Attention Economy & Enterprise Attention Management

The attention economy is the new economy. This is an age where Presenteeism is plaguing corporates around the world and continuous partial attention fast becoming the norm.

Burton Group’s Craig Roth finds that we are in an information economy, you are what you know, and not knowing what you think you should know causes stress. With e-mail overload, instant messages popping up at an increasing rate, and interruptions following you through Blackberrys and cell phones, it is becoming increasingly difficult to pick the important information out of the noise. The solution – Enterprise Attention Management – a method for improving the effectiveness of an enterprise's information workers by providing culture, processes, and tools to gain control over the messages sent, received, and discovered by its information workers. EAM provides a common model and vocabulary for technologies that help harried information workers to pull important messages forward to get the attention they deserve and push less important messages backward to avoid distraction.

The upside to deploying this: EAM is not how to make attention grabbers more effective, but is how to make an organization's information workers as a whole more effective. The problems causing "info-stress" are growing exponentially. Enterprises that address corporate cultural and behavior by implementing capabilities available in existing platforms will be ahead of the curve. Examples include using "attentional" technologies that pull the correct messages forward as along with "attention shielding" technologies that push unwanted messages back.
Attentional technologies include:

- Personalization
- Search (saved)
- Social networking
- Portals
- XML syndication (RSS and Atom)
Attention shielding technologies include:
- E-mail and IM filtering and rules
- Presence status indicators
- Enterprise automatic call distributor routing

Forget if these technologies also find place in other emerging frameworks. It’s also a good problem to solve. First create the infrastructure & methods to create a new model economy – then work on managing it!!.As I wrote before, full attention focus is essential as experiencing engaged attention is to feel alive. Trusted filters, trusted protectors, trusted concierge, human or technical, removing distractions and managing boundaries, filtering signal from noise, enabling meaningful connections, that make us feel secure, are the opportunity for the next generation. Opportunity will be the tools and technologies to take our power back. This may need other convergent forces - sociological and economical to operate in alignment with this technological advances. While the collaborative tools provide the technological support, social intelligence binds them together for effectiveness.