Information overload? Bring it on!
Jinfo Blog

8th December 2008

By Tim Buckley Owen

Item

As the recession spreads from financial services to almost every other area of the economy, one activity that shows no sign of a downturn is the production of content. If ever an activity were subject to the law of diminishing returns, content production is it; as such, it should represent our biggest opportunity. Tom Sutcliffe, a columnist on the Independent newspaper, is worried about Twittering http://digbig.com/4xykf, where contributors say what they like, unconstrained by the professional journalist’s incentive not to broadcast misleading or dubious information. And the Economist reports http://digbig.com/4xykg the appearance on some websites of a new Facebook Connect button, allowing readers to broadcast their initial unconsidered reactions to whatever they’re reading faster than ever. Professional solutions to information overload could lie with technology – such as the formidably effective Cogito suite of semantic search and analysis products from Expert System http://www.expertsystem.net/page.asp?id=1521 demonstrated at the recent Information Management Solutions show in London. Or with the software as a service offerings of business information providers like OneSource (http://www.onesource.com/ – to be profiled in a forthcoming VIP magazine) allowing sales and marketing staff to leverage OneSource content through their own customer relationship management system. IT consultant Gartner certainly sees further growth in this area. Its recent User Survey Analysis: Software as a Service, Enterprise Application Markets, Worldwide, 2008 http://digbig.com/4xykm finds nearly 90% of organizations surveyed expecting to maintain or grow their SaaS usage, and 37% currently moving from an on-premises to an SaaS solution. But there are plenty of possible professional people solutions too. It’s worth bearing in mind, for example, that the taxonomies behind services such as Cogito are developed by people thinking, not created on the fly by software. And in The E-Mail Challenge: Managing a Tsunami http://www.outsellinc.com/store/products/787 the information consultancy Outsell shows how information professionals are being pulled into the development of solutions for the increasingly inefficient use of email, and looks at some new communication and sharing tools tailored to specific applications and user behaviours. There’s further reassurance from guru Gerry McGovern http://www.gerrymcgovern.com, widely regarded as the number one worldwide authority on managing web content as a business asset and one of the speakers at the recent London Online Information conference. Five per cent of your web site (or intranet) delivers 25% of your value, he says; to judge from his presentation, finding out which 5% is more commonsense than rocket science, but nothing like enough people are doing it. So – software or people power? The answer of course is both – but information professionals do need to seize the initiative, get to grips with some of the new software solutions that are coming along, and convince management that they can use them to benefit the bottom line.

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