Information is key for efficient business operations. The way it circulates must be facilitated and fluidified? Everything may be very valuable at a given moment for a given person while being useless for anybody else. Identifying week signals is critical but it implies to increase the amount of information that circulates through the enterprise. People can’t manage more than a given quantity of information but we know that if we want everyone to find what’s needed, more and more information will have to circulate.

Companies are not comfortable with this paradox : the need for making more and more information coming from many people accessible while protecting people from information overload and delivering a clear signal about “what matters”. Knowing that “what matters” depends on the people. So it’s not a surprise that for many businesses, even if they understand there’s a real potential, social media is seen as a source of confusion and information overload.

I often say that, in order to improve things, two main lines have to be explored at the same time

• a human line : trust your environment to filter. Knowing that people you are professionally close to share your concerns, the information filtered by your network is often relevant.

• a software line : tools have to identify “strong weak signals” from the informational hubbub.

Of course, we’re only at the beginning but we can see emerging initiatives that prefigure what things may look like tomorrow. To illustrate my words, let’s have a look at Microplaza.

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