The Battle Against Information Overload

By Cyndi Seidler

Reprinted from Organized Living Newsletter, July/August 2000

Walking into your office with piles of paper strewn all around your desktop and neighboring counter space is a familiar sight to many whose job involves sifting and sorting through information. The battle against paper can be won, however.

Some people embark on a personal crusade to eliminate paper, but it will always continue to appear anyway. The key is what we do with it, how we manage it, and how we can create electronic delivery of it (instead of paper).

When Knowledge Management came of age, it took on an area overlooked by a majority of organizations. This was leveraging the collective knowledge of their company. Although the concept has been around for some time (since the early 1990s), there wasn’t much practice or technologies for this.

While some of these issues still exist to a lesser degree, today’s businesses are beginning to take advantage of its potential. Systems are now in place which offer a collaborative environment which can locate information in a variety of different formats or data stores. It can deliver information to users when they need to receive it, analyze it, or share it.

Business intelligence is strengthened by the benefits of having knowledge and information readily available to access and share. Knowledge Management is not a remedy in itself. Rather, it is a business practice that can be supported by technology. It seems there are quite a few alternatives to managing the amount of information we get.

There are web-based services that bring you magazines and newspapers which can be stored electronically. These web pages can be saved or selected and copied to your hard drive. Indexing this collection of files in an infobase for research would require some labor, however (regularly, on a monthly basis, is advised).

Fax modems can take the place of fax machines. Faxes can come paperless, like email, in some cases. If you have a paper document to send, scan it and send it (thereby storing it on your hard drive and getting rid of the paper).

With email, information is at our finger-tips. Of course, these must be organized and filed in such a manner that it can be easily retrieved.

In determining the value of information you save, one must also determine if it has any value at all, and be able to toss it if it doesn’t!

Copyright © 2000 Cyndi Seidler.  All Rights Reserved.

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