Summary: Infollution: The term infollution or informatization pollution was initially coined by Dr. Paek-Jae Cho, former president & CEO of KTC (Korean Telecommunication Corp.), in a 2002 speech at the International Telecommunications Society (ITS) 14th biennial conference to describe any undesirable side effect brought about by information technology and its applications

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Our knowledge environment is getting ever more contaminated by information pollution. Things we need to know are drowning in irrelevant information. Symptoms include:

In most companies, employees squander an hour or more each day simply “doing email.”

Employees fritter away 48 hours each year trying to unearth job-related information on bad intranets compared to the time they would need on an intranet with usability in the top 25%. The resulting productivity loss amounts to millions of dollars for mid-sized companies.

Many websites alienate users by burying answers to basic questions in useless corporatese.

Email messages that customers actually want, such as useful newsletters or customer-service confirmations, don’t survive overflowing inboxes — often because senders ignore the principles of good email design.

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I enclose a general submission piece discussing information pollution and the problems associated with this phenomenon. I detail how information pollution arises, what challenges it brings for us as IS professionals, and future avenues of research and development that might remedy this problem. Specifically, the average knowledge worker – someone who is part of the growing information economy – loses 2.1 hours a day to interruptions associated with multi-tasking.

If those workers make an average of $21 an hour, that adds up to $588 billion a year, more than the gross domestic product of Argentina. Another recent study finds knowledge workers experienced interruptions approximately once every 10 minutes and it took an average of 23 minutes for them to return to their original task. What can we do as IS professionals to address information pollution? This paper seeks to provide answers and stimulate future endeavors.

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