Far Wise in Knowledge Management

Still overloaded with information

Once in a while an article or research gets published about how people feel overloaded with information. Lately it was a Dutch study (article in Dutch) that got a lot of attention, while it actually told not much new. 28 % of employees felt overloaded with information in 2018, an increase of 3% compared to 2014. When we studied information overload (more than 10 years ago!), it was mainly email that caused the feeling - nowadays it's a combination of email, mobile phone and app messages. What made this study interesting is that the researchers dug a bit deeper than the usual "do you suffer from information overload" question. 60,000 Employees between 15 and 75 of age were questioned. The topic information overload was part of a bigger research question about working conditions in the Netherlands.

So from the study we learn that higher educated people suffer more than lower educated employees. There was no difference measured between men and women. Managers complain most about the number of information they get, people in the ICT-industry are the second in the list. For a large percentage of the people who suffer, it was reason to think about finding another job. The last finding indicates that it's a serious issue, but I wonder if it would really help to change jobs. Do people expect that there will be less information overload in another company? Managers will probably still get information from 'above' (their leaders) and from 'below' (the team members they manage).

Questions that come to my mind (I didn't read the details of the study): is it the quantity of information or the quality? Our own study indicated that especially the lack of quality was an issue (people were wondering why they got this message, what was expected from them and had to interpret the information to find out what was in it for them). Although nowadays I can imagine quantity of information has increased, so it will be a combination. Another question: is it a personal lack of skills, habits or it is a bigger, more generic issue? Has quality of information gone down (think fake news), which makes it harder to filter out what is useful (so then even good skills aren't sufficient). Maybe AI can help us in future to filter and select the information we need.

I'm afraid that information overload is an issue that will stay, for a long time at least. We can partly help ourselves by rigurously cutting off the flow (unsubscribe to channels, less apps, etcetera), ignore the feeling of missing out. Changing habits is incredibly hard, but it's a place to start where we are in control.

 

 

 

Intelligent Swarming Framework published

Something I worked on for the last few months, the framework for Intelligent Swarming, has been published by the Consortium for Service Innovation. Before you think I did this on my own, let me add that I was one of three authors. There were bits and pieces of information about Intelligent Swarming in slides, workshop notes, case descriptions present, but it was time to structure it and write it down. I was picking Greg Oxton's brain, who knows more about Intelligent Swarming than anyone else. He's called "Father of KCS", but I think it applies to IS as well. I'm glad the job is done and I'm proud of the result. I know it's a first version and I'm sure more versions and updates will follow as companies gain more experience with this way of working. As Greg put is: this framework is more a "what" and "why" for Intelligent Swarming than a "how", as the way IS is filled in depends so much on the company, like we did at Tricentis.

In short, when swarming in the service organization, we no longer use the tiered model of escalation, but a network of expertise. The model depends on collaboration to solve issues and the "intelligent" refers to getting the issue to the person who can best solve it and finding the right experts who can help. Collaboration means asking for help or offering help and we use technology to support this (think: how do people know you need help, how do you ask for help, how can others offer help?). The framework explains that this model is efficient, but not in all cases. Whether Intelligent Swarming is right for your organization depends, amongst other things, on the complexity of the issues that you're trying to solve. 

 

Resilient Service Organizations – Conference visit

When I saw the program (in Dutch) of Srvision & Trends in Tooling 2019, I had more than one reason to be enthusiastic. Resilience organizations is a topic that interests me, so the theme “Service Resilience” was one reason to attend. The other is that one of the presenters talks about swarming in combination with the Cynefin framework. Since I refer to his work in the upcoming Intelligent Swarming framework, I thought it would be nice to hear (and meet, if possible) Jon Hall talk. Here is my summary of the day. All presentations can be found in a Dropbox folder, as well as pictures drawn during the presentation. Also, read the blog post of the organization (“Bouncing back with ITIL4).