Information Overload in the New World of Work: Qualitative Study into the Reasons

In this chapter the authors present a revision of the information overload concept elaborated by Eppler and Mengis (2004). The main elements of our approach are literature synopsis and analysis, qualitative semi-structured interviews, and discussion. Their review of the information overload concept is multidisciplinary as we identify similarities and differences among the various management perspectives and refine it with the empirical findings. They hope that by doing so, we can identify synergies between the theoretical conceptualization (Epper and Mengis, 2004), and real-life settings. They present results in a highly compressed, visualized format that allows for a more concise representation of the subject domain, easy comparisons, and hopefully – reduction of information overload. The empirical study was done at the Microsoft B.V. (The Netherlands) where Information workers became the most important type of workers within an organizatio