KnowledgeForward

I’m leaving for vacation tomorrow, but wanted to post up one more entry before I leave. I got the following question from a reporter doing an e-mail based interview. I thought I’d post the answer here too:

Q: Do you have a sense of the cause of EAM? You mention too much input (such as emails), but is any of EAM also traced to staff cuts, portfolio overloads, outsourcing or even that IT may be in the midst of a build-out or refresh cycle with technologies that are so new that no one on staff is an expert (Ajax, RIA, SOA, Identity/Security)

A: A continual increase in competitiveness (which covers all the causes you mention) is partially to blame. Making content creation easier has enabled everyone, not just content experts, to be prolific. But another part of the problem is that expectations for responsiveness continually creep upwards over time. Each new communication technology, such as when pagers were introduced or cell phones or email, increases how quickly we can respond which puts us ahead of the expectations. For a short time. If you’re the first one on the block with a Blackberry this works out well since you can be as responsive as everyone else with less effort or more responsive with the same effort. But then everyone gets one and the arms race continues. What you want is a technology that makes you - and only you - more responsive, but that isn’t going to happen.

I noticed a couple of comments connecting my Enterprise Attention Management system with attention deficit disorder. Here’s a few:

FCW.com commented that EAM

“sounds like something you’d hear discussed at a middle-school PTO meeting …I wonder what the strategy was using language that many people will surely associate with attention deficit disorder. Does that make it sound more serious than chronic messy desk syndrome? “

The ecm blog had mentioned a similar thing:

First thing I thought of was Enterprise Attention Deficit Disorder (EADD).

Well, I had actually noticed the connection to ADD / ADHD while doing my research and dedicated a paragraph to it in the full version of my report. I’ve attached the relevant paragraph below, but a quick summary would be that I was trying to explicitly distance EAM from ADD. ADD connects to a powerful meme among parents (and all sorts of easy plays on words about Ritalin and comparing executives to children). But at the risk of sounding humorless, I believe it leads down a path that is not constructive for addressing the difficulty information workers have finding important messages and information and pushing unimportant ones back. There’s nothing necessarily dysfunctional with these people – they just need help given the enormous amount of information present in the enterprise environment.

From my paper “Techniques to Address Attention Fatigue and Info-Stress in the Too-Much-Information Age”:

Psychiatric View

In researching attention management in the workplace, one runs across references to “ADD” or “ADHD” (Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder; for example, Accenture’s “Overcoming Management Attention Deficit Disorder [MADD]”) and the search for a pill to solve it (“corporate Ritalin”, see examples at Hopelessly Devoted: A Customer Communications Renaissance Customer Inter@ction Solutions by David R Butcher and Advice Line by Bob Lewis). The principal characteristics of ADHD are inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity. Although this connects frazzled multi-tasking with the well-known popular narrative of ADHD as a dysfunctional disorder for children with short attention spans, it does not provide understanding or solutions for EAM. While it is useful at a base level to apply these characteristics to the business world, it does not have significant prescriptive value for the information worker’s response to information overload. The problems addressed by EAM are mostly intentional, controllable, and driven by the worker’s environment. ADHD is mostly defined in the negative, through inattention. EAM takes a positive view, assuming the information workers are functional human beings, and is focused on bringing important messages closer to the user’s awareness and pushing less important messages further away. Indeed, a worker’s ability to be distractible and multi-task may be highly beneficial, as described in the next section.

In a recent mention in the ecm blog George Dearing introduces Enterprise Attention Management:

Helping companies manage information is big business. Which means every consultancy, especially the big ones, is jockeying to be seen as the thought leader. And I guess with that thought leadership comes the enviable task of inventing new acronyms. Enter Enterprise Attention Management (EAM).

It’s a good posting on EAM and I’m happy to see it there. It did bring up the issue of buzzworthiness for me though. I’m not against coining a new term when needed, but I think clarity is the #1 priority. Besides, if you invent a new word when existing words will do you look kinda obvious! With EAM I was aiming for clarity, as I described in my comment to ecm blog

I’m glad you like the direction of Enterprise Attention Management. The term “attention management” has been floating around for a while now. I just clarify my take on it as “enterprise” because I studied what enterprises can do about it as a whole rather than individuals or advertisers trying to grab people’s attention. I’m not trying to coin it as a term really - just clarify what type of AM I’m talking about.

My report on attention management was just released yesterday. I’ve attached the information and link below, but it requires a client subscription. But if you can’t get to the paper, you can see a (very) brief summary of it in an eWeek article that came out the same day “IT Pros Advised to Address Information Overload”.

Full Report:

Techniques to Address Attention Fatigue and Info-Stress in the Too-Much-Information Age

The flow of messages and content faced by information workers is increasing but their attention spans remain fixed and limited. Each beneficial new communication and collaboration technology brings along the burden of one more channel that information workers, already suffering from information overload, must pay attention to. Accordingly, attention fatigue will be a gating factor for the success of collaboration and communication projects and activities. In this overview, Craig Roth examines how attention overload afflicts businesses and how an Enterprise Attention Management strategy improves information worker effectiveness and responsiveness.