touchy-feely sort of thing that infrastructure groups aren’t good at doing (for that matter, it’s one reason why some people work in an infrastructure group, to get away from the touchy-feely).

What do you think? Are intranets infrastructure or applications?

Secured RSS versus E-mail

Blogger: Larry Cannell

A recent post on Samuel Driessen’s blog posed a question sent in by Peter Verhoeven regarding the use of secured RSS feeds in enterprise RSS products such as Newsgator or Attensa (secured RSS feeds require a the user to be authenticated in some way, often with a username and password). Peter is working on a project to consolidate RSS feeds, reduce network bandwidth, and enable collaboration to take place around them.

The problem is secured RSS feeds have challenges that are not obvious when using RSS feeds from unsecured sites (like a public news site or a blog, like this website). Peter reports that Newsgator has capabilities to handle secured RSS feeds, but are implemented in a way that is unsatisfactory. Attensa’s handling of secured RSS seems broken in many ways (read the post for more details).

RSS, Not Just For Blogs

Often times people assume the source of RSS feeds can only be content sites, like blogs. However, RSS can be generated from any application, including enterprise applications. So, when RSS feeds are secured it can be dangerous for an aggregator to make assumptions about the feed.

Here is a key point about secured RSS feeds: the same RSS feed URL can produce a different list of feed items based on the identity of the requesting user. For example, assume a CRM system produces an RSS feed. Persons "A" and "B" both have access to the CRM system but cannot perform the same functions. "A" can look at all outstanding leads. "B" can as well, but is also able to see all closed deals. Therefore, if the CRM system uses the same feed URL "A" will not see some items that "B" does (closed deals). Clearly, this is a very different scenario then monitoring a blog for new posts.

So, the reason secured feeds should not be easily shared is because they may contain different feed items per user. Secured RSS feeds can also be personalized RSS feeds.

This doesn’t have to be a difficult concept to understand if you strip away some of the mystique which can be assigned to RSS feeds. Ignore the fact that RSS feeds are formatted in a special way (or course, they are in RSS format). Instead, think of them as simply web pages served up by a web server (which may be fed by an application generating the web page). They are also accessible using http. So the only difference between an RSS feed and a web page is the format of the text (one is html, the other is RSS).

In the example above the CRM system is producing a different RSS feed based on the identity of the user. This is no different than the behavior of the same CRM system when it is used interactively as an application. But, instead of producing a different page of html per user, the secured RSS feed produces a different list of RSS feed items.

Secure RSS Feeds Are Personalized For You

The most obvious difference between unsecured and secured RSS feeds (besides requiring authentication) is that secured feeds can be personalized. So if we start thinking about scenarios where an enterprise application provides different RSS feed items per user some interesting scenarios come to mind. An obvious use is notifications; maybe a part as been released to manufacturing, a payment has been made, or some other event happens that the application feels is important enough that you should be notified.

Today, these notifications are usually sent via e-mail. In some cases these messages occur infrequently enough that the user notices them in their inbox. But, it may also be the case that these messages overwhelm the user who then simply turns them off or ignores them.

Another Option

In the case where numerous notifications are overwhelming inboxes, an option to consider is an RSS feed consumed by a “river of news” aggregator (this assumes, of course, the application can produce an RSS feed). For example, the Google Desktop Web Clips gadget monitors multiple RSS feeds and displays new items in a sidebar on a desktop display. It also happens to support Windows single sign-on which means it doesn’t need to store a username and password for secured feeds, if the application providing the secured RSS feed also supports Windows single sign-on.

The “river of news” aggregation model assumes that if the reader misses some items it isn’t a big deal but one of them may catch their attention. So, imagine having a stream of updates coming from enterprise applications showing up in a sidebar. Although there may still be an overwhelming number of notifications coming they no longer clog up the inbox and the person monitoring these may be satisfied knowing messages are flowing at an expected rate.

I’m sure there are many options that could consume secured RSS feeds and present them to individuals or teams in useful ways. If you have an interesting example please share it below.

Update: Greg Reinacker posted a response and says NewsGator Enterprise Server 3.x will implement a feature that will address Peter's issue with secured feeds.

