How do your clients deal with information complexity?

by Bernice de Braal and Peter Newman, Information World Review

People deal with information complexity by either reducing that complexity or absorbing it. Knowing whether your clients are shrinkers or swallowers is a key insight for information professionals

There is a consensus that the world has entered a knowledge era where information is power and rapid learning a necessary condition for success. The concept itself, though, is nothing new: the English philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon is credited with coining the phrase “knowledge is power” in 1597 in his Meditationes Sacrae. And in business, knowledge is now widely regarded as a powerful source of competitive advantage.

But information tends to be complex and, as anybody who has worked in different types of libraries and information services knows, clients from different communities handle information, both simple and complex, in different ways. Someone from the business community, for example, will handle information differently to someone from the academic or medical community.

To be part of a community and to truly belong, you have to be able to understand and process information given to you by other members of that community. Such communities have been described as populations of data-processing agents. The way in which the community’s data-processing agents handle information is one of the community’s key cultural attributes, and different communities have evolved different strategies for handling the complexity of the information they deal with. Article