Information overload: context and causes David Allen Information Systems Institute, University of Salford, Salford M5 4WT, UK e-mail: [email protected] T. D. Wilson Ho ¨ gskolan i Bora˚s, SE-501 90 Bora˚s, Sweden e-mail: [email protected]

This paper present interim results on a research project on information management issues within the UK telecommunication and financial sectors. The specific focus of the paper is information overload. Our research, although at an early stage when this paper was written, suggests that organizational climate may play a significant role in influencing the degree to which human information behaviour moves from being beneficial to the organization to creating overload. We argue that there is a recursive relationship between climate and culture and illustrate our arguments with data from one of our case study organizations: a large multinational bank. Here a climate of mistrust reinforced a culture of ‘risk avoidance’. We describe the antecedents of these elements of the work organization and their influence on information behaviour.

INTRODUCTION he phrase ‘the convergence of information and communication technologies is transforming our society into an information society ’ flows almost effortlessly off the pen. We have moved, so the argument goes, from an agrarian economy and society through the ‘industrialization’ of society and are currently undergoing the ‘informatization’ of society to an information-based society and economy. Repeated almost as a mantra by national governments, it has been accepted and eagerly taken up by most, and questioned only by the few (1). Indeed, it has been argued that we are entering a new global information economy where information stands not only as the symbol for our age but is the driving force behind the transformation of our society. It was widely accepted (2
/ 4), therefore, that information is a resource and should be managed in the same way as the traditional organizational resources of capital, land and labour. A manifestation of this belief was, for example, the focus on information as a basis for competitive advantage (5) in the mid-1980s (cf. 6, 7).

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However, from the 1970s through to the mid-1990s this issue seems to have been addressed primarily from a technological perspective (8), where the word ‘information’ was seen as synonymous with information technology. The New Review of Information Behaviour Research 2003 DOI: 10.1080/14716310310001631426

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The number of researchers focusing on informational issues seemed to be limited to a small group of researchers with their roots in the field of library and information studies (9
/13). In recent years the emphasis seems to have changed with a re-emphasis of informational issues (14, 15). Yet, despite the almost universal agreement on the importance of the management of information it remains a problematic area for many organizations. This paper presents interim results on a research project on information management issues within the UK telecommunication and financial sectors. The next section of the paper presents the study’s research approach. This is followed by a discussion of the concept of information overload. The main body of the paper provides a brief presentation of the main findings. The paper concludes with a review of the key findings of the project. Research approach The objective of the research was to explore information management behaviour in large, complex, information-intensive organizations. The phenomenon of information overload was of particular interest. While being aware of the extensive literature on information overload, we also recognized that much of it was based on reviews of the literature (16, 17), was highly positivistic (18) or based on survey data (19). The aim of the research was to take a fresh look at the problem from a different prespective. The approach taken was a multiple case study design after Eisenhardt (20). Case research in this context has been shown particularly appropriate for exploratory/explanatory research of this type (21). This approach allowed us to investigate ‘sticky’, practice-based action, where the experiences of actors are important and the context of action is critical. The project is supported by Accenture PLC and entry to companies was aided by this fact: we were able to gain entry at the highest level and then negotiate how the study was to be conducted. Two methods of data collection were employed: individual interviews and group interviews
/ the groups ranging from two or three persons to eight or nine. The interview process was informal and focused upon a number of key issues: the nature of the company and perceptions of corporate culture; whether information overload was seen to exist; what factors caused overload; what recognition there was in the company that overload was a problem to be tackled; . how overload was dealt with, individually and corporately. . . . .

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Within the three companies so far considered (one is reported on here), the process went smoothly, although it may be significant that in one we were not encouraged to proceed further down the organization than the directorate-level group we interviewed. In common with other research (22) we identified the issues of information quality as significant problem for many of the managers interviewed. In particular managers noted that they had not enough of the right kind of information, or badly structured information. This seemed to be linked to political behaviour within the organization. Whilst Davenport (14) has identified different forms of information cultures, with related political behaviour, we identified three forms of information politics: hoarding, distortion and blocking. Hoarding was the denying of access to information. Distortion took the form of consciously changing the meaning of the information (such as the distortion of senior management’s messages by middle managers). Blocking took the form of denying others access to people who owned information or had expertise in an area. This was also linked to the problem of information navigation. Managers often reported difficulty in navigating through the multiplicity of intranets and other information sources. The key issue that we focused on, however, was that of information overload.

