Burton Group Coins Enterprise Attention Management (EAM)

Helping companies manage information is big business. Which means every consultancy, especially the big ones, is jockeying to be seen as the thought leader. And I guess with that thought leadership comes the enviable task of inventing new acronyms. Enter Enterprise Attention Management (EAM).

First thing I thought of was Enterprise Attention Deficit Disorder (EADD). Now that, I thought, would be dead-on. Between my 150 or so RSS feeds, Skype, Groove, Google Groups, Yahoo Groups, and others, discerning between what's valuable and what's noise is tough.

The man behind EAM, Burton Group VP Craig Roth,explains his method to all this information madness. 

"EAM is 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."

And it's encouraging to see someone making an argument for some of the social media (web2.0) and collaborative technologies I'm so fond of. His "attentional technologies" category is rife with Web 2.0 technologies -- RSS, Atom, social networking -- they're all there.

The other point about getting us to use the capabilities that exist within our toolsets is a good one. Admit it, how many of you actually set your IM presence indicator to busy?

You can go down the application line -- Microsoft Word, Instant Messaging, Blogs -- there's always plenty of features we haven't turned on. Look at Wordpress for instance. Do you think you could ever keep up with all the plug-ins that could make your life so much easier? If I didn't have Akismet on WOW Feed I'd go nuts trying to manage the influx of spam.

And who knows, if Roth's techno term sticks, maybe all the IT folks can add another line to their resume. I can see it now.

All that support for desktop software, PBX, and Blackberry syncing becomes: "Enterprise Attention Management support for Fortune 500 company in financial services sector".

Love it.

Technorati tags: enterprise+attention+management, information+technology, burton+group, social+media, web+2.0, analysts

Comments

[Craig Roth]

I'm glad you like the direction of Enterprise Attention Management. The term "attention management" has been floating around for a while now. I just clarify my take on it as "enterprise" because I studied what enterprises can do about it as a whole rather than individuals or advertisers trying to grab people's attention. I'm not trying to coin it as a term really - just clarify what type of AM I'm talking about.

Incidentally, in my paper on the subject I briefly address the ADD topic, but I'm dismissive of it. ADD (ADHD) has too much cultural baggage that I don't want to apply to EAM. Plus it refers to unintentional task switching whereas it's intentional and not necessarily dysfunctional when done by information workers.