The subject line grabbed my attention-"Information Overload: The Impact on the Organization." The thought of spending time listening to the webcast was itself pressure. But I was feeling particularly overloaded that day, so I registered for the free event from the nonprofit group calling itself the Information Overload Research Group (IORG; iorgforum.org). A key company in the organization is Basex, Inc. (www.basex.com), which describes itself as a "knowledge economy research firm" that serves IT vendors and buyers with an expertise in knowledge worker management and productivity. Here's the compelling statistic: Basex estimates, based on data it has gathered, that information overload costs the U.S. economy a minimum of $900 billion a year in lost productivity and reduced innovation. That's a big number.

Jonathan B. Spira, CEO and chief analyst at Basex as well as director and VP of research for IORG, first set the stage in the webcast with an overview of the problem-I needed no convincing. He describes information overload as "too much of a good thing." Our current work environments comprise a plurality of knowledge workers. And, as knowledge workers, we search for information, create information, re-create, communicate and collaborate, and network. We deal with abstract work and an exponential increase in content exacerbated by ubiquitous connectivity. (See this chart about the increase in information generation.) Too much information mak