Smooth Social Interaction With Automated Nagging

Blogger: Craig Roth

In all this talk about aiding social interactions through instant messaging, community posting boards, blogs, and social networking there is one technology that I see missing from the list: a use of technology I'll call (with tongue firmly planted in cheek) "Notification through Automated Governance" or NAG systems.  These are the automated reminders that are sent out when a system has detected you haven't done something you're supposed to, usually via e-mail although IM, SMS, RSS, and voice are options. NAGging is actually a good example of the use of communication technology to improve social interactions.

Let me explain where I'm coming from.  When I was a project manager, my most dreaded task was going around weekly to programmers and business clients to get their updates on percentage completion and dates. They were supposed to e-mail this to me each week, but of course they often didn't.  So I became a nag, which soured my relations with people and turned me into a human focus point for their frustrations with the project.  If I had the ability to automate the tracking of the weekly entry of this information and have notifications come from a system rather than me, a nasty part of my interaction would be eliminated and I could focus on qualitative discussions about the project.  This is now easily possible with many different products or a little scripting.

Nowadays there are systems I work with that send out automated nags about not getting information entered and I appreciate them.  They are fair and sent to everyone that forgot without singling me out. I can't take them personally, since they are not sent by a person.  Accordingly, they don't impact my opinion of anyone ("geez, I'm only one day late and you're bugging me?  How about when you were late with xxx ..."), and they act as a handy reminder of something I may have forgotten.

NAGging has to be done with caution.  Sometimes the interaction that occurs when it's done personally is valuable and forces a discussion that should take place - one that may be improperly avoided if left to a computer.  Also, we've all had the experience of being NAGged by systems that think we didn't do something that we did.

But done properly, I think they are well worthwhile and easy to implement.  And in these times when it's difficult to get funding for new software, it acts as a good example of using technology you already own to improve productivity by greasing the gears of communication between enterprise information workers.

Email Overload: A Little Help From Microsoft

Blogger: Craig Roth

In June, Google announced an "Email addict" feature that was kind of a gag response to people complaining about email overload.  When you press a "take a break" button, the screen turns gray and locked the user out of email until you clicked again.  I had posted my own suggestions of how an email tool could help with email overload at http://knowledgeforward.wordpress.com/2008/06/08/google-lands-crushing-blow-to-email-addiction-with-new-feature/.

I was just turned on to Email Prioritizer from Office Labs which seems like a nice (and real) response to Google’s gag approach with its “Email Addict” feature. It hits on one of the features I wrote about: mail arrival schedules. I’d also recommend that Microsoft add automated scheduling options (hourly, morning/noon/evening, etc) to the manual option provided. This would simulate the cycle of the postman coming to deliver the mail, and leave your brain free outside those times to concentrate.

One nit: the description of the tool on their website annoyingly equated “do not disturb” as allowing you to “work without interruptions”. Unless you have toasts turned on email doesn’t interrupt you. And if that bothers you, the feature is already there to turn them off. I’d say email is a distraction or a temptation, not an interruption. The reason I’m picky is that there is a lot of great research around “interruption science” (for example, see interruptions.net) that mostly can’t help or doesn't apply to this situation.  One needs different approaches and has different goals and metrics when dealing with distractions versus interruptions.

Note: This is a cross-posting from the KnowledgeForward blog

Where Did All The Collaborative Authoring Researchers Go?

Blogger: Craig Roth

My job as an industry analyst sometimes requires me to be a detective.  I'm in the midst of researching my upcoming document on "Content Authoring in the Enterprise 2.0 Age" and uncovered an interesting mystery. 

Most of my day-to-day interactions are with end user clients, with a smattering of vendor conversations thrown in.  But when researching a new topic I like to see what research is going on in academia, which is where I noticed an interesting phenomenon.  One of the trends in content creation I'll be writing about is "collaborative authoring".  This is the idea that more and more documents are being created as a collaboration between many authors, which introduces procedural and technical challenges.  My research uncovered quite a bit of academic work in this area, but the lists of papers I found all mysteriously stopped around 2000.  It's as if an academic meteorite hit the earth at the end of 2000, wiping out all the collaborative authoring researchers without a trace! 

