Last week I had the opportunity to chat with two really smart analysts on information overload – Jon Gantz and Angele Boyd – both from IDC. Three things struck me in the conversation:
- This is a problem that is only getting worse – for everyone
- Nobody is going to solve this problem in one fell swoop. Can’t eat an apple in one bite
- You likely have technology that you bought already that is capable to helping you start tackling the problem.
It was the third example that really made me pause and in line with what I blogged about last time – what technology do you have to help slay this dragon called Information Overload. For example, a lot of people scan stuff and send the documents to their own e-mail. But how many companies actually scan a document and then parse the data and use it to populate fields in enterprise applications?
I know that I use the SmartSend technology that is part of my company’s MFPs to scan and send info to co-workers around the company. Its pretty easy, print a cover sheet, scan the cover sheet and the document, select where you want it to go to – and off it goes.
But how cool would it be if my doctor’s office actually took the scanning idea to the full level and instead of copying my insurance card for the umpteenth time, they actually scan it in, suck the data from the card and populate the forms they have to fill out for every patient. It might actually free the person at the front desk to do something other than re-keying the information they just copied.
As Angele said during our discussion, in this day an age, the more RIO you can get out of the products you have, the better.
The term “information overload” is a double pronged construct. On one hand it implies the surge in raw information and on the other the limited capacity of humans to process it.
Your article focuses on the first part. There are significant opportunities in he second area by enhancing human potential to assimilate and process information. A few thousand years ago sign language was the only informational input and then came speech followed by writing, print,radio,tv etc ecah drawing more senses into the information assimilation process.
The future in this area would lie in drawing even more senses like touch, smell, taste etc into the information assimilation process.
A newspaper which smells or feels different in different sections based on news content, so that you can just swipe your hand caross or smell it to figure out what you wnat to read and what to ignore ?
Smelling or tasting our news instead of reading it ? Seems farfetched today but may be the face of tomorrow.