Information-overload

It is a situation where a manager is given too much information and as a result his is confused and cannot make optimal decisions.

In other words, information overload is a phenomenon of having so much information that the very volume creates the additional work of having to decide what is important, rather than helping executives to solve problems and make decisions. Information overload is a fact of life for company directors, senior managers, and all professionals. Information is coming in from all asides in the form of reports, memos, newspapers, journals and letters, and not the advent of email and internet has accelerated the issues.

The increasing globalization and diversification of business forces the managers to handle large volume of information and this is one of the main reasons information overload.

There are many techniques available for managing information overload. The main important techniques are:-

Data summarizing:

Summarization is a commonly used method of data reduction and it refers to the reduction of data to a meaningful and concise form. For example, each employees gross pay and taxes are accumulated from the beginning of the year may now be summarized and printed.

Summarization reduces the amount of data transmission with out changing the essential meanings of the original message. Accounting classification is a formal method of data summarization. The managing director of a company is not interested to go through each and every sale made by a company for decision making. He requires sales data in a summary form. Therefore he insists to design in such a way as to provide summary of data to the decision makers such as summary of sales data by product wise or geographical wise.

Message modification or filtering:

An important method used to exercise control over information transmission is message modification of filtering. It refers to the removal of unwanted and irrelevant data so as to make the information more useful to the recipient. Under this method the meaning of the message is altered before it is transmitted. When information is passed from lower level to higher level in the organization structure, the message may be filtered out by the intermediate organizational elements in the communication channel.

Information system may generate more data than actually required by the decision makers. In order to prevent information overload, the data can be reduced to a manageable size through the process of filtering. Certain amount of data may be blocked or prevented form supplying to the manager. This may also be done to conceal inefficiency in the performance by the lower level managers.

Inferences:

Inferences are drawn form a large volume of data and these inferences are transmitted or communicated in the organization instead of original data. This process reduces the volume of data considerably. The recipient of the message does not get any idea about the original message. He has to depend on the inference received by him for decision making. Therefore the decision maker should be very careful in making decision based on the inference. He has to ensure himself about the validity of the source of the message. If the source of the message is not dependable it is better to go deep in the source in order to extract the full text. Inferences may be based on quantitative data such as statistical inference or may be more subjective. The quality of inference depends on the ability and skill of the person who makes the inference.

Message routing:

Another method of increasing the efficiency of the system is message routing. The message should be distributed to only those persons or departments which really require information to make decision or initiate an action.

For example, copies of purchase order should on be sent to production, distribution and billing sections because these departments have to take direct action based on this order. The copy of purchase oreder need not be sent to marketing department since they do not require information containing in the order.