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Special Report: Breaking Down Knowledge Silos

Knowledge Silos and Information Overload

Confronting information overload is a growing necessity for knowledge managers. The ever-increasing amount of information gathered and stored internally inhibits the ability of employees to find relevant and timely information. Too frequently the volume of information decreases its value. What is also clear is that information overload is not unique to the enterprise; it’s a fact of life outside our workplaces as well. We are all bombarded, on a daily basis, with more information than we can possibly make sense of. Technological advances have improved our ability to handle the incredible influx of data, but they have also had the paradoxical effect of rendering suspect our understanding
of the information with which we’re deluged...

The Silo Breaker: How to Cut Through Information Overload

PLOT YOUR PATH TO STRATEGIC KM

Information overload is a concept that has been around longer than the phrase itself. As early as the first century AD, Roman philosopher Seneca the Younger said “the abundance of books is a distraction.” Major events all throughout history have added to the growing amount of information out there. From the creation of the printing press to the birth of the internet and beyond, it is continually becoming easier to create and consume knowledge. Today, smartphones put anything we want to know right at our fingertips. The growing masses of data out there are nearly impossible to quantify. Concepts like “big data” were first seen as technology’s greatest opportunity before quickly becoming its greatest challenge. We talked in a recent report about the fact that more than half of enterprise data goes unused. Not only is there so much of it, but this data is largely unstructured and lives in silos. People are forced to search across different systems only to uncover a lot of information they do not need, and not enough of what they do...