Implications of information overload

The first person to talk about information overload was Alvin Toffler in his book “Future Shock” (1970). In this book he explored the impact of information overload on the lives of individuals from both the physical and psychological dimensions, as well as socially and professionally.

Information overload occurs when the amount of data input to a system exceeds its processing capacity. Decision-makers have a limited cognitive capacity to process information, so when overload occurs it is more than likely that the decisions taken will be of low quality.

The impact of information overload in companies is very important, the emphasis is placed on improving the work-life balance and the development of the individual, but the processing of information is not well managed and has an impact on the health of workers as well as on the often hasty and suboptimal decision making.

In several surveys, similar percentages have been reported and the following has been found:

• 25% of workers have experienced significant stress and a worsening of their health due to the volume of information they have to process.
• 36% of managers state that they suffer worsening health due to the excessive information they have to handle in order to do their job.
• 68% of these managers say that information overload has an impact on their personal and work relationships.

The situation is worsening year after year with an exponential growth in the amount of information published on the internet. This makes it increasingly difficult to filter and analyze business-relevant information.

How does Radarion help mitigate the impact of information overload?

• By screening the strictly essential information available on the internet about our clients’ brands and their competitors.
• By filtering by various criteria to help discriminate what is needed.
• With the functionality of research projects that allows sharing the key elements with the rest of the work team assigned to market or corporate strategy tasks.

– With the use of artificial intelligence, which allows a prior analysis of the publications and then access the ones we are interested in by means of filters.