Showing posts with label Infovores. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Infovores. Show all posts

March 24, 2008

In Love with Information and Enterprise Architecture

Enterprise architecture helps to ensure the decision-makers in the organization have the information they need to make improve business processes and make sound IT investments.

In general, people love information and the more the merrier, up until the point of information overload.

We need information to survive, to gain a semblance of control over our lives, and to satisfy our human curiosity.

The Wall Street Journal, 12 March 2008, reports “why we’re powerless to resist grazing on endless web data.”

Apparently, when the human mind is stimulated with information, there is an “increased production of the brain’s pleasure-enhancing neurotransmitters called opioids.

“New and richly interpretable information triggers a chemical reaction that makes us feel good, which in turn causes us to seek out even more of it…it is something we seem hard-wired to do…when you find new information, you get an opioid hit, and we’re junkies for those. You might call us ‘infovores.’”

So in essence, we eat up information. We are addicted to information. (Hence, all the time your teenagers and you spend on the web).

“The reverse is true as well: we want to avoid not getting those hits, for one, we are so averse to boredom.”

In fact, when people’s minds are idle or information deprived, they seem to get into more trouble. They are bored and they seek out experiences to liven things up a little.

Years ago, before the age of planes, trains, automobiles and the Internet, people lived much more shallow lives. Most were constrained to lives that wondered no further than maybe 10-20 miles from their villages. Information was scarce. Forgot about national headlines or international intrigue. More often than not, people were misinformed and often relied on neighborly gossip.

“Today, we can find in the course of a few hours online more information than our ancient ancestors could in their whole lives.”

“We are programmed for scarcity [of information, like scarcity of food] and can’t dial back when something is abundant.” Hence, we are addicted to the water hose flow of information and sometimes have the feeling that we are drowning in it.

One advantage of User-centric enterprise architecture is that it structures and regulates the flow of information, so that it is useful and usable to organization end-users. It is developed for specific users and users, and is not just more shelfware information.


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