They recommended a more disciplined approach to managing information, communication, priorities, projects and decision making in organizations. The solution is as multidimensional as the problem.

Maybe CIO’s should become chief intellectual capacity officers since the limiting factor is the human capacity to process information. We owe it to the people in our organizations to manage this problem before they short circuit.

Someone once said that if you read all of your RSS feeds then you are subscribed to too few

RSS feeds require their own management e.g., links move, no longer are supported, no longer are useful, or contain non-parsable data. Reporting source problems can be challenging.

Some sites do not provide RSS feeds, but they should.

Some RSS sites allow you to slice and dice and simply focus on specific topics or tags (including THIS site).

email is a “push” medium, and you constantly feel like you’re being poked in your ribs to go check your mail. shifting to “pull” collaboration tools (document management, task management, forums) not only relieves the email glut, but also smoothen information management in the organization, and the effectiveness of teams working together.

you can see the white paper at – http://www.hyperoffice.com/business-email-overload/

we also have a guest speaker, tech expert James Gaskin from networkworld.com and itworld.com presenting a webinar on the subject on the 28th of May at 2PM EST

Somebody should do a study and see whether those students who google stuff during lectures do any better or worse than a student who googles afterwards. Or whether people gain anything from tweeting during a conference talk. If it’s a boring lecture and you don’t care about it then sure, you’re accomplishing more if you do something else instead, but you’re not getting as much from the lecture.

“Yep, son, we have met the enemy and he is us.”

ppt

“Why, oh why, hasn’t Microsoft improved Outlook”

I have been avid user of the “rules and alerts” function since I first started using Outlook about 10 years ago. I too have been waiting for Microsoft to improve this area of Outlook. If rules could still be prioritized so that only one copy of an email would be directed to a folder instead of multiple copies to multiple folders it would greatly improve workflow. To take it one step further, if these rules could be established on an enterprise level then best practices could be more easily implemented.

Of course, I am still trying to teach people to use text only email formats (background can triple the size of your emails). Then again I’m also still trying to teach people to not put spaces in their file names. That way they can send a “clickable” link allowing the recipient to view a current copy of the information rather than sending out multiple copies of a static document.

Depending on your perspective, it may be encouraging or discouraging to know that I do tech support and web development for a K12 district!

I call it a “band aid on a broken leg” recommendation. The deeper issue is too many organizational priorities, too many poorly run meetings, unclear desision making processes, lack of adequate project management tools, software that shifts clerical work to managers…I won’t go on. I look forward to sharing the results of my research.