Information Overload can have manifold manifestations: physicians have more new articles coming out in their field than they can possibly cover, consumers have too many TV channels to choose from comfortably, journalists have a hard time staying on top of breaking news, and so forth. But in the enterprise, the domain of the knowledge worker population I belong to and serve, Information Overload took a fairly predictable and well-characterized form, and it had two underlying components: Email Overload and Interruptions (a.k.a. distractions). Until recently, this was it; find a way to handle the hundred or (many) more incoming emails a day, and to keep in check the endless intrusions of BlackBerries and other interrupters, and you could have IO under control.
But in the last year I begin to see signs that a third component may be joining these two: Facebook. I first caught on over a year ago when a senior manager asked me: when is Facebook going to replace email in his company? He had noticed that his kids’ generation don’t bother to maintain an email account; it’s all in Facebook for them. He also noticed that these kids, or their peers, will very soon hit the workplace…
Now, I wouldn’t hold my breath for email to disappear; but there are ever more signs that the arrival of Gen Y in the enterprise will bring with it a growing reliance on both internal and external social networks; and my bet is that any attempt to ban the external ones will be as short-lived as were the attempts to ban the World Wide Web in the mid-nineties. Facebook and similar tools will be part of enterprise life, including personal use, and many people with foresight realize that. The question is, what will this do to Information Overload?
That this is a relevant question I see from the number of people who approach me, after my lectures on IO, and express concern, or seek advice, around Facebook Overload. The temptation to check and update Facebook around the clock may strike Gen X and Boomer workers as silly, but it is the younger people – who already do this in high school – who will matter before long. If Facebook is addictive, they will arrive at the workplace with the habit already established. If so, we IO practitioners will need to add Facebook to the twin factors of email and interruptions, and we will need to have answers and solutions to this new aspect of the old problem.
What do you think? Do share your thoughts on this: will Facebook IO be a problem 5 years from now? Is it a problem already? And what can we do about it?