Did humanity solve the collaborative authoring problem rendering further research unnecessary?  Or was a more nefarious hand at play?  I had some theories, but this was just too curious to ignore, so I contacted some of the academics who were involved in this space in the late '90s to find out what happened.  I'm happy to say they are still alive and well.

Dr. Sylvie Noël, an HCI research scientist for the government of Canada, fingered "free collaborative authoring tools such as Wikipedia" as a culprit.  And since quite a few commercial products offering collaboration started coming out after 2000, researchers weren't as interested.  Dr. Noël did point out that work continues under the rubric of "collaborative editing" (more encompassing than just authoring).  Regarding collaborative authoring, she still hopes for "a popular product that meets the large corporations' needs and is as simple to use as email."  Me too.

Dr. Michael Spring, Associate Professor of Information Science at the University of Pittsburgh, pointed out that while the research assumed people author content together, in reality there is generally one owner with others just commenting.  And getting information workers to be a bit more structured and maybe - gasp! - look beyond Microsoft Word is often futile.  Like Dr. Noël he points out a profusion of "good enough" tools like wikis and better reviewing features in Word.  Once theory starts showing up in real, commercial products like word processors and wikis the grants and academic interest dries up pretty quick.

Dr. Spring had another observation that carries over into my research on attention management and improving employee productivity.  After exploring the potential time and cost savings that technology could yield for distributed collaborative authoring for engineering standards, he wonders if "the senior engineers really didn't want to be that efficient."  They liked getting together in first-class global cities to hang out together rather than efficiently exchanging snippets of content using web-based collaboration.  In fact, these efficiencies could threaten the staff and budgets of their departments.

To me, it's unfortunate that this research has died down. Even if the theoretical level is now understood, it hasn't all been turned into practice and technology yet.  Large vendors like IBM and Microsoft do have research groups, but I haven't confirmed they have picked up the research now that academia has handed it off.  It's clear there is still more than enough room for some good ideas.

Interruption Models

Blogger: Craig Roth

As part of my attention management (relates to "information overload") coverage I've been developing a set of interruption models.  Here is a working list of interruption models I've come up with so far.  Each has an example of how it would apply, followed with a sample numerical calculation based on the dollars gained or lost by the organization based on the interruption (assume this is $ based on time x fully loaded pay rate).

• Help-me model: Bill needs a moment of Stu's time to proceed with his work
  • Value to interrupter (80) + value to interruptee (-20) = Net closed-loop benefit (60)
• Help-you model: Bill takes the time to let Stu know he needs to change his task approach
  • Value to interrupter (-10) + value to interruptee (50) = Net closed-loop benefit (40)
• Jerk model: Mick is an jerk that likes bugging other people about fantasy football, hurting both their productivity
  • Value to interrupter (-20) + value to interruptee (-30) = Net closed-loop benefit (-50)
• Machine interrupt model: Stu's PC crashes. This distrubs Stu and has no benefit to the PC
  • Value to interrupter (0) + value to interruptee (-50) = Net closed-loop benefit (-50)
• Break model: Bill's thinking has been getting less effective and he finds himself spinning on a simple task, so he interrupts himself and decides he needs a mental break.  He returns to work more refreshed and effective
  • Value to interrupter & interruptee (5) = Net closed-loop benefit (5)
• Interaction model: Stu and Bill are working on a task together, expecting each other's input, and neither would really consider this an "interruption"
  • Value to interrupter (5) + value to interruptee (5) = Net closed-loop benefit (10)
• Alert model: A fire alarm goes off while Stu is working, interrupting him and saving his life
  • Value to interrupter (0) + value to interruptee (100) = Net closed-loop benefit (100)
• Scheduled interruption model: Stu is working hard on a task that requires concentration, but has to stop at 10:00 for a scheduled meeting, which interrupts his train of thought and will require recovery time upon resuming.  For this example, it is assumed the meeting is a project update for another project that Stu doesn't get much out of but is obligated to attend
  • Value to interrupter (0) + value to interruptee (-10) = Net closed-loop benefit (-10)
• Lazy model: Mick could figure out his task alone if he applied some time and effort, but it just seems easier to ask his smarter colleague Stu. Too bad Mick will never learn to help himself and will keep bothering Stu
  • Value to interrupter (5) + value to interruptee (-7) = Net closed-loop benefit (-2)
• Training model: Bill is stuck in his task and needs to ask his smarter colleague Stu for information.  Bill learns a valuable lesson that can be immediately applied and Bill is now that much better at his job
  • Value to interrupter (10) + value to interruptee (-7) = Net closed-loop benefit (3)
• Blast model: Mick shouts out to the room to see if anyone wants to go to lunch.  No one wants to because Mick is a jerk, so they are annoyed
  • Value to interrupter (1) + value to interruptees (-50) = Net closed-loop benefit (-49)

