Information Technology (IT) and Information Overload (E-Mail Quicksand)

The incredible speed of Information Technology (IT) has produced incredible outcomes as we witness daily in this IT-era. The "speed" has become a main characteristic of Word Processor / Report generation software, E-Mail, Network, Internet, Intranet, Multi-media, Fax-Voice-Text devices, Scanner, Laser-Print etc. etc. What took days of information preparation and transmission in yester-years takes only seconds at this present moment. The impact (or it is an assault?) on every individual life is not only felt but stressed and drowned in quicksand of information overload. The echo of such sentiments reverberated throughout most industries and organisations who have invested in IT.

To overcome this serious problem of Information Overload, many turn back to more advanced Information Technology again to find a solution. Seemingly creative products are available in the market, product like "Intelligent Information Filtering" software / devices. Hence, criteria are built-in the devices to gauge the worth or urgency of the information, origin of the information and from which hierarchical level, etc. etc. This approach is much favoured especially after organisation management fails in their attempt to train or giving guidelines to their staff on information transmission.

Other solution observed is restructuring the organisation like creation of Information Management Department, special position in each department with title like Information Analyst, Value-Creator, etc. Such solution is carried out with great enthusiasm in the belief of the many management fads concepts like "Change Management' "ReEngineering" etc.

Some organisation continues to slogan to their staff that they are "empowered" or rather in the management perception, the staff "should act like an empowered employee" to take up the decision making and not just passing the information.

There are heroic stories in magazines and newspapers that portrait decision maker, CEO, General Manager as "Effective and Committed Leader" whose policy is "total transparency and openness". These leaders carry with them computer notebook in which all their employee all over the world has access by E-Mail . They operate as if they have 50-hour-day and not 24-hour-day, answering or acknowledging every E-Mail comes to their mail-boxes.

The above are examples of many sincere effort and attempt to find solution to the side-effect of advancing Information Technology - Information Overload. However the various approaches described can be summarised as fragmented, reductionalistic, following the doctrine of "Divide and Manage". As such, the solution has not only not created better result, in some cases they generate more liability to the organisation business.

This author is exploring the underlying systemic forces that create the information overload nightmare with the hope of throwing another perspective and understanding before any attempt on solution.

1.0 Hierarchical Structure & Organisation Mindset - (Individualistic-culture and Vs team-culture)

The speed in the changes of Information Technology is like leopard whereas that of organisation management practices is like tortoise. Although this may sound like a provocative statement, a closer look in most organisations reveals hierarchical structure inherited from early industrial smoke-stack era of Taylorism. All works are divided in parts. Hence compartmentalisation is common-place as evidence by Division, Department like Marketing, Production, Transportation, Customer Services etc. This has tremendous impact on personnel in the compartment as their mindset becomes "boxed-in". Their behaviour is reinforced by other mechanisms that further divide every things into parts like tasks, functions, work disciplines, etc. Examples are individual (part) job description, individual (part) staff performance appraisal, individual (part) reward scheme, etc. There is little or no "Process", "System" mechanisms that enable individuals to operate as Team to serve the Business needs, as against current practice of servicing individual and departmental needs only.

What happens when a leopard is running loose in a tortoise-like organisation? The leopard (Advanced Information Technology) knows no departmental boundaries. Her tendency is to cut across rigid compartmentalised empires at high speed and without mercy, with the networked electronic super highways. The driving forces for the leopard are the more aware customers (hence market competitors) and complexity of the business like technological hardware changes and their associated problems. Individuals within the compartments have to feed this hungry leopard with bit and pieces, fragmented information. The result is the information overload. The individual feeding to the leopard is mostly carried out with utmost sincerity and professionalism as that is the only paradigm he or she knows how to operate, conditioned by century-old management practices.

2.0 Manager's Role

Against the backdrop of the above described organisation hierarchy, traditional manager's role in an organisation is another contributing factor to the Information Overload. The Manager's Role can be summarised as "Command, Control and Judge" the staff under his or her compartment. This role is also conditioned by the organisation structures and mechanisms as described above. Hence a vicious circle is formed. Being a commander, controller or judge, he or is has to be a decision-maker, which is the icon of manager. The sub-ordinates are merely following the logic and culture, passing every bits and pieces of information for the "decision maker". After all, it has long be concluded that "the boss is always right."

To catch up with the speed of the leopard, a new paradigm shift of managers has to take place. Traditional role of "Commander, Controller and Judge" has to be replaced with "Coach, Mentor, Facilitator, Motivator, Leader, Integrator, Aligner". A lot has to be un-learned with new learning. In this new paradigm, subordinate formerly judged as under-performance is then a reflection of more learning is required of the manager to be effective leader, motivator to inspire and coach the staff. New skills and techniques have to be learned in order to build effective teams among staff with shared vision, focusing on the core-business process for the leopard to run through smoothly without wasteful by-product (information overload).

3.0 Managing Information Vs Managing Knowledge

If we see Information Overload as wasteful by-product of an organisation, then "information" itself needs to be scrutinised. Three categories are used for this discussion, i.e. DATA -> INFORMATION -> KNOWLEDGE. In my humble opinion (IMHO), it is difficult to rigidly define each category with boundary. There is an overlap or migration of one category to another depending on which perspectives are employed. The temperature and pressure records can be important INFORMATION to the factory production operator, or even KNOWLEDGE to a new operator who gains insight into the machine behaviour, but only DATA to the supervisor and manager.

There is a great deal of blurrness and vagueness in the treatment of the three categories. Traditional hierarchical organisation with individualistic, fragmented and compartmentalised approach has brought such blurrness and vagueness to greater height. Some times an incident or defect or customer complaint can become a big "information" (issue) that exhausted the management energy and effort with investigation, fixing, remedial solution that generate reports and more reports (information overload). Under the teaching of Dr. Deming's Profound Knowledge in "Theory of variables", such an event may just be an occurrence of random variables as reviewed by statistical pattern techniques, which does not require any fire-fighting and fixing behaviour.

Again to follow the Dr. Deming's Profound Knowledge, focus is again on Process, System Understanding and Improvement that requires Teams with shared Vision (constancy of Purpose) and disciplined methodology (constancy of Methodology) and not focusing too much on technology and weakness of people alone.

Managing Profound Knowledge and not merely managing information may be a big clue to the woe of Information Overload.

End.