Calculate the Cost of Information Overload to Your Company

If the stock market and housing crashes aren't costing you enough, just wait. The Attention Crash may also be eroding your company bit by bit.

According to Basex, a research firm, information overload cost the U.S. economy $900 billion per year in "lowered employee productivity and reduced innovation." Up to 50 percent of our day is spent managing and searching for information.

Now Basex has created a a free, Web-based "information overload calculator" so that anyone can now can estimate the dollar impact of the Attention Crash on their own business. There's also a free report, "Information Overload: We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us."

Simply visit the web site, identify your industry and the percentage of your employees who are highly skilled, skilled, single skilled or unskilled and it will give you a number. I am not sure how they are doing this though without asking for revenues. Still, it's a fun - yet scary - tool.

Comments

[Sampad Swain]

I'm quite doubtful about the metrics used to come to a solution. I think we would have needed more comprehensive one than just 3 questions solution. Though, like the idea of people giving heed to information overload as a potential dampener to financials which have been long overdue.

---Sampad

[Tom Cunniff]

In my experience, in business far more money is lost due to a lack of focus than to a lack of effort. Technology has radically improved our "ability" to dwell on minutiae and reside in our own personal echo chambers while remaining dangerously unaware of the big picture.

The critical skill of the coming decades will be the ability to quickly tell the difference between data (487,526 grains of salt in the salt shaker on Table 75) and essential information ("there's an iceberg, dead ahead".)

[Jonathan Spira, Basex]

To address Steve´s question as to how we do this without revenue figures, we use a variety of inputs incl. salary details from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

To address Sampad´s, since we know, based on interviews and surveys of many thousands of knowledge workers, how much time is lost due to IO, we are able to provide a range.

[Chris Edwards]

It's come-on for the white paper - to receive that, you have to sign up for a year's worth of email newsletters.

[Sampad Swain]

Thanks for that input. But just for the info, are those stats for global worker or primarily for US...

Thanks for the quick response though!

---Sampad

[Beth]

This is a great - now you can computer the cost of information overload as part of a ROI analysis. What's the solution? Been teaching workshops "information coping skills" - and have included an assessment that lets you figure out how much you are personally effected by information overload and some tips for reducing it.http://informationcoping.wikispaces.com/Self-Assessment

[Jay Krall]

If you're going to calculate the cost of "information overload", you need to first subtract from it the value of all the useful intelligence gathering and relationship building that this vast amount of information has enabled you to do.

[Albert Maruggi]

Chris, did you fill out the form to "learn more"? I love it, at the bottom of the contact information, after they tell you the tens of thousands of dollars you are losing to information overload they ask if you want to receive their enewsletter.

At times reality can be much funnier than art, you just can't make this stuff up.