KM in an Era of Information Snacking

In a recent letter to his customers about the eBook reader Kindle, Amazon's Jeff Bezos discussed the current tendency to engage in "information snacking":

We humans co-evolve with our tools. We change our tools, and then our tools change us. Writing, invented thousands of years ago, is a grand whopper of a tool, and I have no doubt that it changed us dramatically. Five hundred years ago, Gutenberg’s invention led to a significant step-change in the cost of books. Physical books ushered in a new way of collaborating and learning. Lately, networked tools such as desktop computers, laptops, cell phones and PDAs have changed us too. They’ve shifted us more toward information snacking, and I would argue toward shorter attention spans. I value my BlackBerry—I’m convinced it makes me more productive—but I don’t want to read a three-hundred-page document on it. Nor do I want to read something hundreds of pages long on my desktop computer or my laptop. As I’ve already mentioned in this letter, people do more of what’s convenient and friction-free. If our tools make information snacking easier, we’ll shift more toward information snacking and away from long-form reading. Kindle is purpose-built for long-form reading. We hope Kindle and its successors may gradually and incrementally move us over years into a world with longer spans of attention, providing a counterbalance to the recent proliferation of info-snacking tools. 

As a reader, I'm supportive of Bezos' attempt to give reading the advantages of the electronic age, but I can't help wondering if he is entirely right about the impact of tools on how we read.  Perhaps it isn't just the tools that nudge us away from long-form reading and towards information snacking.  Could information snacking in fact be a by-product of the pace of modern life?  Or does the abundance of available information at our fingertips force us to find faster, more efficient ways of retrieving and reviewing what we need?

Wikipedia's article on Information Foraging, which appears to draw on the work of Peter Pirolli and Jakob Nielsen, notes that once users have been trained by search engines to go to a variety of sites to gather information, they will be reluctant to invest much time on a single site. Instead they make quick strategic raids to collect specific information and then leave the site.

If information snacking and short attention spans are an unavoidable part of the knowledge terrain of the 21st century, this leads to some interesting questions for law firm knowledge management:

- Are we providing lawyers with tools that encourage information snacking over long-form reading and analysis? (Bloggers and Twitterers may want to take the Fifth on this one.)
- Are there risk management issues arising from the increasing tendency to engage in information snacking?
- If information snacking by lawyers is a bad thing, how do we counteract it?
- If information snacking is inevitable, how do we adjust our KM systems to accommodate it?

As we deploy increasingly more powerful search engines within our firms, we give lawyers the ability to find more information with Google-like ease.  And that information is fragmented, providing a perfect opportunity for information snacking.  Perhaps the most important thing knowledge management systems can do now is to ensure they provide adequate context for and connection among these fragments so that we diminish some of the negative side effects that result from information snacking.  

Finding the Right Stuff

The best search engine in the world cannot convert garbage into useful content.

So, before you spend megabucks on the latest cool search tool, think about what repository you're searching. If your office is anything like most offices, you've got tons of ephemera -- stuff that probably isn't going to matter 30 minutes from now -- and tons of materials that really ought not to see the light of day. However, a decent search engine has the effect of shining a klieg light on the shortcomings of your content.

In fairness, a great search engine can help filter out much of the suboptimal content, but if there isn't anything worth finding, what have you really achieved?

One solution is to stack the deck: make sure you put a goodly amount of useful content into your repository before you turn the search engine on. And what constitutes "useful content"? Not just something that someone might possibly need someday. (That's the sort of rationale the turns a document repository into a cluttered and confusing packrat hell.) "Useful content" is content that is vetted: someone has reviewed it and given it a seal of approval or it's been used with good results enough times for you to know it's a great resource.

With that kind of content, you're going to look like a genius every time the search engine does its thing. How often can you say that about a KM project?

For more information on the benefits of vetted content, see my article "Loading the Deck" in ILTA's 2007 Knowledge Management White Paper.

What are People Searching For?

What are people searching for and where are they looking? That's the question asked and answered in a thought-provoking article in the March 2008 issue of KMWorld. While working with an admittedly small sample, the survey yielded some interesting findings:

- 62% of respondents said that they first search the Internet before searching more specialized resources such as their own company's website or intranet
- while 13% of the time the respondents said they were searching for information about their own companies, they began their search on their company intranet only 2% of the time
- respondents tended to ask their colleagues for help before they tried their company intranet
- business users spend a lot of time searching for information at work (approximately 9.5 hours per week)
- knowledge workers tend to search using general indices like Google and Yahoo rather than specialized web sites or search engines

The picture that emerges is troubling:

- companies aren't doing a good job of making their intranets the first choice for company information
- despite the hours spent searching, many knowledge workers are not searching efficiently
- knowledge workers don't seem to understand the inherent weakness of general web search engines like Google and Yahoo when it comes to finding specialized, high-value content
- searchers tend not to use content aggregators, specialized vertical search sites or topical sites to find data

For knowledge management, these findings pose some real challenges. In many companies, it's the knowledge management group that's responsible for the intranet. The findings of this survey are a real indictment of the job we're doing. So what must we do differently to make our intranets the first choice research resource for our colleagues? It might be worth asking them.

And while we're talking with them, we should investigate why it is they are using sub-optimal search methods. Is it a lack of awareness about how search engines like Google and Yahoo work? Do they simply not understand that high-value content can get buried in the Web, but will tend to be more visible on specialized web sites? According to the author of this article, people in the online industry know that "the `good stuff' gets hidden if it is thrown into the larger web grab bag. And very often, it isn't even in the grab bag because it isn't indexed." Clearly the average knowledge worker doesn't know this or they wouldn't be using the grab bag search engine.

Despite this (or perhaps because of this), the author notes that there are some signs of progress in the growing recognition of the value of finding high-quality information rather than merely relevant information. As a result, there is renewed interest in recommendation engines, contextual search and vertical search sites. These are "tools that will tell [knowledge workers] what they need to pay attention to in the pile" of information they face. In this age of overload, this sounds like a step in the right direction.