How serious a problem is information overload? Consider Eric Sachs, VP of research and development at Wolf Communications in Houston, a provider of network services. On a typical day, Sachs answers 20 telephone calls, replies to 60 E-mail messages, monitors six news services and filters 12 others, participates in several online discussion forums (three on an hourly basis), and gets two reports from a news retrieval service. In his spare time, Sachs scans 10 trade journals. It all translates into a 70- to 80-hour work week.

A study published recently by the firm IDC estimated that for every 1,000 knowledge workers, businesses spend the equivalent of $2.5 million (US) annually searching for information. Furthermore, double that amount is lost by employees who must spend time searching for critical information that their respective companies already possess but that is difficult to locate.