KnowledgeForward

When I spoke at the Catalyst conference I mentioned 3 technologies that I consider to be the most important for enterprise attention management. I wanted to take this opportunity to elaborate a little bit.

By “most important” I mean they offer the greatest opportunity to improve the attentional characteristics of enterprises since they have experienced recent advances in their capabilities that many organizations have not taken advantage of yet. Therefore they can contribute significantly to improving an organization’s ability to improve the efficiency and decision making quality of its information workers.

They are:

• XML Syndication: Sam Weber of KnowNow spoke on RSS right after my EAM presentation and made it clear how RSS was developed as a response to the information overload problem that EAM addresses. In my EAM model, RSS is a textbook example of an attentional technology for pulling desired information forward. This technology is here today, so overloaded organizations have no basis on which to throw their hands up and say nothing can be done.
• Presence: I see presence as being an important opportunity for three reasons. First, getting information workers to honestly and accurately use their presence indicators can help sigificantly with interruptions, on which I’ve written before (see an assembly of my interruption science entries here). Second, if one adds a discretionary function on top of presence that can make it message aware (not just am I unavailable to receive a message, but am I unavailable to receive a specific message from a given sender at that time), it could represent a major leap forward in enterprise attention management. That’s a big “if”. It requires someone to build the rules on top of the presence engine (probably not part of the presence engine itself, even in “rich presence” incarnations). And it could run afowl of all the problems associated with rules (e.g.,false positives).
• Search: While search has been around a long time, there has been a lot of forward movement recently on enterprise search, which can now aggregate search across many more content and data sources as well as include social searching capabilities. Improvements in search, particularly when used as saved searches, can help pull information forward that would otherwise be lost in the noise.