INFORMATION OVERLOAD Information overload is not a new phenomenon: the potential for overload has existed ever since information became an important input to any human activity. For example, once the scientific disciplines began to clearly emerge in the 17th to 19th centuries, it gradually became impossible for anyone to keep abreast of all of the work in what had been called ‘natural philosophy’. In some fields, the degree of specialization is so high that, even within the same discipline, people are unable to keep abreast of all subareas and, in fact, may be completely unable to understand some of them. By the 1970s, the phenomenon was being discussed in other fields, such as accounting, information systems and communication research (11), with contributions from, for example, Driver and Streufert (23), Farace et al. (24) and Davis and Olson (25). From 1976 to 1996, the term appears only four times in the indexes of Information Science Abstracts and appears 18 times between 1996 and 1999 (26). More recently, however, the business information providers have taken an interest in the subject, since it is in their interests to ensure that the information load on managers and executives is not so great as to preclude use of their services. The New Review of Information Behaviour Research 2003

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The ‘Dying for information?’ study (27) is one of a series from Reuters, which appears to attribute overload to business factors and the technology: The amount of information has increased for a number of reasons: there is a general increase in business communication, in-company and with customers and suppliers; trends such as globalisation and deregulation increase competition; companies are downsizing and fewer secretaries are employed to protect people from information; more outsourcing means a wider range of other companies with which it is necessary to communicate. There are also more ways to communicate: by fax, voice mail, e-mail, internet and online conferencing, in addition to the more traditional methods, telephone, meetings, post and telex.

This quotation identifies a number of factors related to information overload: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

increased communication; globalization; deregulation; downsizing; technology.

The Reuters report also identified some of the effects of overload, specifically: 1. 2.

3. 4.

time is wasted: 38% of managers surveyed reported wasting substantial amounts of time looking for information; delayed decision making: 43% of respondents thought that decisions were delayed or adversely affected by the existence of too much information; distraction: 47% of respondents reported being distracted from their main tasks; stress: leading to tension with colleagues, loss of job satisfaction, ill-health (reported by 42%), reduced social activity (61%) and tiredness (60%).

Definitions At the personal level, we can define information overload as a perception on the part of the individual (or observers of that person) that the flows of information associated with work tasks is greater than can be managed effectively, and a perception that overload in this sense creates a degree of stress for which his or her coping strategies are ineffective. Similarly, at the organizational level, information overload is a situation in which the extent of perceived individual information overload is sufficiently widespread within the organization as to reduce the overall effectiveness of management operations. 34

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Personal traits and information overload Clearly, however, information overload is not simply a matter of there being more information available, or of the power of the technology to deliver more than we actually need. Human factors also enter the situation in terms of the propensity of people to demand information and to disseminate it to others
/ information pull and push, in the computer jargon. Information pull is related to what researchers have called the need for cognition (28), that is the extent to which people feel a need to structure and understand their life-world and who seek information to do this. Cacioppo and Petty devised a need for cognition scale upon which individuals could be ranked according to their desire for such understanding. Given that management is ‘knowledge work’, we can hypothesize that managers will be high in need for cognition and, consequently, will tend to acquire information. A key point is that, the more uncertain their life-world, the more they will be driven to do this. A pathological state of information pull exists when a person feels impelled to collect information, whether relevant to his or her situation or not. Information push has a particular technological meaning in relation to the Internet and ‘push technology’ exists to facilitate the distribution of information. Experience with this technology leads to the conclusion that ‘‘In general, push works best when it’s used for information that must be accessed and acted on immediately’’ (29) and companies that have employed push technology have withdrawn its use, relying upon information pull, or employees accessing information when they need to. However, anyone can act as an ’information pusher’, simply by disseminating paper or electronic documents. When this is done on a ’need to know’ basis, it may not become problematic, but, again, pathological states of information push may exist for various reasons. Organizational climate and information overload The reasons for the pathological states of information push and pull may be found in the work organization. Our research, although at an early stage when this paper was written, suggests that organizational climate may have a greater responsibility for these pathological states than either the sheer volume of information or the power of the technology. Work by Allen (30) introduced the importance of the impact of organizational climate on information behaviour. Organizational climate is: . . .created by a group of interacting individuals who share a common, abstract frame of reference, i.e. the organisation’s culture, as they come to terms with situational contingencies,

