How To Drive Out Information Overload At Work

Information has become a powerful tool to all companies. The ability to properly employ and manipulate the information at hand determines the success of your business. Our digital world is swarming with volatile information of different formats, types and sources. These voluminous sets of data might overwhelm a corporation causing it to lose control over situations faced as well as poor decision making. This dilemma is known as information overload. A sufficient example would be a corporation trying to measure the customer’s feedback on social media but not knowing where to look or how to use the huge amount of data. That being said, businesses take certain measures to prevent information overload. Both information and digital literacy are key in eliminating unnecessary information.

Information Literacy

Regardless of the massive amounts of data a business has, if it does not match up to certain qualities it is useless.  Information Literacy highlights critical thinking as well as ensuring message quality. In other words, information literacy ensures data integrity. When employees are information literate they can critically evaluate and extract valid and consistent needed data from appropriate reliable sources. This narrows down the information at hand directing the company’s focus on what is necessary and needed in achieving its set objectives and goals.  That being said, businesses must make “quality over quantity” a top priority to drive out information overload.

Digital Literacy

Digital literacy lies in the core of preventing information overload. Digital Literate employees are aware of the several digital tools present to cultivate, evaluate, integrate, and analyze the sets of information at hand. Digital literacy is a development process containing 3 levels: Digital Competence, Digital Usage, and Digital Transformation.

Digital Competence is necessary as it acquires the individual with the necessary critical, analytical and visual recognition skills. In addition to that, it initiates and develops the evaluative approach granting each individual the ability to recognize valuable needed sets of information. These skills are vital when faced with huge sets of data as it eliminates the ones that cause confusion.

By definition, digital usage is the application of digital literacy to a specific situation. It is defined as the “Community of practice” where all skills and approaches acquired are applied to the specified tasks or problems at hand. That being said, companies will have a tighter grip on the situations faced hence improving the decision-making process and attaining the goals efficiently and effectively.

The last level is the Digital Transformation and it occurs when the digital usages leave room for innovation and creativity. This level is not considered necessary to complete digital literacy however it is crucial as it allows an individual to manipulate the information at hand creating significant changes or shifts in their professional domain.