Understanding the Attention Economy: An Interview with Thomas Davenport - Prof. Robert L. , Study Guides, Projects, Research of Information Technology

Download Understanding the Attention Economy: An Interview with Thomas Davenport - Prof. Robert L. and more Study Guides, Projects, Research Information Technology in PDF only on Docsity! agilebrain.com ... getting attention for your ideas, your products and your information is a critical prerequisite for any kind of business success. Attention, Management! An interview with Thomas Davenport How can a company capture attention in this, the age of the distracted customer? What happened to knowledge management? What next for ERP? Thomas Davenport shares his insights. By Christian Sarkar Tom Davenport has been around the IT block. One of the pioneers of process reengineering, he has been instrumental in the development of our understanding of how businesses use information to compete. A seminal thinker in the field of knowledge management as well, he has recently focused on the critical field of attention-management. His latest book is The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business. One of the things you say in your book, The Attention Economy, is that, "understanding and managing attention is now the single most important determinant of business success." What is the attention economy and what are its implications for companies and then individuals? The attention economy overall is an economy in which there's way too much information and knowledge floating around for the brain cells that humans have available. So it becomes an economy where attention is really scarce and hence really valuable. And getting attention for your ideas, your products and your information is a critical prerequisite for any kind of business success. If people don't know that your products exist and spend any time cogitating about it, you don't stand a chance. A great example is "The Blair Witch Project" -- $750,000 making the movie, $30 million marketing it. At an individual level, you say something about "there can't be too many initiatives at one time." I see that as more of an organizational thing, but it certainly impinges on individuals. And ultimately, any organizational initiative that's successful comes down to individuals changing their behavior. But if they're not paying any attention to what the initiative is about, its objectives and so on, they're not going to change their behavior. Getting real change to happen in organizations becomes a matter of individual attention. Every individual has to look at him or herself as a consumer, and you want to be a very intelligent consumer and consume only information that's going to benefit you, your family and your organization. And you've only got so much to give out, so you've always got to be making this calculation: Is this the best use of my attention right now? http://www.agilebrain.com/davenport.html (1 of 6)9/5/2004 1:12:38 PM agilebrain.com That's why so many employee newsletters fail, because there is so much useless information. You note that there are different types of attention and certain teams are dominated by certain types... We identified, based mostly on psychological research, three overall dimensions and six types. There's front of mind and back of mind -- what you try to do there is push as much as possible to back of mind through repetition and practice so you can free up your front of mind for other things. That's one of the dimensions with the Attentionscape tool that we've developed. There's front of mind versus back of mind, voluntary versus captive, attractive versus aversive. What we argue is that you really want to try to maximize all of those six types because you're getting a maximum amount of attention if you're hitting on all of them at the same time. You also discuss the critical success factors that are for getting the attention of CEOs. Can you talk about that? I wouldn't say CEOs -- I'd say executives. We looked at what managers, white-collar workers and professionals pay attention to. We first asked what sort of media they pay attention to -- it turns out e-mail is the most attention-getting medium in our research. Then we asked what attributes of the message would make it most likely to receive a lot of attention. We found out that personalization was the single most important factor. Second was keeping it short and concise. Third was emotion, having either positive or negative emotion being evoked by the message. And the fourth one was making it come from a trustworthy source. The first three are relatively easy to manipulate. I say easy, but it's actually a lot of hard work because personalization takes a lot more effort than sending out a big group distribution e-mail. What are the lessons we should learn from the online world? How do you capture and sustain attention online -- or even offline? Actually, the biggest attention industry, if you look at how much attention goes to it, is television. People watch it for three hours and 26 minutes a day on average in the United States. They're not online quite that much. We had a whole chapter on e-commerce and the Web. But for those industries like television, the movies, publishing and advertising -- out of each industry or sub-industry, we tried to abstract some of the lessons. So for television, it's the power of narrative. They always tell stories, make it easy to get in and get out, have a predictable time schedule, and they don't let technology get in the way. Movies, we talked about age segmentation and the captive setting. We tried to point out some circumstances where people had taken some of these lessons and moved them across industries. For example, we looked at Gamesville, a Lycos entertainment Web site, and how they start new games at the top of the hour, much like a television schedule. Let's shift to ERP. In terms of strategic use of ERP, you are http://www.agilebrain.com/davenport.html (2 of 6)9/5/2004 1:12:38 PM