Wall St. Journal Provides Quick Attention Management Primer
July 6, 2009 at 8:41 am | In Attention Management, Google | Leave a CommentL. Gordon Crovitz provides an attention management primer in today’s WSJ. “Information Overload? Relax” is worth reading or pointing others too as a quick summary of information overload, the idea of managing it, and attention. Best quote:
Rather than pitch our BlackBerrys and iPhones into the sea, imagine the benefits once we have figured out how to manage the chaos of endless data and routine multitasking, a process that will help refine our judgment about information and refocus our attention on what’s truly important.
Mr. Crovitz describes both ends of the information overload spectrum. I wrote about this previously, saying “There’s no ‘right’ answer in the debate between those that believe information overload will soon cause the heads of information workers will begin to pop like popcorn as they slump over in their fuzzy cubicles and those that believe we’re just adapting to the new flow.” Mr. Crovitz comes down 100% on the “we’ll adapt” side of the spectrum in this article, but I believe it’s a rhetorical device since he has generally been on the “it’s a crisis” side of the spectrum in previous columns on this subject.
The only minor quibble I have with his article is where he says:
As one data point, a search for “Information Overload” on Google returns 2.92 million results in 0.37 second.
No, actually, if you search on “information overload” with quotes around it Google returns 1.53 million results. He searched on information overload without quotes which returns anything with those two words close together. As you can see in the figure below, the noise he’s including in the search results involves iron overload (hemochromatosis), a serious but rather separate issue. Granted, 1.53 million is still a lot, but using the tool properly trims almost 50% of the noise from the result set.
The built-in irony of that meta-mistake is brilliant. Mr. Crovitz misuses a tool that is, itself, a symbol of the overabundance of information at our fingertips – while searching for the term that names that overabundance! I don’t mean to pound on Mr. Crovitz – I wish to use this instance to demonstrate a point: that while technology cannot solve information overload, it can be part of the solution. Before getting into fancy R&D projects and algorithms that try to formulate probabilistic estimates of which news items may be of interest or how to automagically prioritize your inbox, people should learn to use the basic features that already exist. If information overload bothers you, it’s worth the effort to learn basic attentional features of the tools you use. By “attentional” I mean how they can help you pull important information forward and push less important information back from the reader’s point of focus. Quotes around words that are only of interest when together is just one example.
Virtual Collaboration for Lotus Sametime
June 25, 2009 at 3:49 pm | In IBM, collaboration, virtual worlds | Leave a CommentSome of the great research work that IBM was doing around virtual worlds has now made it onto enterprise desktops through IBM’s announcement of the availability of the “Virtual Collaboration for Lotus Sametime” plugin for Lotus Sametime 8.0.1 or later. An OpenSimulator instance runs on the server and connects to Sametime through a bridge. There is a web client, although most users would probably use the SecondLife client.
The plugin provides 3 enterprise virtual world environments that I’d classify as virtual collaboration: collaboration spaces, boardrooms (meeting rooms), and theatres (see details in the slideshow below or the YouTube video).
It looks like neat stuff to me. And from what I can tell, there’s no cost to Sametime users to add this since OpenSimulator and the SecondLife client are free. Even though this has moved from research to general availability, I still consider it an experiment. Now is when early adopters can start playing around with this, find good uses, and report their stories back to start assembling a business case. I haven’t had a chance yet to read the “Business Value Study” they reference. From my research last year, the best business cases were around rehearsal and training, not virtual collaboration, but I look forward to seeing what they came up with once I get past Catalyst season.
Note: This is a cross-posting from the Collaboration and Content Strategies blog.
"Considerably Higher Costs" Indeed
June 23, 2009 at 6:13 pm | In Attention Management, Information Work, communication, email | Leave a CommentI recently posted a set of ideas for improving e-mail from the point of view of enterprise attention management. It listed 15 ideas that would help e-mail users (which is pretty much everybody these days) to allocate their attention more efficiently to their daily tasks, whether that means more attention to some e-mails or less.
One of the items I listed on was this:
Remind sender if no reply
Avoid “dropping the ball” with e-mails by adding a simple checkbox indicating if an e-mail being sent should alert the sender if no reply is received within a given time (like 3 days). Too often post mortems indicate that a message was never replied to, the sender forgot about it (“fire and forget”), and the task was therefore left in limbo.
