The Era of Infor­ma­tion Overflow

door 30 januari 2016

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Millions of bits & bytes are flowing through the sky or via the ground meanwhile reaching billions of people with information

This is causing the expo­nen­tial growth of the digital universe. According to a study conducted by IDC, shows that the global infor­ma­tion stored doubles every two years and is growing faster than Moore’s Law . Expecting that within the next 10 years the amount of data will be 75 times larger, forcing companies to manage fifty times more data and documents then they handle today. Moreover, the research provides large economic, social and tech­no­lo­gical impli­ca­tions for among other Cloud and Big Data.
Ever feel like you can’t handle all the infor­ma­tion pouring out from all the screens? But you keep reading and watching anyway?

Then you probably know what “infomania” feels like. The problem grows in step with the number of gadgets we use and the number of publis­hers pushing content onto them. By now there is even an official defi­ni­tion in the dicti­o­nary:

It’s “the compul­sive desire to check or accu­mu­late news and information.”

That said, we still don’t know exactly where infomania comes from or what we can do about it. And — ironi­cally — sifting through the theories, anecdotes and reports about our digital stressors usually just makes us feel more overwhelmed.

The picture1 above shows us the relation between the infor­ma­tion gathered in real time and providing us the small amount of knowledge that we are able to collect and consume.

The problem isn’t information overload, it’s failure to filter.

So where do we keep all this infor­ma­tion, and how can we only get what we are really looking for? The answer to the first question is inevi­table the Cloud, because like the Internet this will be the only platform able to manage all those zetta­bytes of data.The answer to the second question is harder to find, some call this Big Data but this is incorrect.

The definition for “Big Data” is predicting in real‑time what your customer behavior will be and act accordingly.

Companies who are able to implement Big Data into our daily life will probably solve our need to filter only the infor­ma­tion we need at a certain point in time. The challenge however will be to provide this “Big Data as a Service” in a constant real life envi­ron­ment and can only succeed and delivered with a solid Cloud platform as foundation.

  1. Special thanks to Luc Blyaert for sharing this picture that inspired me to write this blog.

Main image by © Royalty-Free/­Corbis

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