Enterprise Poll: Do Your Tools Ease or Accelerate Information Overload?

LexisNexus recently conducted survey of white-collar workers in five countries (the United States, China, South Africa, United Kingdom and Australia) on the subject of information overload. According to the press release, the survey found most professionals have had an increase in information they must process since the economic downturn and that between 1/3 and 1/2 of all information they receive each day is irrelevant to their job. Also, 51% of workers spend half their work days managing and processing information rather than using that information to do their jobs. We asked last week about what enterprise 2.0 tools you use in your organizations. This week, we’d like to know how well those tools are working out for you.

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The survey found that Chinese employers do the most to help employees with information overload. The most common solutions requested by employees are information management training and specialized tools designed for professionals in their fields.

A story by Stuff New Zealand says LexisNexus identified three main causes of information anxiety:

• A surfeit of information
• The lack of relevance
• The inability of organisational systems to deal with the information well

The third is exactly the sort of thing that enterprise 2.0 technologies are supposed to address, and many attempt to address the first and second as well. But one of the most common complaints about all the new tools enterprises are adopting is that they add “just one more thing” for workers to pay attention to.

We saw that many of you have implemented enterprise 2.0 technologies such as internal blogs, wikis and social networking. Are these things helping or hurting? I know there are many complexity to this question that a simple poll can’t address, such as implementation, corporate culture and the particular technologies. I’m just hoping to get a reading on how well this stuff is helping our readership overall.

If there’s a particular technology you’re using that helps, please do share that in the comments. And vendors: please take this as an opportunity to learn and not to pitch solutions.

Discuss