I cannot overstate the importance of closing the loop on communications between senders and receivers. Especially when you combine important messages with “weak” connections (meaning they are unlikely to speak often and are unlikely to have other chances to reiterate the information and check up to see if a message was delivered). Getting medical test results fits this pattern to a tee. In fact, when I added this item as one of the 15 ideas, I did so knowing that it had a very personal connection to my life. Today’s WSJ described why (6/23/09, pD4, “Make Sure You Get Test Results”). I can’t find the exact article online, but here’s a summary from the USA Today:
No news isn’t necessarily good news for patients waiting for the results of medical tests. The first study of its kind finds doctors failed to inform patients of abnormal cancer screenings and other test results 1 out of 14 times.
The failure rate was higher at some doctors’ offices, as high as 26% at one office. Few medical practices had explicit methods for how to tell patients, leaving each doctor to come up with a system. In some offices, patients were told if they didn’t hear anything, they could assume their test results were normal.
… “If bad things happen to patients that could have been prevented, that will lead to higher costs and in some cases considerably higher costs,” Casalino said.
I can vouch for “considerably higher costs.” At the risk of being overly personal or melodramatic, the issue mentioned in the study was the primary likely contributor of the death of an immediate family member of mine last year. When the “fire and forget” mechanism I describe involves a communication from a lab to a physician, that message can be important indeed. In the case I mention, a message indicating a negative result and recommending more tests was sent, but the recipient claimed to have not gotten the message. By the time the proper tests were run a few years later, the condition had progressed from highly curable (85% chance of survival past 5 years) to terminal (15% chance).
The “confirmed delivery” features of e-mail programs may be of some assistance, although in my experience recipients often do not acknowledge receipt and I’m not sure how consistent implementation is between e-mail systems. Besides, what I’m recommending is the opposite – a “delivery wasn’t confirmed” response. In cases like those described in the cancer screening study, “fire and forget” messaging can have very serious consequences.
Four Key Points About Enterprise Attention Management
June 22, 2009 at 4:09 pm | In Attention Management, Information Work, interruption science | 1 CommentI’m just putting the finishing touches on a new document on Enterprise Attention Management. This one will be a short primer on our view of the subject. It’s been over two years since my main document on EAM was published and my thinking has evolved as I’ve hit questions from people at presentations and in private conversations. It’s also been shaped by the press coverage of information overload and e-mail overload – often by encouraging me to put warning signs in front of some slippery slopes that they wander into: Counting all distractions as interruptions? Lumping interruptions into information overload? Using 100% focus and efficiency as the benchmark to compare “cost of overload” to? Assuming only tips and tricks for individuals can chip away at it? Yeesh!
After a brief description of what enterprise attention management is and its business context, I describe 4 points that are key for my position on EAM:
1. Not Everyone Feels Overloaded
As strongly as you and a few like-minded people may feel about the impacts of information overload, a lot more people just don’t notice or care. But improving efficiency and reaction time: that’s something everyone can get behind. Get away from having to shake everyone awake about the “problem” and its a lot easier for others to get on board with your efficiency argument.
2. Key People in an Organization Can Take Action to Improve Efficiency of Information Workers
You can try to organize your little information garden and give tips to your teammates to do the same and one small portion of your company will breathe a little easier. But there are a few people who select the gardening tools and set expectations for everyone’s gardens – they have a different set of things they can do to help everyone in the organization.
3. Use EAM as a Lens to Understand Impacts of New Information-based Technologies
Enterprise attention management can be used as a lens to analyze how various technologies and programs will impact the attention of information workers. One recent example of applying this architecture is the “EAM for e-mail” posting I did here.
4. Influence Process and Culture Selectively
An evangelical approach to “information overload” starts with declaring it “bad” and then figuring out how to force people not to overload each other. A more practical approach does not see lots of information as good or bad, but rather focuses on efficiency and looks for key moments when processes and culture can be influenced. These include teachable moments, such as new hire training or rolling out a new technology. They do not include an e-mail blast or interoffice memo out of nowhere telling everyone how they should now behave.
Two Spots to Address E-mail Overload Suggestions
June 13, 2009 at 6:41 pm | In Attention Management, IBM, Information Work, email | Leave a CommentIn my last posting I listed 15 ideas for improving the attentional characteristics of e-mail (in other words, addressing “email overload” or “inbox overload”). There are now a couple of efforts underway to describe how these ideas are currently or can be applied to popular e-mail clients.
