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Information Overload And Why Your Car Doesn’t E-Mail You

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September 11th, 2010

Drill-down is OK. Some people and some business processes will require a deeper level of detail. Building a system capable of drilling into more information is OK, but make sure users don’t start there.

  • Adapt an information trade-in policy. Ask users to give up five pieces of information for every new one they request. Get the users thinking about a low-information diet.
  • Straight-to-video isn’t just for bad movies. If people want to have access to data for historical reference or “just in case”, then push the raw data into a database for later retrieval. Do not create reports for problems you haven’t had yet and may never have. It’s a waste of time and money.
  • Analytics is not a business process. One of my co-workers used to say that with business intelligence systems, the third question someone asks is the most powerful. The idea is that while investigating one piece of information, you are lead to another and then another. It’s not uncommon to find significance in something you weren’t even looking for. Although I am advocating a low-information diet, that doesn’t mean you have to restrict the people who truly need information for analytical purposes. Their requirements will be different from those who simply need the information as part of a standard business processes.

    I think too much data is out there. What I really want is information that will help me make decisions and take action. I want the overwhelming glut of data being produced boiled down to a few critical pieces of information that will help me. That’s it. I want it to help me. I think our users want the same thing (even if they don’t know it yet).

    Term Of The Week: “Rublish”–spending a significant amount of time creating and publishing documentation that 95 percent or more of the intended audience will not read. “We spent the last two weeks of the project working on a bunch of rublish for the intranet.”

    What do you think? Leave a comment, or E-mail me at Todd.Michaud@FranchiseIT.org. You can also follow me on Twitter: @todd_michaud.

    You can follow my Ironman training at www.irongeek.me.

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    • Posted in CRM, E-Commerce, In-Store, IT Strategy/Industry
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