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Beware of information overload
The greatest impact and influence of Information Technology (IT), as the term rightly suggests, has been in the field of information. IT has revolutionised the field of information, in terms of content and form as well as meaning and direction. Access to any kind of information is now only a click away. The World Wide Web, emails, telecommunications and satellite television are some of its most potent manifestations.
About 20 years ago, for an ordinary person access to information was not an easy task. Physical barriers to information were made worse by a pervasive culture of secrecy at the bureaucratic level. The usual sources of information were newspapers or television.
You either watched primetime TV news or waited for the morning newspaper to get the latest news. For businessmen specialised magazines and newspapers filled the void to a great extent. For the ordinary people who did not have access to such a wide variety of TV channels as today, finding information was difficult, time-consuming and expensive.
Thanks to IT, all this is now history. Information is now available quickly, easily and cheaply. All kinds of media from all over the world are at your fingertips. The CNN, BBC and all other news, views and entertainment channels are available at your desktop, television screen and even on your mobile phone. You no longer have to wait for morning newspapers to get the latest information.
You can log-on to any of the news sites on the internet, through your computer or through your cellphone. The era of state controlled media is over, since it is no longer possible for governments to control or censor information.
Freer and easier flow of information has enriched the human civilisation and added to our quality of life. This has empowered the common man and given him greater control over his life and environment. But as the best of medicine are not without their side-effects, so is the case with Information Technology.
IT has given rise to the phenomenon of information overload. This is a state of being bombarded with an uninterrupted flow of information, both processed and unprocessed. Since all filters have been removed, free flow of information can cut both ways. Information can be good or bad, right or wrong, fresh or dated, needed or needless.
The challenge today is not getting your hands on information but managing it — especially its overload. The challenge is how to make sure you get the information that is important and relevant.
Self-discipline and time management are effective ways to overcome the problem of information overload. Don’t let information overwhelm you
Most of the information available on the web is unorganised, unprocessed and unregulated. A large part of it is junk. It is for the information seeker to use his or her judgement to separate the real stuff from the rest to get the required information.
For IT professionals and business executives, a typical workday starts with scanning through a huge amount of information in the form of email, voicemail, regular mail, feedback from staff members and information culled from newspapers and the web. How a professional copes with this overdose of information depends upon his capacity to focus only on the essential, leaving out the rest.
These days managers have access to a great deal of information. The usual assumption is that the more information you have, the more effective is the process of decision-making. But the phenomenon of information overload is proving this assumption wrong.
Uncontrolled information may result in deflecting the focus from important issues. One can make a right decision based on correct information, or a wrong decision based on incorrect information. Or you can make an ineffective decision based on a lot of information lacking focus.
Information explosion is a serious problem, which is getting worse by the day. In this age of stiffening global competition companies already have a hard time managing people, money, material and machine. Now, information is another major source they have to manage.
The right kind of information judiciously used can be a source of innovation and strength and serves to give a competitive advantage to a firm. On the other hand, wrong information inappropriately used can result in disaster.
One of the biggest challenges facing the Chief Information Officers (CIOs) these days is how to manage this overload. They have to wade through a sea of information — facts, figures, statistics, etc — to provide the optimum level of information to their managers for effective decision-making. Less or more than the requisite amount of information can result in a loss of focus leading to ineffective decisions.
This is not a one-solution-fits-all kind of situation. The solution varies from company to company, culture to culture and, most importantly, from person to person. There are no readymade remedies. Every situation demands its own answer.
For information professionals, media persons, business executives and others here are a few tips to cope with the ever-growing information overload:
— Use filters and other available tools to avoid junk and unimportant mail;
— Organise your mail folders and other hard disk content;
— Fix a time of the day for surfing the internet, checking news and other updates;
— Subscribe to email lists and newsgroups with great care;
— Stay focused. Keep your targets constantly in view, and;
— Carefully ration your time, so that you are not distracted by unimportant and redundant information.
Self-discipline and time management are effective ways to overcome the pressure of information overload. Don’t let information overwhelm you. Take charge of the information coming to you. Don’t let technology lead you. Lead the technology yourself.
The author is an IT professional who is studying at the London School of Economics, UK. Email: a.naseem@lse.ac.uk
As data banks build up worldwide, and access gets easier through technology, it has become easier to overlook vital facts and figures that could bring about groundbreaking discoveries. The British government’s response has been to set up the National Centre for Text Mining, the world’s first centre devoted to developing tools that can systematically analyse multiple research papers, abstracts and other documents, and then swiftly determine what they contain.
Text mining uses artificial intelligence techniques to look in texts for entities (a quality or characteristic, such as a date or job title) and concepts (the relationship between two genes, for example). In many ways, it’s more precise and sophisticated than a search engine: it not only tracks down information against specified criteria but can also draw out relationships between hitherto unlinked bits of research.
Initially, the centre is focusing on bioscience and biomedical texts to meet the increasing need for automated ways to interrogate, extract and manage textual information now flooding out of large-scale bio-projects.
“Biology is our primary focus as the government has identified that there’s a big problem with all this information that nobody can handle,” says Richard Barker, the centre’s commercial manager.
The problems are compounded by the lack of standardisation. Scientists enjoy some licence in the nomenclature they use to register their discoveries. “In biology, for example, there are huge numbers of genes in the body and they are called different things by scientists, who are quite likely to use synonyms, abbreviations or acronyms,” says Barker. “You can try to standardise but the problem is getting people to use them.”
Text-mining tools in use include Cafetiere, an information extraction tool that annotates text with information about entities and the relationships between them. Termine, a tool for handling terminology, is being re-engineered by the centre so that it can deal with large volumes of data.
The centre, which is funded by science and higher education research councils and run by a consortium of Manchester, Salford and Liverpool universities, will act as a repository for such tools, as well as developing its own. One key task will be plugging the number of different tools for different tasks into one coherent framework.
“This infrastructure will allow many people’s tools to work together in a mix and match way, the mix of which will depend on the intended application,” says Barker.
In Manchester, the European Commission-funded BioMinT project is developing a text-mining tool to analyse documentation on DNA and protein sequence data spawned by the Human Genome Project, using the databases Swiss-Prot (devoted to protein sequences) and Prints (protein families) as sources. The tool, worked on by an interdisciplinary team of biologists and computer scientists, will handle queries of different kinds, retrieve relevant documents, extract the information and produce it either as a database entry or as a report.
“It will enable researchers to identify a range of information, such as the function of a particular gene or whether a protein is linked to a disease such as breast cancer, much more swiftly,” says Terri Atwood, professor of bio-informatics at Manchester University, who is leading the project.
The collaboration across disciplines required in text mining is something academia is likely to see more of, she suggests. “One difficulty is bringing together the different communities of biologists and computer scientists. There’s a huge language barrier between them in terms of the jargon they use.
“But this kind of interdisciplinary science will be a feature of many more scientific endeavours in the future, the more we use computers and want them to take over the things that humans do.” Text mining has been carried out since the mid-80s and the US academic Prof Don Swanson was instrumental in the initial development of the concept. — Julie Nightingale/The Guardian
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