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FIG. 1: Three dimensions of organizational climate. i.e. the demands imposed by organisational conditions. This approach to the origins of climate shifts the focus away from individual perceptions as a source of climate formulation and emphasises the interaction of the organisation’s members. (31, p. 35)

Allen identifies three dimensions to organizational climate, as shown in Figure 1: trust vs. mistrust, security vs. insecurity, belief vs. cynicism. From this perspective there is a recursive relationship between climate and culture. In the case of company A (a large multi-national bank), for example, the climate of mistrust reinforced and legitimized a culture of risk avoidance.

FINDINGS Company A: the ‘risk avoidance culture’ Various descriptions of the organizational culture of the bank were offered to us: it was described as a ‘blame’ culture, a ‘watch-your-back’ culture, fault-finding and fault-avoiding, one in which personal accountability was denied, a fear of imperfection and a ‘tell-it-all’ culture. We have concluded that the best way to define the culture and bring these elements together is to call it a risk avoidance culture. This manifests itself in the ‘risk syndication’ practice of ensuring that all possible parties with a view on a project or programme are ‘on board’ before the idea reaches a decisionmaking committee, and in copying to anyone who might conceivably have any kind of interest in an issue. It was suggested to us that, given the bank’s attitude to risk in relation to its clients, this culture, if not inevitable, is not surprising. 36

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The risk avoidance practices, in our view, are clearly related to the change programmes that have been instituted in the organization. These programmes may not be the cause of risk avoidance, but they certainly appear to reinforce it. We have not explored the operation of these programmes and these comments are based on hearsay, but the impression we are given is of programmes that are not intimately connected to the organizational structure, that may not have the intended effect and that are not organic and driven by understanding, analysis and action recommendation from below, but by fiat from above. The result seems to be that, rather than change being embedded in the organizational culture, it is seen as being ‘bolted on to the organization’ in discontinuous change programmes. The association of downsizing with change is a further reason for individuals to defend positions (e.g., by hoarding information). Interviewees also spoke of ‘bottom-up’ innovation being stifled in a web of red tape and bureaucracy. The impact of management fads In business, and increasingly in the public sector, this urge for efficiency (often at the expense of effectiveness) has been driven by one management consultancy fad after another. We can go back to the time and motion studies of Taylor in the early part of the 20th century, which were associated with the idea of ’scientific management’; following this, we had the human factors school in the 1940s and 1950s, associated with the Hawthorne experiments and researchers such as Maslow and Hertzberg, followed by management by objectives, planning, programming, budgeting systems (PPBS), zero-based budgeting, the learning organization, business process re-engineering and now knowledge management
/ all of them promoted on the utopian ideal that success depended upon applying the ideas throughout the organization. At the same time as the later of these fads were prevailing, we have also had the phenomenon of ’downsizing’, that is cutting the staff of an organization to the irreducible minimum, usually presenting to the downsized staff a picture of imminent collapse, while at the same time presenting a rosy future to shareholders. Although downsizing is thought to have run its course, in fact it appears to continue unabated. Stephen Roach symbolizes the changing sentiment towards downsizing. Downsizing was alleged to improve productivity, increase profitability and, in some respects, to ensure the health of the overall economy by hampering inflationary expectations (through wage inflation). Roach, chief economist at Morgan Stanley, was a strong protagonist for downsizing, arguing that it was the cure for any company’s problems, but in 1997 he reversed that opinion, arguing that, on the contrary, it could be a recipe for industrial disaster. Yet, as market The New Review of Information Behaviour Research 2003

