Databases Toolkit

Information overload: How vital data can get overlooked

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Information Overload

Tim Chapman Tech Republic

Published: 02 Aug 2006 16:50 BST

With the constant advances in information technology, it's now easier than ever to deliver information to your organisation's business leaders. While the delivery of this information is crucial to decision making, providing too much data to users that is not well-formed and defined has adverse effects.

Too much data
Actually, there's no such thing as too much data. The more information your company is able to gather, the better position it's in to make better decisions that lead to success. The challenge is to structure that data, and provide it to business leaders in a meaningful way.

Information overload becomes more apparent in those organisations where new, more technologically advanced systems are built. When an organisation outlays a large amount of money into any endeavor, it expects to see results. A new information system is no different. The organisation's leaders will want to see and use the features of the new system, so they can make more informed decisions. These requests will often lead to report requests to your IT department. When report requests are received, and not just in a new system, IT must be very diligent to ensure that the data the requestor receives is the data that the requestor wants, and that can lead to accurate decision making.

Problems begin to arise when requests for data reports are satisfied in an uncontrolled manner. For example, let's say your organisation's marketing department requests a report for the number of widget sales for the fiscal month of March, which begins on 8 March and ends on 5 April, of the current year for a presentation to the executive staff. Two weeks before the request by the marketing department, the manager of the customer service department requested a report for the number of widgets sold for the calendar month of March (1 March to 31 March) for the current year. After the customer service manager receives the report, she plans staffing for the next month. After staffing plans are made, she then presents the budget and staffing plans to the executive staff. However, the numbers of the customer service manager and the numbers of the marketing department are drastically different. Suddenly, concerns arise for the validity of the numbers. All of this confusion could have been avoided had special care been taken when the reports were created.

Develop a company-wide strategy
Although there's no definitive solution to the "problem" of too much information, the starting point is to develop a company-wide strategy for dealing with report requests. The goal is create a formalised method for report request submittal. Your request form should include information such as:

Who is making the request
A description of the request
What data fields are needed
If it is a scheduled report, how often it is to be run
The reason the requestor needs that report.

When possible, your policy should prohibit the creation of ad-hoc reports, which is any reporting request that is a solitary request with no plans of rerun. These "one-off" reports, although sometimes necessary, introduce a great possibility for mismatched reports, and confusion. When reports are completed and published, make sure they are published for the entire organisation to view, and that the report names are unambiguous.

Having the ability to effectively handle your company's report requests will significantly reduce the amount of information overload your users experience. Requiring users to thoroughly consider their report requests and ensuring that the entire organisation has access to published reports will reduce the amount of time researching contrasting reports, and ultimately lead to a more successful reporting experience and less developer headaches.