
Karen Beaman
HR Technology and the Attention Economy
How many times have you ended your workday and are packing up to head home and you wonder what you really accomplished that day? How many interruptions and distractions and menial, irrelevant activities diverted you from your best-laid plans?
We live in what Tom Davenport calls the “Attention Economy.” How do we get and keep our attention focused on doing the right things — the important and relevant activities — and avoid the constant distractions that interrupt every aspect of our professional and personal lives and keep up from achieving our goals? Davenport defines attention as:
“… focused mental engagement on a particular item of information. Items come into our awareness, we attend to a particular item, and then we decide whether to act” (Davenport and Beck, p. 20).
But we live in the age of information overload. So how do we manage and direct our attention effectively?
Ray Wang’s blog, “A Software Insiders Point of View,” this week talks about why the next generation of software applications must improve what he calls “activity streams.” Activity streams help to organize and contextualize the massive amount of information that flows through our networks and in and out of our email/facebook/linked-in/twitter accounts all the time. And the flow of information is continually increasing such that people are literally drowning in what Ray calls “data deluge” with little hope of surfacing.
Ray describes the “four forces of data deluge that … paralyze both collaboration and decision-making:”
- Massive activity stream aggregation by enterprise applications
- Explosive growth in the “Internet of Things”
- Flood of user-generated content
- Proliferation of social meta data
So how do we get control over this information flow and sort out the relevant and important from the superfluous and un-important? Ray maintains that application vendors must provide filters to give users greater control over what they see and when and how they see it. Filters by people, location, date/time, event, topics, etc. that users can manage to uncover trends, perform modeling/simulations, and make predictions.
Kevin Kelly, digital age guru and founding executive of Wired magazine, in Better than Free, describes the internet and technology as a “copy machine”. When things are so easily copied, they become abundant, and when things become abundant, they become worthless. So the goal is to differentiate our systems and processes so that they add intangible value which is not so easily copied. Kelly talks about eight “generatives” that create intangible value:
- Immediacy – priority access, immediate delivery
- Personalization – tailored just for you
- Interpretation – support and guidance
- Authenticity – validating whether it’s the real thing
- Accessibility – wherever, whenever
- Embodiment – books, live music
- Patronage – paying for things simply because “it feels good”
- Findability – how do you find things when there are millions of requests for our attention
There is no question that we live in the “attention economy.” Kelly’s generatives and Wang’s filters are two key concepts that we will surely be seeing more of in the next generation of HR technology.
Do you need help in evolving your HR applications to the next generation? Jeitosa’s global and local experts, with their depth of industry knowledge, breadth of global expertise, and hands-on experience with all of the major HR applications on the market, are here to help you achieve your goals. We provide services in the following areas:
- HR Strategic Planning
- HR Process Optimization
- HR Shared Services Design
- HR Technology Evaluation and Roadmap Development
- HR Systems Deployment, Conversion, and Integration
- International HR Requirements and Compliance
- HR Leading Practices Evaluation and Benchmarking
- Global HR Readiness Assessment
- Change and Culture Management
We provide workshops, as well as guided and fully supported services, in each of these areas. Call (+1.415.874.8566), email (contact@jeitosa.com), or visit our website (www.jeitosa.com) for more information.




