Meat + Poultry - October 2009 - 98

TOO MUCH INFORMATION
(Continued from page 96)

Jeremy Russell, director of communication at the National Meat
Association and an admitted "early
adapter" of new information tools,
sums up the feelings of many executives in the industry: "I'm inundated."
He chuckles wearily. "I've become one
of those 14-year-olds you read about.
I'm constantly online."
He says the good part is that he
feels like he doesn't miss anything,
that he's as connected as possible.
In his position with a major industry
trade association, knowing important
information just a little ahead of everyone else can mean the difference between solving a problem for a member
or dealing with another public crisis.
Besides industry news, Russell also
tracks, on a daily basis, technology,
software and networking information
and news - "things like cloud-computing." "But the bad thing is I don't
have the time to really do any analysis
on the information," he adds. "By the
time I've done that, six more stories
or articles or headlines have arrived
that I need to follow." Firewalls and
spam fi lters help, at least a little. But
Russell points out these obstacles will
also sometimes keep out information
that's wanted.

Pardon our interruption
The problem is hardly limited to meat
or food-industry executives. "The
flood of information that swamps me
daily seems to produce more pain than
gain. And it's not just the incoming
tidal wave of e-mail messages and RSS
feeds that causes me grief. It's also the
vast ocean of information I feel compelled to go out and explore in order
to keep up in my job," wrote Paul
Hemp recently in the Harvard Business
Review. "Current research suggests
that the surging volume of available
information - and its interruption of
people's work - can adversely affect
not only personal well-being but also
decision making, innovation and productivity. In one study, for example,
people took an average of nearly 25
minutes to return to a work task after

an e-mail interruption. That's bad
news for both individuals and their
organizations."
Hemp writes that the problem of
information overload is actually centuries old: The development of the
printing press by Gutenberg in the
15th century suddenly enabled the

"In one study people
took an average of
nearly 25 minutes
to return to a work
task after an e-mail
interruption. That's
bad news for both
individuals and
their organizations."
publication of far more information
than a single person could consume
in a lifetime - a revolution, indeed,
in information quantity compared to
what was made available annually by
the manuscript-copying monasteries.
"Later technologies - from carbon paper to the photocopier - made replicating existing information even easier.
And once information was digitized,

documents could be copied in limitless numbers at virtually no cost," he
observes in the Review article.
Information overload leads to some
strange behavior. Hemp quotes a 2008
survey conducted by America Online
(AOL) of 4,000 e-mail users in the
U.S. in which 46 percent admitted
they were "hooked" on e-mail. Almost 60 percent of those surveyed said
they checked e-mail in the bathroom,
15 percent checked it in church and
11 percent had hidden their e-mailchecking from a spouse or other family member.
"Most organizations unknowingly
pay a high price as individuals struggle to manage the information glut.
For one thing, productive time is lost
as employees deal with information
of limited value," Hemp writes. "In
the case of e-mail, effective spam fi lters have reduced this problem. Still,
a survey of 2,300 Intel employees revealed that people judge nearly onethird of the messages they receive to
be unnecessary. Given that those same
employees spend about two hours
a day processing e-mail (employees
surveyed received an average of 350
messages a week, executives up to
300 a day), a serious amount of time
is clearly being wasted."

You and YouTube
But the challenge of information overload - or, to put it more precisely, the
challenge of information-sorting - is
particularly acute in the time-sensitive, operations-driven meat and poultry industry. The U.S. Dept. of Agriculture generally does not deliver the
results of pre-op inspections through
the Internet. The raw-material supplier
that can't fill an order doesn't spread
the news with an e-headline. A new
customer bid doesn't come through
Yahoo or Bing. The meat and poultry
industry operates, more than most industries, in a real-time present, not in
the past or in the future. It is a business
requiring minute-by-minute, handson management, decision-making and
operational expertise. Spending even

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