• Social interruption model: Stu stops by his co-worker Bill's desk and interrupts him to find out how his daughter is feeling after she got out of the hospital
  • Value to interrupter (?) + value to interruptees (?) = Net closed-loop benefit (positive?)

I talked this over with Mike Gotta, who brought up the point of reciprocity.  One enters into an implicit social contract that they will be gracious about interruptions in exchange for getting to interrupt others when needed.  The Help-me model should be encouraged as it has a net benefit for the organization, but it can also have a net benefit for Stu if he gets some of Bill's time the next time he needs it.  He also pointed out that interruptions tied to communities can be worthwhile as people search for expert opinions and information.

For individuals feeling stressed and overloaded this list of models could help guide some introspection about the degree to which interruptions are causing the stress and which models need to be reduced. 

For the owner of an attention management project, surveying information workers for the types of interruptions they are experiencing can help optimize the communication flows and interruptions. 

For anyone presented with an interruption study (particularly those showing extremely high negative impact by interruptions) it provides a firetest of the study's assumptions.  These models can be run through the methodology of the study to see how accurately it would count the net closed-loop benefit.

 

Is Managing Information Overload Just Self-Discipline? No - Some People Can Actually Do Something Real About It

Blogger: Craig Roth

An article in today's WSJ by Lee Gomes (4/16/08, page B1, You Can Enjoy a Book On a Mere Cellphone; (Hit Spacebar Now)) has a tidy summary of a statement that tends to make me cringe:

The biggest drawback to the experience involves the sheer proximity of the Internet and the constant temptation it provides for the aforementioned thumb to wander away from the realm of timeless literary art toward a cheap, quick-information fix in the form of email or blogs. This is one of the cultural problems of our time and I don't have much to offer in the way of solutions, save to nag everyone about steely self-discipline.

While Mr. Gomes is referring specifically to the itch to check email or blogs, I've seen the entire attention management issue framed this way as well: that information overload and info-stress are like the weather in that everyone likes to talk about it but no one ever does anything about it.  Why waste much time talking about the dangers of our always-on, go-go culture if all you can do about it is nag people to buckle down and change their behavior?

I can understand that the average information worker feels that dealing with the overabundance and addictive nature of information (just as with food) is a matter of self-discipline.  But there are a handful of people in any organization that can take action to impact the productivity and stress of hundreds (sometimes thousands) of information workers.  I'm talking about CxOs and the IT owners, stakeholders, and champions of attentional technologies.  Cornering the folks in the corner office about Information Overload can pay dividends.

Enterprise Attention Management (EAM) pulls together the various puzzle pieces involved in the information overload issue and lays them out in a conceptual architecture that provides a view (a cross-section really) of the myriad technologies and processes involved.  Once laid out in this fashion, EAM can be applied to a specific organization's situation.  For a demo of how this works, see my entry that applies the EAM to personal attention management and then think about doing that for the organization as a whole.

If you're one of that handful of people I mentioned, you can take real action - actually do something about information overload for scores of people in your organization.  For example, if you're the owner of the e-mail system, you can enable filtering rules, teach people how to use them, or place them on your list of evaluation points for an email product evaluation as your situation warrants.  If you're a CEO or head of a large division you can lead by example in how you send out and accept communications (e.g., using appropriate channels, not accepting electronic interruptions during meetings, demanding full attention for short periods of focused collaboration).  If you're in a position to roll out RSS technology you can accelerate its entry into the organization.  These are just a few examples.  Each is only a small piece of the puzzle, which is why the EAM conceptual architecture is important for laying out how all of these pieces interconnect.  And how they apply to each organization is different.  But only when they are laid out in the context of attention management can strategic direction become evident.