Given the avalanche of information from numerous avenues including e-mail, instant message and syndication feeds, corporate users could start to feel attention fatigue and companies may need to institute a strategy for attention management, according to one analyst firm.
Craig Roth, service director and vice president of collaboration and content strategies at the Burton Group, says attention fatigue has a negative impact on information workers and is caused by the limited amount of attention they have to spend on an ever increasing amount of information that demands their attention.
He says that fatigue also leads to an unwillingness to adopt new communications technologies such as blogs and wikis.
Roth presented his thoughts and suggestions for coping skills and solutions Wednesday during a Burton Group telebriefing.
He says processes, cultural changes and even technology lumped under something he calls “attention management” (AM) can help users cope. He says AM applies concepts from psychology, physiology, and economics.
“Attention management provides a way of framing a lot of the issues we see today,” say Roth, “with the intrusive aspects of these technologies, the unforeseen impacts on information workers from what are otherwise very beneficial collaboration communication and content technologies, and explaining why the promised life and productivity benefits of these technologies often seem elusive in the real world.”
He says the upside is that things are not hopeless and companies should not throw up their hands, accept their perceived fate, or make rapid changes to combat information overload problems.
“It is not hopeless, there are techniques that can help,” says Roth. He says users must become aware of the issues and implement changes to corporate culture, processes and technologies.
Roth says attention management in the enterprise means improving control over messages sent and received by information workers by changing work habits and culture, business processes and software tools.
Roth says even though technology got users into this mess, it can help ease the information burden.
He says technologies like spam and IM filters, caller ID and blocking, and popup blockers help reduce information overload by pushing unwanted communication into the background. In particular, he says presence information provides critical data about a user and says IM’s free/busy toggle is but a first step.
He says the next level would include calendar search, device detection, location, and microphones and cameras, which could detect if a user is physically present.
In addition to using technology to filter out or redirect communication, Roth says tools such as alerts, portals, syndication feeds, social networking, search and e-mail filtering rules can help bring some information forward and highlight its value.
Roth has created a conceptual model he calls the Attention Management System, which sits between the senders and the receivers of messages, and includes an attention response engine that features rich presence information, rules and scoring tools used to make decisions on messages, and redirection of communication along different routes or channels. It also includes sensors to monitor load and information gleaned from the user’s desktop such as what task they are on or what time zone they are in.
“The Attention Management System acts on the user’s behalf to decide what to do with messages that come in,” says Roth. He says there isn’t a single vendor that has all the pieces of the puzzle and, in fact, some of what is needed does not currently exist.
The system also includes throttles like those featured in automatic call distribution systems used in call centers to manage workload.
Roth says attention management will become a much more visible issue as people begin to pass the threshold into being paralyzed by the amount of data they must process.
“People will act when the cost of inaction exceeds the cost of action,” he says.
As that time approaches, he says there are thing users can do to fight attention fatigue including awareness of information overload and its degree of impact on productivity, seeking a solution only if there is a documented problem, implementing changes that fit within an organization’s ability to adopt them and view AM as a long term issue that is managed not solved.
Roth says enterprises should think about deploying technologies that help recipients protect themselves against overload, train message senders to recognize the correct channels of communication to use, and increase the company’s and IT’s awareness of attention management.
“There is probably not an ROI you can measure,” says Roth. “You would have to make a lot of assumptions. But there are different levels of hard and soft benefits you can look for. Using something like spam technology, you can see the number of message being caught by the spam filter. On the soft side, you can survey users and try to measure the level of information stress. If you take that pulse every six months you can see how things might be getting better or worse over time.”
