Press Releases

Information Overload's Billion Dollar Impact on Productivity Major Factor

NEW YORK, Dec. 19 /PRNewswire/ -- Information Overload has been named the 2008 "Problem-of-the-Year" by Basex, the leading provider of research on the productivity of knowledge workers and how technology impacts them.

Information overload lowers employee efficiency and overall productivity and has been identified as a key challenge for companies that operate in the knowledge economy. The cost of unnecessary interruptions, which is part of the information overload problem, is estimated to be $650 billion per year in the United States alone according to a recent Basex report factoring in reduced productivity and throttled innovation.

"The 'Problem-of-the-Year' designation tells us how serious an issue information overload has become," said Jonathan B. Spira, chief analyst at Basex. "Nothing has been more disruptive to the way we work than information overload."

Whether sitting at a desk in the office, in a conference room, in one's home office, or at a client, the likelihood of being able to complete a task (what many call "work") without interruption is nil.

"Normally we designate a person or product of the year," said David M. Goldes, president and senior analyst at Basex. "2008 is the year we begin to solve the problem of information overload in a substantive way."

Intel, a company with 94,000 employees, sees this as a serious problem. "At Intel we estimated the impact of information overload on each knowledge worker at up to eight hours a week," says Nathan Zeldes, a Principal Engineer focusing on computing productivity issues at Intel. "We are now looking at applying new work behaviors that can help reduce this impact".

In conjunction with the Problem-of-the-Year announcement, Basex announced a survey on information overload and today's work environment challenges. Ironically, the latest office productivity tools designed to increase productivity are often having the opposite effect.

The survey can be found at http://www.basex.com/2008poty and survey takers are eligible to win a Palm Treo 750 smartphone with Windows Mobile 6.

About Basex

Basex is the world's foremost knowledge economy research and advisory firm. Founded in 1983 and headquartered in New York City, Basex provides senior business executives from organizations across the globe with strategic advice, business and technology guidance, best practices, and insight about knowledge worker management and productivity.