First, Ed Brill of IBM picked up the gauntlet and summoned Lotus users to describe “which of these attention management issues you’ve addressed in your e-mail environment.” I’ve been both a Notes and Outlook user and suspect Notes will fare a bit better when measured against an enterprise attention management yardstick. I’m interested to see what Ed’s readers can tell about their environments.
And Jack Vinson of the Knowledge Jolt blog has created a wiki to track which e-mail products can meet these requirements and which cannot. I encourage any and all e-mail experts to peruse the table and update it with information on how to accomplish these attention shielding tasks in each e-mail client.
BTW – I think it’s important to note how difficult it would be to accomplish these modifications: default, one-click (contextual option the user can easily find and select), multiple clicks (buried in option lists; requires some assembly), third party solution, or programmatic.
E-mail Overload: No Cure, but Enterprise Attention Management Can Shed Some Light
June 10, 2009 at 1:17 pm | In Attention Management, Information Work, email | 4 CommentsThe most popular “overload” topic in offices today is e-mail. But after all these years of incremental improvement to IBM Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange, surely there can’t be any low-hanging fruit left to pick to help people manage inbox overload. Or is there?
The Enterprise Attention Management Conceptual Architecture to the rescue! Rather than relying on a set of personal pet peeves or specific annoyances that have happened in recent memory, a model such as the EAM conceptual architecture provides a systematic approach for analyzing the attentional characteristics of a system.
The EAM architecture is intended for use by organizations to examine individual technologies or whole systems (such as the information worker desktop) that are suspected of causing explicit (information stress) or implicit (poor decision making, slow reaction to new information) information handling problems. With systems it can be used for gap analysis. Here I use it as an intuition pump to reveal a set of potential enhancements to e-mail software that would improve its attentional characteristics.
Click on the thumbnail below and scroll around to see the ideas that came out of my informal analysis of e-mail. Also, here is a quick summary of the recommended improvements (going clockwise from the upper-left of the diagram):
- Scheduled delivery
- Maintain whitelists to bypass blocks and delays
- “Move to discussion” greys out “reply”
- Automated routing and prioritizing? Not yet
- Un-bury turning off or freezing of “toasts” (alerts)
- Enable e-mail hyperlinking
- Enable role-based profiles
- Enable sender tagged e-mails
- Stop attachment abuse
- Presence-enable recipient lists
- Enable group-based rules
- Turn e-mail into generic small-content tool
- Manage multiple inboxes
- Provide inbox analytics
- Token systems
- Remind sender if no reply
Caveat: I’m not an e-mail expert. It’s possible that some e-mail systems can already do these things outright, with some configuration, or with simple coding. If so, great, although they should be no more than one click away. In the meantime, my inbox is filling up as I wait for these capabilities in the next version of e-mail programs.
Content Globalization Report Now Available in Capsule Form
June 4, 2009 at 7:46 am | In Content Management, Fun, Globalization, Recession, wordle | Leave a CommentI wrote a blog posting over at the Collaboration and Content Strategies blog that answered the Global Watchtower’s pronouncement of “companies claiming that ‘it just isn’t worth it’ to have websites in other languages.” My response is that I suspect this is due to tighter economic conditions that require harder business cases coming up against web localization efforts that have easily quantified costs but benefits that are difficult to measure.
If you want more detail, you can read that blog post here. What I want to do here is provide this Wordle chart of my report “ECM for Translation and Localization: Raising IT’s Globalization Fluency“. This report is only available to clients, but I can boil down all 45 pages of it into one handy chart on “content globalization”. It’s like getting your knowledge in capsule form! Click for a larger view.
Silence Would Be An Interruption Here
June 3, 2009 at 3:34 pm | In Attention Management, Audio, Information Work, interruption science | Leave a CommentI’m writing this blog post from a nice Japanese tea house near my home office. While it’s nice, the real reason I’m working here has to do with the truck-mounted jackhammer tearing up the alley right outside my window. The noise was shaking things on my office bookshelves. Even putting on headphones didn’t help as my feet kept picking up pounding vibrations.
