Comments on: It’s all relevant

By: bstg

bstg — Sat, 30 May 2009 19:25:05 +0000

Mark, thanks for the kind remarks. I couldn't agree more, not only is time spent/wasted an issue (Outsell just reported over one-third of all knowledge worker searches end in failure), but opportunity cost as well. What vital piece of information was too buried in a results list to find? We have to continue the shift away from searching, and towards understanding the needs of the searcher, and turning the right information into intelligence for them. – Ken

By: bstg

bstg — Sat, 30 May 2009 12:25:05 +0000

By: Mark Worth

Mark Worth — Fri, 15 May 2009 00:18:49 +0000

Ken, I am enjoying your blog greatly. You are correct in stating that information overload is still a major problem. I think it should get more attention, not less. As a CKO based in Europe at a pharma, I find myself more and more concerned about what knowledge workers are NOT seeing or finding. We subscribe to the Basex research service and they have put out vast amounts of information on this topic (almost to the point of overload!). According to one of their reports, information overload cost the U.S. economy about $900 billion in lost productivity and related areas. I think they are probably understating the amount.

By: Timothy Fives

Timothy Fives — Fri, 08 May 2009 14:01:01 +0000

The reality is there is a tremendous burden on people today not only regarding the volume of the data related to the overload, but the relevancy of the data. While formatting information and and linking it all together is a crucial piece of the end user experience, getting to the crucial piece of information that will give one a competitive advantage is where the real focus needs to be. I see that we are transitioning from one information stage into the next, we are currently still in an information pull phase where we use tools such as Google to find and pull information relevant to our search, but we are quickly heading into a phase of information push, where information is streamed into our lives, great example would be RSS feeds and the like. The fundamental issue going forward, is how to you parse out what is relevant in the streaming information, so that what information is being streamed into our lives is relevant to what we need, and lowers the burden of having to go searching for that relevant data.