The article opens with a Basex claim stating collaborative tools are costing businesses over a half a trillion dollars in lost productivity due to worker information overload. I didn’t read the actual Basex report (because it cost $199), so I can’t say for sure this number is hogwash but…
If companies are truly experiencing these kinds of losses due to too much information, I need to shift RatchetSoft’s focus and become a knowledge management and collaboration consulting company because the market opportunity is apparently huge. Information overload is rarely the fault of the technologies that deliver the information. It’s usually the fault of one or more of the following:
1) The group asking for the information doesn’t really know what they need. Looking for a needle in a haystack assumes you know what a haystack and needle looks like.
2) The collaboration solution is not implemented properly. Opening up the spigot and letting the data flow is just the easy part of knowledge management and collaboration. Filtering it for relevancy and making available at the right time is the hard part.
3) The information itself is of poor quality. Garbage in, garbage out.
Then the article moved on to the issue of security.
“Corporate executives also worry that Web 2.0 tools pose a security threat. Fifty-two percent of 472 executives say securing and protecting sensitive data was the top barrier to adopting the tools, according to a January poll by the Economist Intelligence Unit, a research and advisory firm, for business consultancy KPMG.Is this news top anyone? In fact, the real news here is that only 52% of these executives see security an adoption barrier. Web 2.0 is no different than any other technology that involves information. Security has been, or at least should have been, a barrier to the adoption of every technology since the invention of the network. Bottom line is security good, hacking threats, bad, very bad. We get it. Nothing specific here to Web 2.0.
Finally, despite all the doom and gloom, the article concludes with some good news for Web 2.0:
“Three of four executives said they believe collaborative tools will foster innovation in their companies. And almost 70 percent agreed that Web 2.0 will help their people work more efficiently.”
So 70% of the respondents agreed that the half a trillion dollar loss in productivity is worth the increases in innovation? Uh, OK.
I read these kinds of articles all the time (maybe I need to get out more), and often come away asking myself; “What did I just really learn?” I’m not sure because it’s hard to decipher true insight amongst the headline hyperbole, contradictory statistics and often obvious observations by pundits. Dare I say there’s too much unfiltered information coming in. Hey, maybe there’s something to this.