There is a lot written about the impact of interruptions in the workplace and their cost on productivity. I have written that much of what is lumped into “interruptions” is really a set of different problems and solutions better known as distractions and social interactions. Still, today’s experience has emphasized that attention can be difficult to focus (and productivity lost) for other reasons as well. The jackhammer and bulldozer don’t really count as interruptions. Indeed, the noise was quite constant for hours. It’s hard to lose focus when you never have it in the first place! I simply had a noisy environment that made it difficult to concentrate. No amount of focus on keeping out interruptions would have helped. The only solution was my Ceylon tea and scone haven.
I remember a situation when I was a management consultant where I worked for a few months on one floor of an office building where it was so quiet people had to whisper on the phone. I then had occasion to visit a consultant working in a department on another floor and was shocked at the cacophony he worked in. Same basic roles, same cube layout, but it was all noisy from loud conversations, hustling and bustling, and difficult to concentrate. It seemed to be just a cultural difference in terms of expectations and etiquette between the departments. A new employee sinking into their cube for the first time would naturally assume a conversational volume in line with those around him. Maybe some people would prefer one or the other? I was happy to retreat back to my quiet cube to work. And put on my headphones.
Google Wave: Magical or Magician’s Trick?
May 29, 2009 at 8:59 am | In Google, collaboration, communication, email | 1 CommentGoogle announced Wave at its conference on Thursday, resulting in some bubbly coverage by the IT press. Check out the video from Google’s conference where they announced Wave (although allow 1 hr 20 min).
I watched the announcement and sometimes during effusive vendor presentations I feel like the guy at magic shows trying to get past what the magician wants you to focus on to reveal how the tricks are done. That’s how I felt watching the video of the presentation where Google Wave was introduced.
For example, the story accompanying Google Wave includes some magician’s hand-waving about eliminating e-mail and reinventing communication (”e-mail was invented 40 years ago before the internet … instead of point-to-point like e-mail, there’s a server-hosted conversation that participants connect to …”) as he slips a collaborative workspace into your pocket. Boil this down and it’s a workspace instead of channel. Workspaces have been around 40 years too and also pre-date the internet as bulletin boards, usenet, etc.
The spell checker (an applause line brought up at least 3 times in the presentation) is contextual which is neat, but I don’t think the technology was created by Wave. While they didn’t mention its origins, I suspect it comes from the work done in Google Translate that implements statistical translation (one of two machine translation methods with the other being rule-based). By analyzing a truly enormous amount of text that is deemed to be accurately translated (one blog reported that Google used 200 billion words from United Nations documents as input), a learning system can develop inferences about how words are to be used and, given a new piece of text to translate, the highest probability of proper translation based upon past experience.
The presenter demos real-time editing with color highlighting and cursors for different editors. When the presenter asked if we could picture students taking notes in a class together, I thought “Yes, I can picture it very easily because I’ve seen SubEthaEdit.” Real-time collaboration editors have been around for a while. What’s cool is not that you can do that at all (”Imagine …”), but that it’s working in a browser and has an open API.
Beyond the re-purposing and re-skinning there are some advances:
- You can respond to parts of messages, which should be handy for those people that include several points in a message that you want to break apart. This also works in larger pieces of content so it acts as a larger content review process (comments are inline instead of in bullets to the side like Word)
- Google made the decision to have text entry be synchronous (you can check an async box to turn that off) so people can see what’s being typed as its typed.
- There’s a playback mechanism. Wikis inherently have logging, so it seems an obvious but fun next step to play through the changes.
The audience seemed happy. There were applause lines for dragging and dropping photos into a discussion, wiki-like changing of other people’s text and markup, drag and dropping a link to a collaboration space.
To me the upside is not the new invention (or re-invention) of capabilities. Think about Google Maps. The cool thing about Google Maps wasn’t that a programmer could overlay data on maps and scroll/zoom around it. That had existed for quite some time. What was cool is that the API made it so easy and embeddable that great applications (”Mapsups” as one client of mine called them) started showing up everywhere.
Well, Wave was created by the Google Maps team. If they can do the same thing with collaboration spaces and synchronous collab that they did with the Maps API we could see much better use of web-based collaboration. Too often collaboration tools have been modal rather than blending contextually into other apps. Hopefully Wave can make some inroads here. And that was, indeed, the point of the presentation which was to get developers excited about using the APIs to get the snowball rolling. It would have been useful to get past the presdigitation and instead of pretending this is all new or the “e-mail killer” to point more to the APIs as the real value.
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