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sentiment runs against the technology, media and telecommunications sector, we find major companies laying off thousands of workers. Jenkins (32) reports Kim S. Cameron, a researcher in organizational behaviour, as saying that ‘‘downsizing [is] the most pervasive yet unsuccessful change effort in the business world’’, and: In the end, a corporation almost always loses company memory and company energy. The first is caused when informal networks are destroyed, information sharing is restricted, and experienced employees depart. The second is caused from declining morale, loss of loyalty and commitment, and the departure of the most talented employees, who know they are marketable.

When these effects are felt, pathological information behaviour occurs as workers seek to defend their jobs: they hoard information, they ‘syndicate risk’ (as one of our interviewees called it) by informing absolutely everyone who might have any conceivable interest in a project well before it comes to the decision stage, and they insist on being kept informed about anything that might conceivably affect their work, and indeed about many things that will not. Work overload People report that many of their colleagues over-work, they work long hours at the bank, take work home in the evening and at weekends, are in mobile phone contact on holiday and so on. This practice may be of such extent as to endanger the health and personal well-being of people. It is probable that those who behave in this fashion have learnt this behaviour in their progress through a career. One model of the process is that relatively junior people in the organization are discovered to be competent and given additional tasks and responsibilities as a result, which requires them to work longer hours. As they progress through the organization, they continue to demonstrate their competency by taking on more work than others do and working late to accomplish all their tasks. They also become role models for more junior colleagues who come to believe that it is necessary to behave in this way in order to succeed. Interviewees spoke of a ‘macho’ or ‘sink or swim’ work culture. This behaviour is itself a source of information overload for others, through the work generated, and that work is also a source of stress for subordinates in that it requires them, also, to over-work. Technology and information overload Overload has become a ‘fashionable’ problem today largely as a result of the way information and communication technologies have made it easier and easier to transfer information from one person to another and to make 38

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available ever-increasing information resources in almost every field. The technologies include e-mail, voice mail, mobile phones, the Internet and organizational intranets. The potential now exists for these technologies to be misused, rather than being used effectively and productively. For example, some e-mail systems, like Microsoft’s Outlook Express, allow you to ‘Reply to all’ at the click of a button: this means that a message saying that X is not able to attend a planned meeting will be sent to everyone on the mailing list of the original message, when only the organizer of the meeting actually needs to know. The ‘Reply’ function may also resend all attachments and the entire message file, including all to and from messages that make it up, i.e., the ‘history’ of the file. For reasons that are well understood by those with whom we have spoken, the technological infrastructure of the company as a whole is inadequate to the needs of modern information dissemination and information handling. It was described as a being comprised of a ‘cottage industry’ of systems, with different technological platforms, and elements of the bank being at radically different stages of technological development. The lack of coordination in information technology planning was represented to us by the example of there being more than 40 independent intranet systems in the organization. Although we understand that these issues are, to a certain extent, being addressed at the technological level, it is clear that technology development must go hand-in-hand with information policy. An information policy is not a technology policy, but a policy for information content, its management, its life cycle and its relationship to the information needs of those working in the organization. As a result technology is blamed for causing information overload, but, of course, technology is not to blame. The problems lie elsewhere; technology merely provides the channels and mechanisms through which information is distributed or accessed. If we define technology simply as the means whereby things are done in an organization, then meetings also figure largely as a ’technology’ that can lead to information overload. The amount of time that senior executives in any organization spend in meetings is enormous: for example, a study of the social work sector found that senior staff spent an average of 17 hours a week in an average of 12 meetings (33). The role of technology in information overload is expressed by Heylighen: Part of the problem is caused by the fact that technological advances have made the retrieval, production and distribution of information so much easier than in earlier periods. This has reduced the natural selection processes which would otherwise have kept all but the most important information from being published. The result is an explosion in often irrelevant,

