Briefs

From eWeek, May 17, 2006. An executive e-mail penned by Bill Gates, Microsoft's chairman and chief software architect, will be sent out to customers and partners on May 17 to coincide with his keynote address to more than 100 CEOs representing many of the world's leading companies at the software giant's annual CEO Summit the same day.

... But there are times when it feels like all of these changes have overwhelmed the tools we use to do our day-to-day jobs.

The problem, really, is twofold. The first is information overload. Faced with the endless deluge of data that is generated every second of every day, how can we hope to keep up? And in the struggle to keep up, how can we stay focused on the tasks that are most important and deliver the greatest value?

The other problem is something I call information underload. We're flooded with information, but that doesn't mean we have tools that let us use the information effectively.

Companies pay a high price for information overload and underload. Estimates are that information workers spend as much as 30 percent of their time searching for information, at a cost of $18,000 each year per employee in lost productivity. Meanwhile, the University of California, Berkeley predicts that the volume of digital data we store will nearly double in the next two years.

Here is the rest of the story.