The Consequences of Real-Time Information

Real-time is the new black. Everyone from Facebook to the New York Times is pumping any feature they can slap a real-time label on. While I’m a big proponent of the real-time movement, the media’s incessant focus on the *consumer web* has failed to probe the consequences of what it means to manage real-time information and derive actions or produce consequential decisions.

In my opinion real-time at the consumer level is considering real-time only at the highest levels: discovery and creation. Platforms (Twitter, Facebook, etc) allow us to publish content in real-time, and a nascent market of applications allows us to aggregate, filter and parse that content (Tweetdeck, Friendfeed, Summize, etc).  However, these products focus almost exclusively on *taking information in* but not on leveraging that incoming signal to derive subsequent action. Humans can create content much faster than they can effectively process it, and thus, while our technology systems can be automated to pull and parse information in real-time, information is only valuable when we are able effectively interact with it. Thought about from an enterprise standpoint, the consequences of real-time information management take on increased importance.

Here are several areas where I see real-time innovation needing to emerge:

Real Time & Awareness

Now that we have so many channels available, a long tail of information is developing. On the consumer side, tools like Freindfeed are attempts to aggregate signal and provide awareness over multiple channels. How is the approached at the enteprise level and what are the key channels providing signal?

Real-Time & Attention

In true long tail form, real-time information is likely to follow the 80/20 rule. While we may have 100% awareness, it’s likely that only 20% of that information is truly valuable and where we should invest our attention. In my mind there is a substantial difference between ‘awareness’ and ‘attention’.

Real Time & Action

Not only does incoming information require our awarness and subsequent attention, but information at an enterprise level also requires action. While it may be fine to sit back and play voyeur on real-time information about a baseball game, when it’s real-time information about a brand, someone needs to respond.

Real-Time & Expected Response Rates

While real-time information may mean an ability to take in greater volumes of information (and faster), real-time interactions also carry the expectation of real-time responses. Consider the difference between email and IM. While IM has certain advantages, real-time interactions usually require deeper levels of attention (even if in shorter bursts). Instant messaging carries the expectation of immediate responses. Is this scalable? Consider the difficulty of being truly engaged in more than two simultaneous chat sessions.

Conclusion:

In the end, information is valuable when it arrives with a combination of speed and accuracy. We have done a good job so far in delivering information with speed and decent job of addressing accuracy.  However, the next turn of the crank is innovating around how we best leverage better and faster information to produce consistently superior outcomes: that is where the true ROI of real-time exists.

Like this post? Follow me on Twitter and help take my Collaboration Survey

Tagged as: attention, filtering, friendfeed, information filtering, information management, Instant messaging, real-time, Realtime, streaming