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unclear and inaccurate data fragments, making it ever more difficult to see the forest through the trees. This overabundance of low quality information, which Shenk (35) has called ‘data smog’, is comparable in its emergence and effects to the pollution of rivers and seas caused by an excess of fertilizers, or to the health problems caused by a diet too rich in calories. The underlying mechanism may be called ‘overshooting’: because progress has inertia, the movement in a given direction tends to continue even after the need has been satisfied. Whereas information used to be scarce, and having more of it was considered a good thing, it seems that we now have reached the point of saturation, and need to limit our use of it. (34)

More complex information environment and information needs Some respondents described their work environment as one in which they were faced with frequent shifts in role (often into completely new and completely different areas), increased task complexity and a continuous need for information in order to learn. At the same time they described their information environment as becoming less structured, containing more channels or feeds and containing much more potentially relevant information. Many expressed concerns about their ability to effectively navigate through their information environment. Conflict between risk and stability Aberrant behaviour may be seen as a conflict between senior executives who seek to promote an ethos of risk taking and change, and the ordinary workers and middle managers who look for stability and security. This situation is represented in Figure 2.

FIG. 2: The risk/security, change/stability problem.

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CONCLUSIONS Information overload is not simply a matter of there now being more information available than people can readily acquire, process and learn from, although it is probably true to say that more jobs now involve day-today access to many more kinds of information than was the case, say, 50 years ago. However, people in some areas have had to cope with the problem for more than 100 years, and have adopted coping strategies (such as greater degrees of specialization) that enable them to do so. Nor is information overload simply a matter of information and communication technologies making the acquisition and dissemination of information much easier than used to be the case. It is true, however, that the misuse of technology (the most obvious example of which for most of us is advertising e-mail ’spam’) does contribute to the problem, particularly if people are not given any training in its proper use or in strategies to cope with misuse. In our view, the root cause of information overload is the stress created by modern management practices which put people’s jobs under threat, or which increase the general workload or otherwise create defensive behaviour. This leads to information behaviour that creates overload on the individual him/herself and/or on others. The management ethos creates a culture of blame, which works against the desire for change and risk taking and, in the process, the organization loses part of its information base as a result of stress-related diseases, redundancies and the bestqualified people moving to positions in other organizations where the stress levels are lower. What can be done in this situation? To get to the root of the problem involves more organizational actors than the information professional. Senior and middle managers need to be involved and the problem needs to be on senior management’s agenda. Some guidelines can be offered to organizations, however, simply by reference to the previous analysis. . First, determine whether or not there is a problem of information overload in your organization and whether the analysis presented above applies. . Secondly, recognize stress-related behaviour, ensure that senior management is aware of the problems it causes and seek to ensure that those affected are properly counselled. . Thirdly, advocate the development of an information strategy for the organization, or, if one already exists, ensure that it is not simply The New Review of Information Behaviour Research 2003

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an information technology strategy, and that the issue of overload is considered. . Fourth, promote effective training in the use of e-mail, voice-mail, the management of meetings and the distribution of documents. . Fifth, monitor e-mail traffic to locate the ’nodes’ that generate most traffic, that fail to use approved methods or that generate unnecessary attachments to messages. . Finally, engage in good information behaviour yourself. In particular, if you are an information provider, disseminate information selectively according to established need, not through distribution lists that generate load for others. Promote information access rather than using ’push’ technology. From the perspective of research on information behaviour this work demonstrates that there is much more to the total behavioural set of activities than seeking and searching. Those we interviewed certainly had the need to seek information and certainly had problems from time to time in searching information systems and discovering the information they needed. More often, however, they were the passive recipients of communications that might or might not inform them and, in some cases at least, they themselves engaged in the kind of aberrant behaviour we have described above, thereby creating information overload for their colleagues. If we see our research in general as contributing to the design of more effective information systems, it is clear that aberrant behaviour of the kinds described must be taken into account and our work suggests that organizational management and those who build and manage information systems need to lay down standards of behaviour and seek to implement support for those standards in software, so that the misuse of information and communication technologies is prevented.

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