“There are all kinds of information disasters. Some are caused by wrong information. Some are caused by outdated information. For instance, many years ago a manufacturing company designed and built a new product based on a part that was no longer manufactured. They had looked in an old parts catalog.
Missing or incomplete information plagues many projects. One of the most visible examples happened in summer 2001 when a volunteer on a Johns Hopkins research project died when she was given hexamethonium to inhale. Researchers had done a search on PubMed and the Web to find out if there were adverse effects associated with its use. What the researchers didn’t know was that PubMed only goes back to 1966. The research on hexamethonium was done in the 1950s. They also missed standard professional sources of information like Toxline. Incomplete information is responsible for the year that a major aircraft manufacturer wasted developing a new product that its competitor had already produced 10 years earlier.
Finally, there is the increasing problem of too much information. In the case of the Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant disaster, for instance, operators had so many error messages thrown at them that they couldn’t identify the main cause of the problem. With disastrous results. One wonders whether the recent Northeast blackout can also be attributed to that cause.
Disasters of lesser or similar proportions happen every day to enterprises that are dependent on good information delivered in a timely manner to the people who need it. There are several reasons for this dilemma. First, information is scattered in multiple repositories and databases all over most organizations. No one knows what exists or where it is, and there is no single unified access point to it. That puts the enterprise at risk, particularly after the passage of recent legislation like the Sarbanes-Oxley Act that requires executives to take responsibility for what happens within their companies.
Second, with the advent of the World Wide Web, every professional worker has become a searcher, but without either search training or a roadmap of what he or she is searching. Without information training and skills, most people don’t know where to look, how to ask for what they are seeking or when it is OK to stop looking. One answer looks very much like another unless the searcher understands what constitutes valid information.
Third, most professionals are inundated with too much information, and they have very few tools to help them handle the flood. Everyone seems to be working longer hours and getting less and less done. We are bombarded by e-mail, copies of presentations, alerts of new interesting articles, meetings and all of the other information trappings that go with being a knowledge worker. … In short, we spend a lot of time spinning our wheels looking for things and not finding them.”