Infobesity | Bertrand Duperrin's Notepad

From noise to situational intelligence

February 10, 2012 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 1 Comment

Sumary : many users say that the problem that enterprise social platforms is the risk of infobesity and informational noise. Reality is more complex. As for infobesity, these platformes only collect information and have few impact on the fact people and systems generate more. The problem is more about how to distribute this information. Then comes things like activity streams and micro-blogging tools that raise another question : what’s necessary and what’s superfluous. In fact there’s a new context organizations and people are not very comfortable with. In a complex business world, it’s essentiel to feel signals to act and adapt permanently to external events that impact one. Feeling does not mean deep reading and understanding. Employees will have to learn to optimize their situational intelligence by making the most of the surrounding noise without being submerged by it.

On the one hand we see enterprises thinking about a more efficient way than email to organize information flows, exchanges, collaboration and information sharing. On the other hand the alternate solution also bring their own questions and fears.

As I recently said, after a large french company decided to ban internal emails :” that won’t decrease the amount of information that will only move to other places”. As a matter of fact it’s more about changing how one manage and deal with information flows than changing tools.

As a matter of fact, social software platforms will be more and more like “catch all”. As they improve in terms of functionalities, they will soon be able to catch anything any information produced, whatever its form or the software that produced it. Some think it may lead to infobesity but that’s not my opinion. Any information that need to be generated will be generated, the social platform only being the receiver, the container. We can even think that such platforms will help to prevent content replication across different systems.

The problem is not about information catching but information redistribution. From the user side, it means wondering what needs to be pushed to him and what should only be made available for whom searches it (improved by suggestion mechanisms to address the grey zone between both. Something bizarre since we are all deeply influenced by current approaches that, despite of the fact we’re submerged by too much pushed information, we still fear to miss something so we do nothing to clean up our information flows.

Two components of these new platforms raise questions : activity streams and micro-blogging tools that generate information flows in which many fear to drown themselves. What lead us to wonder if we need so much information and if it’s really useful.

Internal communication and social media : move the filter !

May 3, 2011 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Summary : with the coming of social media in the workplace and the need for internal communication teams to let go and don’t care about what is not their responsibility, the question of information filtering is more important than ever. With the increase in the number of information sources and the need for communication team to fall back on their core duties, information has to be managed at the user lever on both a qualitative and quantitative standpoint. So filters will have to move : formerly set at the publishing level, it needs to move to the receiver level and rely on two pillars. A human one in order to make the concept of social filtering fully operative at a wide scale in the workplace (what is also a major issue in terms of training…). A technological one then because, until today, the social filter has not worked as expected and, moreover, the increase in volume of information will imply the use of intelligent tools to compensate for humans. Filtering is not about authorizing people to publish anymore but about filtering what they receive based on relevance in context.

Before, everything was clear : communication in the enterprise was the job of a dedicated communication department who decided what people needed to know and didn’t care about how employee reacted to this information. Today, this department is not the only source of information and any employee, team, unit will have its own voice.

Please notice that it’s a significant improvement. For what I can see, 2 or 3 years ago, most of the communication departments were more likely to fight against this uncontrolled form of information broadcasting while, today, most of them seem to have understood they need to share the power. That doesn’t mean they are very comfortable with this new challenge, what is is quite logical, but they’re now trying to find how to go with change rather than block it. Remember that it’s not obvious at all for a traditional BE2 team to support an E2E approach and that, instead of criticizing them, helping them to deal with this transformation is a more constructive approach.

It raises two questions : the first is about the place of the communication department on a socialized intranet and the second is about controlling the global information flow.

Social networks are the quintessence of enterprise web 2.0

February 27, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

The issue has been emerging for years but it’s now a hard trend : companies don’t consider internal use of web 2.0 as a prospective subject and started to work on its implementation. The network logic and the question of knowing how to implement it is now on CEO”s agendas. All the same, people in charge often can’t make head nor tail of it.
In the first years, the equation was as simple as web 2.0 = Blogs + wikis. No sooner companies understand what they could do with these tools that they were told about social bookmarking. Then RSS. Then microblogging. And now social networks.

So many new things that common people in common businesses may get lost, don’t you think ?

In fact the point is not to make a choice between all these tools but to make a rational use of many of them, each having its purpose, in an unified context. Continously switching from one to another is out of question : employees must have everything at their disposal at the same time and in one interface, without having to care about how they communicare together. Another point is that IT depts can’t afford building bridges between a multitude of tools that evolve independantly, depending on the will of each vendor. I don’t even mention the real risk of overlap as solutions become more mature and expand their scope.

In this logic, the emergence of social networks as the main issue doesn’t have to be understood as “one more tool” but, on the contrary, as the integration of what’s above in a consistant approach.

I spend 28% of my time reading your useless emails !

July 9, 2008 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

That’s what many employees could (should ?) say to their colleagues and managers.

I’ve been pleading for a system which would make the right information find the right people instead of sending grouped emails to people who don’t need them and often forgot those for whom it would have been useful.

I’m often answered the same thing : people may miss some information. Yes, of course. And that’s a good thing. They will miss any information that is useless at a given moment, will stop wasting their time reading what does not concern them and having to refocus on what they were doing. And if, one day, they need to find it, a simple search on the intranet will do the job.

I’m talking about making it possible for people to build their own information supply chain depending on their needs and concerns and not about other’s people needs to show they are working or to cover themselves saying ‘”but they knew”. We already do it very well on the web with, on the one hand published information, and in the other RSS feeds coming from identified sources or search agents and I can’t see any reason why we wouldn’t be able to do this within the enterprise.

Managing information will soon be a key competence

April 5, 2008 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 2 Comments

While informations is becoming more and more important in everyone’s day to day job, we always ear the same things : “too much information, not enough time, impossible to manage it”. This looks like a paradox as people don’t seem ready to embrace what is becoming more and more essential in most of us’ jobs. Yet, as mentioned in a recent UNESCO survey, we’ll have to learn to deal with that. Managing information is about not not remain a constraint anymore but to become a key competence.

What is it about ? The issue is clear : find, extract, evaluate, and make an efficient use of information. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Knowledge & Information management Tagged With: competences, datas processing, infobesity, information, informational culture, knowledge, supply chain

Informationnal overload is a myth

March 5, 2007 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

It’s also called infobesity and it’s said being the cause of all our sorrows. It stresses those who aren’t able to manage such an amount of information, it causes losses of productivity and its growths makes informationnal quality decrease.

I don’t suscribe to this point of views. Honestly I don’t feel like being overloaded by information. I’d rather say I don’t have enough information and I’d be very happy to get more. And I think we’re all in the same situation but not everybody realizes it.

Our problem isn’t informationnal overload. We’re not being flooded by information, but by datas. It’s not just a change in verbalization, it’s really a conceptual change that may have a lot of effects once you’ve taking it into account

What are we talking about ?

What’s the difference between information and datas. Information is an answer to a question. Data is only a part of this answer that, taken individually, doesn’t mean nothing for me and is useless.our moi.

The first conclusion is that the difference between both is highly subjective. What’s a data for me may be information for you and conversly. [Read more...]