Info glut drags down economy

Beverley Head
Tuesday, 29 November 2011 14:09

With 1800 exabytes of information tipped to be created and stored in 2011 it's not surprising most of us feel a little overwhelmed by our online in-trays. In fact 39 per cent of Australian and New Zealand organisations feel that they are already suffering information overload, which is dragging on employee productivity - the situation's particularly acute in the public sector.

The Great Information Glut released today by Hitachi Data Systems found that over the last two years the situation had worsened, with 5 per cent more organisations feeling overwhelmed by the scale of the data management task compared to 2009.

In addition 49 per cent of organisations reported that they were suffering additional cost burdens simply to manage their data. Worryingly 22 per cent of the organisations surveyed in Australia and New Zealand said they had difficulty meeting their reporting requirements because of the challenges of getting to the right information in a timely way.

According to a second report, The economic impact of the information glut, based on research by Deloitte Access Economics and also conducted for Hitachi Data Systems, companies are concerned that their current information systems simply won't be able to cope with the continuing deluge of information.

According to that study, if companies were to invest in improved information management systems, productivity gains worth around $3 billion a year could be unleashed simply by providing people with faster access to information. This of course makes the assumption that once people have the information they will use it wisely.

While interesting the Deloitte report still does little to explore the productivity implications of the era of 'big data' where information is sourced not only from corporate systems, but also social networks, sensors in the field and so on. In this scenario employees may be only minimally involved in accessing and harnessing this data, which is increasingly being fed into automated analytical systems.

Productivity then becomes increasingly a function of the quality of the analytical algorithms rather than the efficiency of individual employees.

However the era of truly big data may be a while off. The Information Glut indicates that only 51 per cent of organisations currently have a company owned social media presence, and just 33 per cent use Twitter.

The report did however identify a significant movement towards cloud based storage with 37 per cent of organisations currently using some form of cloud storage. Within two years only 26 per cent of organisations said they would have no cloud storage at all.